Virat Kohli believes India's sporting culture needs to change

While the Indian cricket team and, to a certain extent, the badminton team have been able to lay their stamp on the world stage, other sports have not really had too much success when it comes to success on a global stage. However, there are signs of improvement from every direction. From Rohan Bopanna winning the French Open last year to the Indian football team making it into the top-100 of the FIFA rankings, it has been all positive news recently. 

When asked why he took a stake in FC Goa, he quickly replied, “It’s passion. Unless I connect to a certain thing, I can never be a part. Even when signing brands, I have started following this (principle) very closely. I need to be there from inside whatever I am doing. I have always followed football.” 

“There is motivation attached with the sport. Then there was this vision of growing together with the league. I see football developing in India in a massive way. The kind of awareness that ISL has created, everyone around the world talks about it. It’s been a wonderful change to Indian sport and I totally want to endorse that. One thing that I have missed growing up with is sporting culture. When you come to football games, you can see the sporting culture. Because people who follow football understand the sport. This is not about hitting the ball anywhere and running behind it. There is certain intelligence attached to football and those who understand football know exactly what’s going on.”

Even though India has a huge fan base for cricket, the football fanbase isn’t too shabby. However, the question that always comes up in a discussion regarding the two sports is why the most popular sport in the world hasn’t been able to catch up with the success that cricket enjoys in India. An optimistic Kohli explained that now with the kind of coverage Indian football was getting, it is bound to take off.

“Unless you get to show your talent, on television screens, it’s very difficult for people to start liking something. It happened with me as well. If our Under-19 World Cup wasn’t televised, maybe I wouldn’t have been sitting here. Our matches were televised and we got our chance to portray our talent. Then people started talking about us. The kind of visibility that the league has will play a major role.”

When asked why the Indian cricket team warms up by playing football, he explained, “We love it. There is a motivation attached to football. If you ask me to run 20 laps around the field, I would get bored after a while. But if you ask me to play a football match after a training session, I would keep running after that ball because I have a chance to do something with it. It’s a beautiful sport; everyone in the team likes it, and we love to show off as well.”