After the Closed Decade: Punjab FC, Mohammedan Sporting and the Real Weight of an Opened Pyramid

On the night of 12 October 2026, the Indian Super League played its first match under the floodlights of Salt Lake Stadium in Kolkata. What began that night had television money, a franchise auction, imported names on the team sheet and a format that could be sold every week. One thing it did not have was a staircase. The door at the bottom was shut; the window at the top was shuttered too. In the same city, in the same year, the I-League carried on at its own pace, without any assurance that playing well would take a club anywhere.

In October 2026, aged nineteen, I took a fourteen-hour train to Kochi to work as a broadcast runner on the Star Sports world feed at the FIFA U-17 World Cup. Between shifts I hand-ruled a one-page 'spine sheet' for every team: the goalkeeper, the dead-ball taker, the player who argues, the chant trigger. Forty-one sheets went into a plastic folder, and that folder is still in my cupboard. Those forty-one pages carry the name of every player. They do not carry the name of the one thing that shaped the next nine years — the structure. The final was played in Kolkata, England beat Spain 5-2, and Rhian Brewster took the Golden Boot with eight goals. Every clip of those eight goals is still on my phone. And then the question that was hard to ask at that age: which league will these boys grow up into, and which door in it will stay open for them?

The Salt Lake count and the I-League count

The largest structural event in the modern history of Indian football is not a transfer or a foreign coach. It is that from 2026 to 2026, for nine consecutive seasons, nobody was relegated from the top league and nobody was promoted into it. This is usually explained as investor protection — franchises had put in crores and wanted their asset guaranteed. That argument holds on its own terms. Its other end was that the I-League was never formally called the second tier and was, in practice, exactly that — with champions who had nowhere to go.

Aizawl FC won the I-League in 2026-17. A team from Mizoram, national champions, with no step above them. The next year Minerva Punjab won it, then Chennai City. Three different cities, three different models, three identical empty hands.

In 2026, post-COVID, the entire I-League season was played inside a Kolkata bio-bubble with no crowds. I was calling matches then from a three-metre by three-metre room in Ameerpet, Hyderabad, off-tube, on a feed delayed by four seconds. There was no roar to lean on. The pitch mic gave up studs, a coach's cough, the fourth official's board going up. That season Gokulam Kerala won their first title on the final day. Even that title led nowhere upward. Before the roar there is a breath nobody records — and that season there was no roar at all.

On 15 August 2026 FIFA suspended the All India Football Federation. Eleven days later, on 26 August, the suspension was lifted. That duration is a fact and I will give it exactly the space it asks for — eleven days are eleven days. The real story is not in August 2026. It is in the decade of postponed federation elections, the court-appointed committee, and a door that stayed shut internationally until third-party interference ended. The suspension was a consequence, not a punishment.

2026-24: the door opens, and the room behind it

The pyramid was opened ahead of the 2026-24 season. Punjab FC, winners of the 2026-23 I-League, became the first club promoted into the Indian Super League. A year later Mohammedan Sporting won the 2026-24 I-League and came up for the following season — Kolkata's third club, carrying more than a century of heritage, into the top flight for the first time.

It is easy to write these two promotions as romance. I will write them as news, because that is what they are. Punjab FC going up is evidence that the door is real, not theoretical. Mohammedan going up is evidence that the door recognises old reputations too. Both things are true. The question that survives them is whether there is light in the room behind the door.

Tactically and financially, promotion is a cliff, not a gentle slope. In the I-League a club's wage structure, travel budget and gate income operate at one scale. In the ISL, the squad has to be rebuilt inside a single transfer window into one that can absorb the pace. I-League football is comparatively slower and more physical; in the ISL, ball circulation speed, pressing intensity and recovery demands all rise. Punjab FC had one window, and spent much of it on new faces. This is not a secret; it is bookkeeping.

Look at travel separately. The I-League's geographic footprint has narrowed in recent years — seasons have been compressed into a handful of hubs because clubs cannot carry the flight and hotel bill. The ISL is a national footprint: Ludhiana to Kochi, Kochi to Guwahati, Guwahati to Kolkata. In a home-and-away format, that is travel every other week, and the load falls not only on the club's accounts but on players' legs. A team entering this rhythm for the first time tends to show the real damage three or four weeks into the table, when the muscle-injury list has lengthened.

