On a humid Tuesday evening last November, in a stadium in Kingston, Jamaica, 11 men in royal-blue jerseys did almost nothing for 90 minutes—and made history. Curaçao, the Dutch Caribbean island known mainly for its golden beaches and electric-blue liqueur, held Jamaica to a goalless draw, and in so doing booked a place at the 2026 FIFA World Cup for the first time ever.
Curaçao is a country of about 156,000 people. As The Associated Press noted, MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, where the World Cup final will be played on July 19, has roughly half the capacity of Curaçao’s entire population.
That same month, on the other side of the planet, the Supreme Court of India was once again hearing a case about the constitution of the All India Football Federation, or AIFF, which supervises the Indian Super League. A drawn-out controversy involving politics in the federation, payment disputes with the company that runs the league, and the intercession of the court had put the league’s 2025-26 season “on hold.” Eleven of the country’s top clubs had written a joint letter to the federation president warning that Indian professional soccer was “paralyzed.” The league eventually began its truncated 12th season five months late in February 2026, with the Asian Football Confederation forced to grant India a one-season exemption from its mandatory 24-match minimum.
Some of the instability in the federation has rubbed off on the national team, which is currently under its third head coach since getting knocked out in the second qualifying round for the 2022 World Cup. This time around, India’s Blue Tigers had their hopes extinguished after finishing third in a group of four behind Qatar and Kuwait and ahead of only Afghanistan.
Curaçao, then, is going to the World Cup. India—population 1.47 billion, the largest country on Earth—is not. And this despite the fact that the 2026 tournament was expanded from 32 teams to 48, and the Asian confederation’s qualification quota was nearly doubled, allowing nine teams from the region to make it to the final stages.
What explains this discrepancy? The answer lies in the way Curaçao embraced its athletic diaspora while India consistently refused to do the same.
It is one of soccer’s great anomalies that India has never made it past the qualification stages of the World Cup. The sport has deep roots in India: The Durand Cup, contested by Indian clubs and teams representing its armed forces, is Asia’s oldest soccer tournament. It was first played in 1888, the same year as the inaugural English Football League. Nor has India historically lacked excellence in the sport. In the 1950s and early ’60s, it was an Asian soccer giant, winning gold at the Asian Games in 1951 and 1962, and finishing fourth at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
India’s soccer problem, in other words, is not absence of foundation. It is the result of choices the country has made on top of those foundations.
The first of those choices was made in 1950, and it set the template. Having qualified for the World Cup in Brazil by default—every other team in its Asian zone had withdrawn—the AIFF then pulled out, citing travel costs that FIFA had in fact offered to largely cover. The popular myth is that FIFA had mandated cleats, and Indians preferred to play unshod. But the captain at the time, Sailen Manna, has denied this for decades, and most soccer historians now accept that the AIFF simply considered the Olympics a more prestigious event.
India was penalized for this affront by being disqualified from the next World Cup, and then quixotically declined to enter the qualification rounds at all until 1985. No system recovers quickly from three and a half decades on the sidelines.
Another choice, one made by fans rather than federations, is often invoked to explain India’s soccer struggles: Indians simply picked a different sport to care about. Cricket commands nearly 85 percent of all sports viewership in India. The Indian Premier League, the world’s top club cricket tournament, drew more than 600 million viewers last year, and around $600 million in advertising. This means that, in contrast to India’s struggling soccer federation, the Board of Control for Cricket in India is one of the wealthiest sports bodies in the world.
But the Indian craze for cricket cannot be the full explanation, because Indian soccer fans exist in numbers that should embarrass every other excuse. International audience data for the English Premier League (EPL), reported by Win Sports Online and others, counted 147 million EPL fans in India, more than twice the population of England. YouGov’s FootballIndex places Manchester United top of the brand-affinity tables among consumers in India—well ahead of any domestic side.
That a country with 147 million EPL fans cannot produce a team capable of beating Afghanistan twice is, to use a Hindi/Urdu word, ajeeb—strange. This is where a bigger structural explanation is needed, one that Curaçao’s success nicely illustrates.
