Minerva Academy’s 6–0 Win Highlights India’s Football Infrastructure Crisis

The Punjab's Minerva Academy U15 team in their historic win against the Liverpool FC Academy with a 6-0 score card has proved that resilience and consistency are the keys to success in the sporting world in spite of strained hardships.

Ranjit Bajaj, owner of Punjab Minerva, has shown courage to take personal loans and use crowdfunding to finance the team instead of large corporate-backed football teams abroad. The team faced significant difficulties in the terrains of Ludhiana, which lacked basic infrastructure to provide quality training to the budding athletes.

This highlights the condition of football stadiums in India. Recently, this issue had even made it to headlines when the Greater Cochin Development Authority asked for ₹25 lakhs as fees to host a football match in the Jawaharlal Nehru International Stadium.

This inflated fee was charged as a consequence of the increased demand but stagnated supply of football-based infrastructural endeavours in India. With the current market spread of ₹308.4 million in 2025, the football industry has shown a consistent growth rate with expectations of a CAGR of 2.85% in the forthcoming period of 2026-2034.

To meet this demand, there are only 75 operational stadiums in India dedicated to football, out of which only 69 are managed by the SAI. Highly inadequate to meet the growing demand of the football wave in India, the growth of the industry is further restricted by the dominant cricketing culture in India whereby infrastructure allocations for other sports are restricted at the expense of cricket.

Other struggles include the urban-rural divide and the high maintenance costs with low revenue. AIFF licensing failures are a major issue in the football stadium world when multi-sport stadiums are the future of sports complexes, provided they don't undermine the requisite infrastructure for sports.