Cast your mind back to the last football World Cup, held in Qatar in 2022. For the round-of-16 clash against Switzerland, Fernando Santos monopolised the attention of football fans worldwide by dropping Cristiano Ronaldo from Portugal’s starting XI. Given Ronaldo’s global fan base — he currently has 629 million followers on Instagram alone, nearly a tenth of the world’s population — it was one heck of a gamble to take.
But Santos came out of it smelling of roses, lilies and every other flower under the sun. By the time CR7, as he’s known in near-Star Wars speak, entered the field in the 74th minute, Goncalo Ramos, who took his place up front, had already scored a magnificent hat-trick. He kept his place in the 1-0 loss to Morocco in the quarterfinals, leaving Ronaldo to plough an increasingly lonely and frustrated furrow in the 40-odd minutes he was given in the second half.
Now, imagine FIFA intervening and putting pressure on Portugal to play Ronaldo, citing his matchless popularity. It’s laughable, right? No such request was made or entertained, and the World Cup moved on without Ronaldo and Portugal, all the way to the epic shoot-out between Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe in the final.
As a truly global sport, football doesn’t need to be insecure about its popularity. North America hosts the next World Cup in 2026. If Messi is fit and primed to play at close to his best, it will undoubtedly help the buzz around the competition. But even if he doesn’t extend his career that far, the tournament won’t flop because of his absence. A generation ago, Diego Maradona, then the main God in football’s pantheon, was kicked out of the World Cup in the USA after testing positive for pseudoephedrine. A heavily fancied Argentina team didn’t make it past the round of 16, but Maradona had long since been relegated to the margins by the time Brazil and Italy met in the final in Pasadena.
This brings us to another North American World Cup, but a cricket one. For months now, we were told that India needed to pick both Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma in the 15-man squad to ensure that the competition got the requisite visibility and attention in the US. They were duly included too, despite having barely played the format internationally since the last T20 World Cup in Australia in October-November 2022.
This column doesn’t seek to go into the cricketing merits of whether they deserve to be part of the side or not. Let’s ask instead why cricket is so uncertain of the ground beneath its feet. Does the success or failure of a global competition really depend on the presence of two individuals? And if that’s the case, what sort of bleak future does such a sport have?
Cricket in India long ago ceased to be a sport. It’s a personality cult, one that would give Kim Jong-un and the North Koreans second thoughts about whether they’re doing things right. Watching the IPL can at times feel a little like watching Amar Akbar Anthony, the Bollywood classic with three stars and a support cast.
If you watched the coverage and the promos, you’d be tempted to think only Kohli, Rohit and MS Dhoni, who last played internationals nearly half a decade ago, were playing. Even when others captain their franchises, these faces dominate every still and every moving picture. Hype is a part of modern sport, but few are so myopic as to focus so obsessively on individuals alone.
England football promos deal with the eternal rivalry between Manchester United and Liverpool, and the present-day tussle between Manchester City and Arsenal, clubs managed by a master and his one-time apprentice. In the US, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys are “America’s Team”, while the Green Bay Packers are celebrated for their ‘Cheesehead’ fans. The messaging is usually the same. Players come and go, but the teams remain and are paramount.
David Beckham once inspired a generation outside the UK to tune in to English football. But was he ever bigger than United? Not a chance. Not even close. Why then do Indian broadcasters and marketing folk live in such terror of a tournament without Kohli and Rohit? If your business plan is pegged on two men fast approaching 40, it really isn’t much of a plan at all.
In the past decade, the Rugby World Cup has seen a tremendous growth in interest thanks to stunning results from the likes of Japan and Fiji. As others have spread their wings, cricket has clipped its own, reducing the last two 50-over tournaments to 10-team affairs. At some point, such short-sightedness is going to come back and bite the game on the backside.
Learn from Portugal 2022, and grow up, please. If a sport has survived nearly 150 years, it can continue to thrive even without cults.