At 5.45am on Saturday, July 4, about 300 football fans gathered under a drab grey sky in Amartya Sen Udyan, a small park in Kolkata, West Bengal. They craned their necks towards a big screen showing the World Cup match between the defending champions, Argentina, and plucky underdogs, Cape Verde.

Giant loudspeakers gave the scene the feel of a political rally or rock concert. The walls and railings of the enclosure were decked out with blue-and-white flags, plastic footballs and life-size cutouts of the Argentina players. For every cutout of Mac Allister, Martinez or Romero, there was a Messi.

This unofficial home of the Kolkata Argentina Football Fan Club, the largest of the many fan clubs in the city devoted to Argentina, reaches a peak of passion for the South Americans — as does the entire city for football — once every four years during the World Cup.

Rain had been falling all night, leaving the ground a sodden mess. But the dawn light brought into stark relief the crowd of blue and white believers, gathered not for mass but for Messi. They’d been there since 3:30am, when the match began.

Now the game had gone into extra time – something few had expected. It felt like a moment to reflect, not so much on football, as on fans. There was a sense of jeopardy in the air, but also the thrill of an exciting spectacle being prolonged, of solidarity in anxiety and hope.

Suddenly, the ball broke to Argentine defender Lisandro Martinez, who lashed a left-footed shot into the roof of the net. The local fans erupted — even as they filmed themselves punching the air, screaming and high-fiving. That self-consciousness, folded into spontaneity, distinguishes the millennial football fan in Kolkata: immersed in reels, podcasts and vlogs, unlike the older generation of scrapbooks, posters and dog-eared sports magazines.

Slowly, the one-word chant began to circulate and rise to a crescendo. It was a name echoing everywhere around the world that night. The Bengalis pronounced it in their own way, elongating the first syllable: “MAY-SI! MAY-SI! MAY-SI!”

The footballing saint

MAY-SI. Messi, who recently turned 39, was playing in a tournament with other great players of a similar age: the Croatian midfield master Luka Modric and the German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, both 40, and most prominently, Messi’s great rival, the 41-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo, who for most of his career had matched Messi feat for feat. There were other major talents at the World Cup in the prime of their careers: French forward Kylian Mbappé, Norway’s Erling Haaland and England’s Harry Kane. Also magnificent emerging talents: Spain’s Lamine Yamal, France’s Michael Olise and Morocco’s Ayyoub Bouaddi.

But to the footballing hive mind of Kolkata, Messi in 2026 is in a league of his own. At an age when most greats have gone off the boil, he is, for them, better than ever: a Zen master of footballing space and time. Strangely, despite being a candidate for the greatest player of all time, Messi can feel like an underdog against great teams such as France and Spain.

Argentina’s team has plenty of stars. But it was Messi who scored all six goals that took them through the group stage. And when his team ran into rough weather – that night against Cape Verde, again the following week in the Round of 16 game against Egypt, against Switzerland in the quarterfinal, and again against England in the semifinal – for those praying he would find a way through – he did.

Argentina’s rousing comeback against Egypt was darkened by the perceived injustice of a few borderline calls going against the plucky Egyptians, which has taken some of the sheen off Messi in the Arabic-speaking world. But at the home of the Argentina Football Fan Club, Messi’s magnificent equaliser in the 83rd minute of that match was celebrated wildly. His spontaneous, contagious tears were even more moving.

Kolkata fans wanted to savour him until the end of the tournament — especially as it is likely to be Messi’s last World Cup.

“It’s one thing to watch Messi play on TV and another to see him from 10 metres away,” said Kolkata native and lifelong Argentina fan Debjoy Biswas. The sports photographer had just returned from Argentina’s group stage matches in North America.

“On TV, you see his on-the-ball movement and his goal celebrations, but live, you get to see what he does off the ball too: his anticipation, his awareness of space. It’s the closest I’ve come to footballing heaven.”

Biswas shared his favourite Messi picture he took in the United States. It caught him with his back to the camera as he wheeled away towards the delirious crowd after scoring a goal, leaving a trail of defeated Austrian players and splayed limbs in his wake – a beautiful juxtaposition of football and fandom.

“At first, my husband saw himself as a great fan of Messi,” said Sapna Patra, wife of tea-shop owner and Kolkata Argentina football buff Shib Sankar Patra.

“But since being chosen by the state government to meet Messi when he visited Kolkata last year, he thinks of him as his own brother.”

