Both debutants are, incidentally, ranked well above India in the current FIFA standings.
Uzbekistan are 52nd in the world and Jordan 63rd, while India have slipped to 136th after a sharp decline over the past 18 months.
The rankings underscore the scale of the challenge facing Indian football. As Kalyan Chaubey, the first former footballer to become AIFF president, said after taking office in 2022: “I will not sell dreams like India will play in the World Cup in eight years. Instead, I will say we will take Indian football forward from its current condition.”
Nearly four years on, the question is whether his administration has succeeded in that.
Far from fast-tracking Indian football, many believe the past three years have turned the AIFF into an object of ridicule.
In 2014, the federation had launched a domestic club-based tournament, the Indian Super League (ISL), with much fanfare, pulling in big names from business, Bollywood and cricket. It was professionally run and attracted good foreign players. But now its future is uncertain.
The latest season of ISL was severely delayed after the AIFF failed to attract any bidders for commercial partnership, leaving hundreds of footballers facing anxious futures and generating a torrent of negative publicity.
Finally, the federation was forced to run a curtailed version without any commercial partners and has now gone back to the drawing board for the next season.
Against this backdrop, Chaubey’s Vision 2047 – an ambitious roadmap that promised to bring 35 million children into football – increasingly resembles a forgotten campaign pledge. And the disconnect between lofty targets and on-field results has only grown starker.
A brief resurgence in 2023 saw the senior men’s team climb back into FIFA’s top 100 after winning an invitational tournament and the SAFF (South Asian Football Federation) Championship. Since then, however, the gains have largely unravelled.
After raising hopes of reaching the third round of the AFC (Asian Football Confederation) qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup for the first time, the team fell short and then failed dismally to qualify for next year’s AFC Asian Cup.