The Caribbean island’s 156,000 residents did not field a team drawn only from their number. Instead, it methodically used FIFA’s rather fungible eligibility rules to harvest its Dutch diaspora. Five players who once represented the Netherlands’ youth and U-21 sides switched allegiance last August. One of them, defender Joshua Brenet, had even played a senior World Cup qualifier for the Dutch in 2016. Tahith Chong, a Manchester United youth product, is one of only a handful of squad members actually born on the island. The coach is the 78-year-old Dutch veteran Dick Advocaat, on his third World Cup.
FIFA’s eligibility rules, tweaked every few years, allow a player to suit up for any national team whose passport he holds—provided he can also show a strong connection to the territory: birth there, a parent or grandparent born there, or, failing all that, a stretch of residency (two years, or five if he was naturalized as an adult). Usually, once a player has played a competitive senior match, he is wedded to that “sporting nationality” for life, with a narrow one-time switch available to younger players who jump ship before earning more than three caps. But exceptions are allowed, as in the case of Brenet.
Indonesia, which also tried to tap its Dutch diaspora, fell short. But this playbook has over the years served plenty of other countries seeking to progress in the World Cup. Morocco made it all the way to the semifinals in 2022 with a squad drawn heavily from foreign-born players who star in the top European leagues. Cape Verde (pop. about 530,000), which will join Curaçao as a debutant this time around, used LinkedIn to recruit players, including the Ireland-born center-back Roberto Lopes.
India does not play this game. As in the case of most Asian countries, Indian citizenship law does not permit dual nationality, and holders of foreign passports cannot represent the senior national side. Soccer fans debate the question every cycle, the Indian soccer press writes long (and longing) pieces about the Indian-origin players plying their trade in Europe—Adrian Pereira of Norway’s Rosenborg, Sai Sachdev of England’s Sheffield United, and Yan Dhanda of Scotland’s Heart of Midlothian, to name but three. But the government has shown no interest in changing its long-standing approach to citizenship law to accommodate the nation’s soccer ambitions.
New Delhi has spent the last decade aggressively courting its diaspora politically and economically. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Pravasi “Bharatiya Divas” (India Day) conventions are by now as choreographed as Bollywood premieres. But on the soccer pitch, the door is shut. Curaçao’s soccer pool covers the Caribbean-Dutch districts of Rotterdam. India’s does not extend beyond its borders.
Sunil Chhetri, the recently retired Indian captain, has 95 international goals to his name. As Wikipedia’s running tally has it, only three men in the history of soccer have scored more for their countries: Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and the Iranian striker Ali Daei. Chhetri scored his goals across 157 caps over 20 years, but never on the sport’s greatest stage. The fact that the most distinguished Indian player of the modern era could spend two decades at the front of the queue and never get to the door is, in itself, a verdict on the system that produced him.
The qualification of Curaçao and Cape Verde, then, is less a soccer curiosity than a quiet rebuke for India. What the islanders have done is read FIFA’s rulebook as an instrument and used it. India still reads its own citizenship rulebook as an identity statement and refuses to revise it in pursuit of any sporting goal.
Being small, Curaçao has worked out, is not the same as being weak—provided you are honest about who you are and where your countrymen actually live. Being large, the Indian soccer establishment still seems to believe, is the same as being strong, and 1.4 billion people must, at some point, simply produce a world-class squad. They have so far produced a FIFA ranking of 136, behind every other country in this World Cup and most of the ones that didn’t make it.
When the FIFA Council voted in January 2017 to expand the World Cup to 48 teams, Indian industrialist-politician Praful Patel, the senior vice president of the Asian Football Confederation—who happened also to be the president of the AIFF before being dismissed by the Supreme Court—told ESPN that the additional Asian places would help soccer develop in countries like India and China. Three years later, Patel encouraged his countrymen to dream of playing in 2026.
Instead, it is Curaçaoans whose dreams will come true. Next month, the smallest nation in the tournament’s history will line up against Germany in Group E. The largest nation on Earth will be following along, as it has at every World Cup, from the sidelines.