A glazed expression came over her husband’s eyes as she spoke, as he replayed the moment when he — himself a club footballer in his youth — met the messiah. “Messi put out his hand towards me…like this,” he gestured. “Behind him was his loyal junior, Rodrigo De Paul.”

Much of life for the Patras was centred around Messi and Argentina. The facade of their family home in the distant suburb of Nawabganj in north Kolkata was painted in blue and white stripes. Outside, above their “Argentina tea stall” facing the street, a giant blue Argentina flag fluttered in the breeze.

The previous week, the Patras had celebrated Messi’s 39th birthday by cutting a blue and white cake that weighed 18kg (39 pounds). They shared it with locals and gave away free Argentina football jerseys to young children.

“My daughter is just as great a Messi fan as my husband — she has named her own son Leo,” said Sapna Patra. “She is a professional classical dancer. But even she asks me sometimes, ‘Why did you send me to a school for dance and not football’? ”

Greatest football city in South Asia

Fans as different as the Biswas and Patra families show why Messi holds a special place in Kolkata: It is not just because of his own brilliance, but because Kolkata’s football fans bring a particular kind of intelligence, devotion and deep sporting culture to the relationship. That is what gives Messi’s appeal in the city its particular force.

Enamoured with football since the 1890s, Kolkata is arguably the greatest footballing city never represented at a World Cup by a national team. That absence lends its fandom a distinctive intensity: supporters, rather than players, become the most visible expression of footballing excellence in India. It also carries a persistent undertone of ruefulness — especially among older fans, many of whom doubt they will see India reach a World Cup in their lifetime.

On the atlas, one would have to travel as far as 4,000 kilometres west to Doha, Qatar, or east to Seoul, South Korea, to find a city where football is so much a part of the fabric of everyday life and public memory.

As the great Indian footballer and Olympian Subimal “Chuni” Goswami (1938-2020) once said, “Together with literature and the arts, it is football that has made Kolkata distinctive and special to the rest of the country”.

Like many other entities in India today – the railways, Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, the English language itself – football came to India and Kolkata as part of the complicated cultural legacy of empire. Like cricket, the only sport in which India is today a major world power, football appeared in the second half of the 19th century and was played almost entirely by British teams.

The new game caught on swiftly, especially in Bengal, the capital of British India between 1772 and 1911. In 1888, the Durand Cup club competition was inaugurated in India. Today it is the world’s third-oldest football tournament and the oldest in Asia. The 135th edition will kick off this year in Kolkata on July 26 – a week after the World Cup final – and will be played entirely in the east of the country, where the following for Indian football is strongest.

Although seen as an alien sport for the first few decades of its existence in India, football had a lot going for it. It was easy to play and required nothing more than a ball and open space. Then, as now, teams could make up with organisation and strategy what they might lack in skill. The major Indian football clubs were all born in Kolkata in the span of a few decades: Mohun Bagan in 1889; Mohammedan Sporting in 1891; and East Bengal in 1924.

Indian football soon evolved with an independent style. Most footballers played barefoot, with their feet wrapped in bandages, which they felt allowed for a better “touch” on the ball than playing with boots as the British did. Perhaps this explains Kolkata’s subsequent love for la joga bonito, the idea of the beautiful game played with creativity, theatricality, lots of dribbling and a touch of arrogance.

The sport also won over unlikely hearts, such as that of fiery Bengali intellectual and Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), one of the few whose name is treated even more reverentially in Kolkata today than Messi’s.

Taking the metro to the 85,000-capacity Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan (popularly known as the Salt Lake Stadium), the city’s premier football venue, passengers see a quote by Vivekananda posted on the station wall: “You will be nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the (Bhagavad) Gita.” The Swami wanted young Indian men to cultivate their bodies, physical vigour and competitive sparks before aiming for spiritual elevation. Only then could they shake off the yoke of political subjugation.

By the time independence came in 1947, India had become a footballing power in its own right. With the end of the British Raj, Kolkata’s footballing allegiances shifted towards Brazil, whose cavalier and irreverent spirit spoke to postcolonial aspirations globally.

In 1950, India was one of 16 teams invited by FIFA to take part in that year’s World Cup in Brazil. But the All India Football Federation declined the invitation and India has not qualified for the tournament since. Still, for decades after that first invite, India remained a major power in Asian football, with Kolkata as its self-evident capital.

