Against a FIFA backdrop, a look at football and feminism through maternal legacies

Football is evidence of everything magical that has a possibility of existing within our mortal realm.

The real reason behind Argentina winning the FIFA World Cup 2026 semi-finals is actually crazier than the wildest speculations football — not to be called soccer at least in former British colonies — fans worldwide have been putting forth. My teen daughter, a compulsive Argentina hater, slept through the match. Had she stayed up and cheered for Jude Bellingham’s team, Messi’s men would have been sent packing. Such is the jinx operating in my football-crazy household: Whichever team’s jersey she dons during the game wins, and whichever jersey I wear to cheer has to, inevitably, belong to the loser. We have never supported the same team since she watched her first World Cup in 2018 as an eight-year-old.

I have been cheering for Brazil for three decades, despite the team making it excruciatingly painful to do so. (Getty Images)

I was exactly her age when my mother initiated me to the magic of football. It was the same ungodly hours of match-watching for us in India in 1994, when the US hosted the championship. There was something magical about that long-drawn Brazil-Italy final, ending with a penalty shootout. More than three decades later, the memory of those Italian tears on the pitch is as fresh and evocative as petrichor. Perhaps it was the first exclusive mother-daughter moment I had experienced. With two younger siblings and a workaholic mother, such moments were rare. The frenzy of the final, alive on the black-and-white TV, courtesy uninterrupted power supply that night, elevated this shared slice of personal history to something beyond the ordinary. Everything fell in place. And Brazil won.

I have been cheering for Brazil for three decades, despite the team making it excruciatingly painful to do so since they last won the World Cup in 2002. There is something beyond the realm of pure sporting considerations that stops me from appreciating any team they are pitted against. It’s almost like a primordial response. The body responds to the Brazil jersey — vice versa is not true — intuitively. Even when the team deteriorated and it became almost a moral obligation to find an additional team to back. Choosing Argentina was complicated. Picking the historical rival has been earning me condemnation from fellow Brazil supporters since 2008-09. Messi, mercifully, has made this cheating worthwhile.

Reading Eduardo Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow as a literature student gave me insights on the seductiveness of this sport. How it mimics the Cartesian idea, elevating football to an existential assertion of being. How it’s difficult, not impossible, to fall for the enemy. But, most importantly, how football is evidence of everything magical that has a possibility of existing within our mortal realm.

In the grand scheme of football, a fan like me certainly doesn’t matter. I don’t invest enough of myself in it. I never played football beyond the neighbourhood. No interest in league football, no regional teams to back, and definitely no stakes in whether India makes it to the global stage ever. I cannot quote stats, I don’t collect star players’ merch. I started learning about the rules only after that 1994 match. I won’t recognise many players if they sat at a dinner table next to me. Can I even be called a fan?

The gift that football has bestowed upon me far outweighs all of the above concerns. It revealed feminism in the most innocuous fashion. The football fandom in my household has no male influence. It shouldn’t be a surprise. Women (50%), as some recent American polls suggest, lead the percentage of casual sports watchers over men (42%). Perhaps it is this casualness that keeps women from brawling over wins and losses. Avid sport watching may not be the most harmless thing.

What my mother passed to me has now gone to my daughter. Mother cannot stay up at night these days but she gets the highlights from me every day when I drive to work. My daughter fills me in on all the possible conspiracy theories. We discuss passes and formations, after we have watched a match sitting in different rooms. My jinx is not allowed to impact her teams’ winning prospects.

Football matters to me.

The views expressed are personal