Nine Months, One Partnership, Five Truths About Developing Youth Sport in India

Nine months. That's how long my team and I worked on formalizing the partnership between Dream Sports Foundation and the Premier League.

For those who know me well, they'll understand why this one was personal. The Premier League is my favourite sports league, has been for as long as I can remember. I have long admired the work they do in leadership and coach development. And this partnership gave me the privilege of working closely with two people I genuinely respect and appreciate, Reuben Borah and Hrishikesh Shende.

The partnership is anchored in three areas: coaching education, competition, and international exposure. But I'm not here to walk you through the MOU. What I want to do is share what came up when I sat with it all after the first stage of deliverables was complete. The kind of reflection that doesn't happen in the post-event debrief but in the quieter moments after on a flight home, over a cup of chai, or just when the noise settles.

As always, I made a list.

1. You Only Learn by Doing

I say this often, but I mean it every single time.

I've lost count of the hours I've spent in conference rooms and meeting halls listening to people talk about why something will or won't work. And honestly? It frustrates me. In an industry that is still finding itself, I don't think we have the luxury of being so definitive about theory. And yet, there we are discussing, analyzing, predicting, debating, contemplating, dismissing, when most of us, including me with over two decades in this game, genuinely cannot know how things will turn out until we try.

Analysis paralysis is one of the most counterproductive forces in Indian sport. It's counter-creative. And, to put it plainly, it's usually just a waste of time.

The best way to learn is to get into action. Make the calls. Start the conversations. Build out the concept note. Test your assumptions. Get out of the meeting room and into the field.

That's exactly what this partnership demanded. We found some alignment, moved into action, and then learned as we went. The coaching education workshops that took place on the sidelines of the Dream Sports Championship U16 Finals were where the real discoveries happened about the dynamics of English coaches working alongside Indian coaches, about knowledge exchange, about what decisions, formats and actions actually create collective growth. You can't learn that from a slide deck. You have to live it.

2. Small Wins Are Big Victories

This one I feel strongly about, and I need the people in this industry to hear it.

When I worked at MLS, which was itself a relatively young and small league at the time, we would pull off major events on a quarterly basis. The SuperDraft. FirstKick. All-Star Game. MLS Cup. A group of us would come together across different cities in the US and Canada, create something remarkable, and then fly home and do it all over again. There was a rhythm to it. A structure that made the road to execution clear and productive. 

India doesn't always work like that. To accomplish the equivalent here, you need a level of grit, patience, and willingness to let go of a hundred things you wanted to do just to get one thing off the ground.

And so I've made peace with something: in Indian sport, anything that gets delivered, anything that achieves even some of what it set out to achieve, deserves to be celebrated.

Let me give you some context for what it took to deliver a week-long coaching education workshop series between English and Indian coaches. On paper, it sounds modest. In practice, it meant navigating conversations and permissions with the AIFF, the Premier League, the Government of Goa, and the Goa Football Association. It meant educating every stakeholder and working through their individual concerns. It meant managing the impact of a global conflict on international travel. And it meant doing all of this while a completely unexpected overnight policy change had wiped out 85% of the company's revenues, and while the All India Football Federation was going through one of its most turbulent periods.

In spite of all of that we finalized the partnership, got the English coaches into India safely, prepared the Indian coaches meaningfully, ran a successful tournament, and created an entire week of collective learning.

That is worth celebrating. Loudly and without apology. 

3. Indian Hospitality Is a Superpower. Use It.

A little while ago, I wrote about my trip to Imphal and the warmth I experienced from the staff and students at the National Sports University. It moved me so deeply that I wanted to go out of my way to support every person connected to that institution. That's the power of genuine hospitality, it creates loyalty that no contract can manufacture.

I've felt this across India for the last sixteen years, starting from my very first visit in 2006. It is one of the quiet but very real reasons I've chosen to stay.