The Northeast makes players; the north and Bengal take the money

Here an old habit of mine applies. The notebook says one thing; the terrace says another. The notebook records that talent in Indian football flows evenly across states. The terrace, and the back rooms of academies, record that the states producing the players are the ones whose teams stopped existing. Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland. Aizawl, Shillong Lajong, NEROCA — names printed on I-League pages, absent from ISL broadcast calendars.

Where sponsor money settles is Delhi, Kolkata, Goa, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Where players are made, that money does not go. This is not a failure of investment but a question of its direction — and that direction does not change by itself because the promotion door opened. It is why I file from the fixtures with the smallest press box. In a match with no cameras, the entire ecosystem is being decided on that pitch.

Crowded academies, narrow first teams

Another count that never appears in a press release. The number of academies at major Indian clubs has multiplied over the past decade, and every brochure advertises a pathway to the first team. In practice that pathway is very thin. Top-flight squads are filled from four places: relatively cheap foreigners, experienced Indians, a limited quota of under-23s, and whatever is left over from the academy — when someone is injured or sold. The academy's job in this arrangement stops being to supply the first team and becomes to stockpile players for reserve sides and onward sales.

The direct consequence is that a nineteen- or twenty-year-old who is physically ready loses three years on a bench at the most valuable stage of his career. The two new places created by promotion open four or five extra slots for such players — necessary, not sufficient. Until the ISL rule is 'give under-23s minutes' rather than 'keep under-23s on the bench', the pathway will remain a brochure.

The women's league: the same decade, twice the silence

There is debate about the men's pyramid and none at all about the women's. The Indian Women's League is semi-professional. Players get contracts, but the sums and durations are not such that a girl of twenty can say football is her profession. Several teams run on the goodwill of state associations or corporates. Broadcast coverage is tiny, and where there is no coverage there is no sponsor, and where there is no sponsor there is neither a wage nor a scout.

In that sense, the door that opened in 2026-24 was a men's door. The comparison is not meant to diminish anyone; it is meant to point out that when we say 'the Indian football pyramid', we are describing half a pyramid and treating it as the whole.

Where I disagree: not a pyramid, a trapdoor

Now to the point on which most people appear to agree. Promotion opened, therefore reform happened — that conclusion arrives too early for me. A pyramid has a staircase up and a parachute for those coming down. India built the staircase. It did not build the parachute.

Consider what happened to the side that finished bottom in 2026-25. Going down means returning to a league with close to zero central revenue, a shrunken broadcast footprint, and travel bills that frequently come out of the owner's pocket. A club that spent on its squad to climb would carry that same spending back down with it. That is not a sporting penalty; it is an accounting one.

The Aizawl example is not to be forgotten. A national champion with no place in the structure is the cleanest sentence this system has produced, and that sentence was written in 2026, not 2026. Two years after promotion opened, the I-League still does not have a broadcast deal that can prepare its champion for the following season. Until the money in the league below is settled, the door above is not an open door — it is a gap with a railing around it.

Similarly, reading the 2026 suspension as external punishment is comfortable, because it spares us from locating our own role. If it had been only about eleven days, it would not appear in this piece. It appears because the pyramid opened a year later and people logged the two as separate events. They are part of one continuity: where an administration keeps the league's books shut for nine years, it wants the international calendar shut in the same way, and at some point a lock goes on from outside.

My scorebook after 2026

Over the next two years I will count three things, none of them in the table. First: whether anything changed in the central payment a promoted I-League champion receives. Second: the number of academy players in a newly promoted club's starting eleven in its first season, and the minutes they actually play. Third: whether even one Indian Women's League match is broadcast on a platform where its audience figure is public.

There is a version of this tournament that only the empty seats heard. In that version there is no scoreboard and no commentary — only a notebook recording how many teams could have come up and how many did. I go back to the page I wrote in 2026 about a team like Aizawl, and check whether a new date has been stamped on it. A door opening is an event. Someone walking through it is a process. Indian football has managed the first sentence; on the second, it has completed only one season.

In the July rain in Kochi I once wrote on a slip of paper: "Who scores this team's first goal does not matter; what matters is where this team plays next year." The slip is still in the folder. The closed decade of the Indian Super League was the longest answer that slip ever received. Since 2026-24 we have been writing the sentence after it, and the first letter of that sentence has not yet dried.