When FIFA announced its ambitious global target of reaching 60 million registered female footballers by 2027, it sent a powerful message about increasing participation and changing the narrative of women’s football. Today, there are roughly 16 million women and girls playing organised football worldwide. Scaling that to 60 million within three years is not simply a numerical jump, but will need the largest coordinated investment in women’s football in history. For India, which is the world’s youngest nation, this could be transformational.
More than half of India's population is under the age of 25, so the potential talent pool is enormous. Yet, only a small fraction of young girls find structured access to sport, and an even smaller number reach competitive football. The FIFA initiative could help change that. With 13 women-centric development programmes open to the 211 FIFA Member Associations (MAs), federations now have support systems ranging from grassroots training templates to scholarships, infrastructure development, and leadership capacity building. India, if positioned correctly, could emerge as a major contributor to this global milestone.
Odisha: From Intent To Investment
Perhaps the most compelling example of strategic growth in football is Odisha. The state has spent the better part of a decade building sports infrastructure and positioning itself as a training hub across disciplines. Its highly visible partnership with the All-India Football Federation (AIFF) has produced two game-changing outcomes.
First, Odisha is among the very few states where girls’ teams have routine access to sports science facilities, dieticians, recovery centres, and certified coaches. These facilities are world-class. Secondly, rather than treating women’s football as a CSR-friendly add-on, Odisha invested directly in athlete pathways. Young players now see a structured route into club football, national camps, and international exposure, providing early access to high-performance training.
With FIFA-supported programmes, more states could replicate this model, especially those with school-level sporting cultures like Kerala, Meghalaya, Goa, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat.
Manipur: The Powerhouse Of Women’s Football
Long before women’s football gained national visibility, Manipur was quietly producing champions. The state has arguably the deepest female football ecosystem in India. In almost every Indian squad over the last decade, Manipur has contributed multiple players.
The state has the unique advantage of community acceptance of women athletes. Playing football is not just something that girls ‘try’. It is part of life with families supporting training, and schools encouraging competitions. Girls do not wait until adulthood to find teams, but begin playing competitively as early as eight or nine. Sports sociologists often point out that women play most confidently when they know they belong. In Manipur, this sense of belonging is built into cultural identity. For India to meet FIFA’s vision, replicating this emotional infrastructure is just as crucial as building stadiums.
Beyond Infrastructure
Developing women’s football is not only about medals or rankings. It reshapes society in other powerful ways. Studies consistently show that girls who play sport have higher body confidence, reduced risk of early dropout from education, better long-term health outcomes, and stronger leadership skills. When football becomes accessible in urban and rural pockets, girls gain autonomy over their bodies and identities. In a country still battling stereotypes around women’s movement, attire, and outdoor sport, this is deeply empowering.
Football also generates employment beyond playing and women can opt to become coaches and assistant coaches, fitness trainers and physiotherapists, match officials, data analysts, academy managers, sports journalists and social media professionals.
Gendered Norms
Football occupies public ground, quite literally. When girls take over playgrounds, floodlit turfs, and stadiums, society recalibrates its perception of who belongs in a public sporting space. Cheer teams, spectator culture, and media coverage shift the visibility of women. India has seen this effect with hockey, boxing, wrestling, and weightlifting. Football, with its global aspirational pull, could accelerate that momentum.
There is already significant proof that when structures exist, Indian women excel. Despite challenges, the Indian women’s team has consistently reached the finals of the South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) Championship. Our under-17 players have matched European sides in youth tournaments. States such as Manipur and Odisha have demonstrated what happens when girls are given access to coaching, mentoring, competition, and community backing.
Hurdles To Overcome
For decades, Indian women’s football has progressed despite limited resources. The Indian women’s national team is ranked lower than its potential, not for lack of talent, but for lack of institutional depth. Girls often find access to basic football facilities only at college level, by which time most international athletes have already undergone a decade of structured training. The FIFA programmes could fill this developmental gap much earlier.
While metro cities now have elite academies, villages often have enthusiastic talent but no safe spaces to train. Football for girls is often seasonal, with many programmes running around state tournaments and shutting down afterwards. Parents still see sport as secondary to academics. Without clear scholarship-education-employment pathways, sport remains optional. India also needs more clubs investing in women, more competitive match days, and longer-season tournaments.
What Could Change With FIFA’s Investment
With well-designed execution, FIFA’s programmes could help India map nationwide school-level talent, build coaching curriculum exclusive to girls’ physiology, run grassroots-to-elite tournaments every quarter, create football-centric scholarship pipelines, support states with structured infrastructure grants, and bring international club partnerships. The ripple effect would also reach tier-2 and tier-3 regions where latent talent is abundant.
India has already proved that it can deliver large-scale sports ecosystems. Our growth in cricket academies, badminton centres, wrestling akharas, and Olympic-focused training units shows that when systems align, talent thrives. Football now requires the same national intent, with women at the centre of planning rather than as an afterthought.
Imagine an India in 2027 where every district has a girls’ league, and every state has a high-performance centre. Where women’s football matches draw crowds and parents proudly invest in daughters’ sporting careers. This 60-million goal is a milestone that India can help achieve, while also rewriting aspirations for millions of young women at home.