When the Premier League coaches arrived from England, we did what we always do, we gave them everything we could take make them feel comfortable in a new place. Big cars with drivers to take them around, availability, information, stories, context, time. We made sure they felt like their presence in India mattered. Like the work they were doing for the growth of football here was extremely important. And it was easy to bring that energy, because they were good people with a genuine commitment to contributing.

Here's what I've learned: while we cannot fix the traffic, the noise, the crowds, or the heat, we can make people forget about all of those things through the warmth of real human connection. Time, attention, and authentic care are India's greatest soft power. In cross-border partnerships, they are often the deciding factor in whether something flourishes or fades.

Own it. Lead with it. Never underestimate it.

4. If You Don't Tell Your Story, No One Will

My football coach used to say: it's the final touch that matters most. You can work tirelessly to win the ball back, build through the thirds, create the opportunity, and then waste it all with one poor decision at the end.

I feel this way about how youth sport in India is communicated.

Organizers pour themselves into building and delivering something meaningful and then, because it isn't cricket and the media cycle won't cover it, it disappears into a silo. No one knows it happened. Sponsors can't discover it. Other organizations can't learn from it or be inspired by it. The next generation of organizers doesn't know it's even possible.

This must change.

Use every medium available to you, social media, WhatsApp groups, personal networks, LinkedIn, Instagram, a simple blog post. Not to brag. But to document, to share what happened and why it mattered. In most cases, the people running these programmes aren't making money. They're spending it, often with no expectation of return. The ROI is impact and in Indian sport, you often won't see the fruits of that impact for years. But the record of your work, the story of what you attempted, becomes the permission slip and, at times, a blueprint for the next person or organization who wants to try something similar.

You have no idea who is watching. And the ripple effects of simply showing up and documenting what you're building can be enormous.

5. When East Meets West, Set Honest Expectations from the Start

I am, by nature, an optimist. Positive to a fault, sometimes. My instinct is always to lead with the possibility, the potential, the vision. Which is generally a good thing, but it can create problems when it becomes a substitute for honest conversation.

Over the years, I've found that nothing derails a cross-cultural partnership faster than misaligned expectations. And I've been guilty of allowing them to form not through dishonesty, but through enthusiasm.

So here is what I've learned: when working between east and west, have the difficult conversation early. Let all parties know that year one is about planting seeds, not harvesting. Help your international partners understand the specific context they're walking into because it is genuinely different from what they expect.

It's very easy for a representative of a big league or club to arrive in India imagining packed venues, media coverage, instant discovery, or commercial traction. That is not how it works here,  not in football, not in most sports outside cricket. Things take time. People need to feel each other out. Trust is built slowly and through experience, not press conferences. And given the history of things announced with great fanfare that quietly never materialized, that caution is completely reasonable.

But here is the thing about Indian sport that I keep coming back to: it's a slow burn at first, and then, when the conditions are right, the forest fire rages through the terrain.

With this partnership, we made a deliberate choice to start slow and build. Six Premier League coaches came to work with approximately fifty Indian coaches. In the weeks before they arrived, we spent significant time preparing the Premier League India team, the UK coach development team, and eventually the coaches themselves, sharing context, managing expectations, and repeatedly stressing that this was the beginning of something, not the whole of it.

And then something happened that I'll remember for a long time.

Without any prompting from us, Indian coaches who had been cautious at the start began to open up. They attended sessions with genuine curiosity. They invited the English coaches to their own trainings. They sought them out after matches. Organically. Authentically. Because relationships had formed.

It may seem like a small thing. To me, it was magic.

That's the list. Five learnings from the first chapter of this partnership, most already known, but now further validated. And if I'm being honest, there's a sixth one that runs underneath all of them:

To break the status quo in Indian sport, you have to think differently and act accordingly. You have to be willing to try things that people don't fully understand, that raise eyebrows, that don't have a clear precedent. That willingness to move before the conditions are perfect, to stay after the rewards aren't obvious, is what real transformation in this industry requires.

It always has been.