“Us vs them”

Kolkata football has, over the past century, come to revolve — much like in Madrid, Merseyside and Manchester —  around intense local derbies. In this case, the rivalry between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal draws crowds of more than 50,000 and dominates football conversation in the city.

“There is a great passion for football in other parts of India too – Goa in the west, Kerala in the south and Sikkim and Manipur in the northeast,” said Kolkata-based football analyst Debanjan Banerjee.

“But the longstanding rivalry between two great clubs in Kolkata has created not just a binary structure for fandom, but an intellectual capacity for football that is of a different order to the rest of India. It means that football is discussed seriously all year long in Kolkata. Football is often the thread connecting the generations. The middle-aged East Bengal or Mohun Bagan supporter of today was one even at the age of ten.”

Had Mohun Bagan or East Bengal existed in isolation, Banerjee explained, neither club would have become as big as it is today. He noted that football in Kolkata shapes how fans think far beyond the pitch.

“It influences how they see politics, art and even history,” he added.

Unusually for a Kolkata fan, Banerjee saw himself more as a student of football fandom – its tribal nature, its irrationality, its love-at-first-sight origins, its feeling for the underdog – than of football itself. He even contributed a video essay on the rivalry between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal to the popular YouTube chronicle of football fan culture COPA90.

Last December, Messi made a much-anticipated visit to a few Indian cities. His appearance in Kolkata turned chaotic when he left early, prompting angry fans to breach barricades and rush onto the field.

Banerjee said the chaos reflected a deeper emotional pull around football icons in Kolkata.

“The city administration was blamed for not organising the event properly,” he observed. “But the minister, the policeman, the volunteer at the stadium … they all had the same identity as the fan who paid big money for a ticket. When you have larger-than-life idols, you cannot draw boundaries.”

Yet even Messi is not wholly responsible for Kolkata becoming a suburb of Buenos Aires every four years. Some veteran Argentina fans, such as the voluble novelist and football journalist Indrajit Hazra, 55, can remember a time in the 1980s when supporting Argentina was not the default position in Kolkata, as it is today, but was actually unusual.

If anything, Messi represents the high point of a long era in Bengal-Argentina relations. (Not just in Indian West Bengal, but also across the border in Bangladesh, which is similarly pro-Argentina). That era began in 1986 – the first World Cup tournament to be widely seen on television in India, and therefore a landmark year in the lives of most over 50-year-old Indian football fans. That year, Kolkata pulsed to the magic of another Argentine midfield virtuoso: Diego Maradona.

Before 1986, Hazra explained, Brazilian football was the gold standard for Kolkata for over three decades.

“Pele, who came to Kolkata in 1977 with the New York Cosmos to play an exhibition match against Mohun Bagan, was thought the greatest player of all time. Maradona changed all that with his remarkable feats in 1986. We didn’t read about him; we saw him with our own eyes on TV.”

“To this day, those images are imprinted on my mind and those of millions of my generation.” he added.

Asked whether he thought Messi was the greatest player of all time, he replied with a laugh, “Yes, Messi is great, but Maradona …”

He didn’t need to say more.

Shifting sands of fandom

To a greater extent than annual tournaments and leagues, the four-year beat of the World Cup cycle always yields interesting insights into the shifting sands of sport and fandom – into how players, teams and stories rise and fall.

“Many people have forgotten this now,” said Gourab Goswami, an English professor at Jadavpur University, “but when Argentina were knocked out of the World Cup in 2018, with Messi already in his 30s, it was widely believed that Messi’s great deeds were only achieved within the frame of FC Barcelona, with great players all around him — that Messi would never win anything in the blue and white of Argentina.”

A lifelong Brazil and East Bengal fan, Goswami built his credentials not just through fandom but through journalism and regular play at the Salt Lake Stadium. He was the classic Kolkata football fan: deeply partisan but also capable of lucid objectivity.

“The fervour around Messi has really shot up in the last few years, after he won his country the Cup in 2022,” he said. “Now, the Messi of the Barcelona days has faded away, to be replaced by a new avatar: the blue and white Messi of Argentina.”

Meanwhile, at this year’s tournament, Cristiano Ronaldo, also long adored by Kolkata fans, was seeking to bring home a first World Cup for his country, just as Messi had done in 2022. But while Ronaldo had much of the city behind him in the 2014, 2018 and 2022 tournaments, that was no longer the case this year.

At 41, Ronaldo was visibly in decline. His media appearances seemed to have a cranky, defiant edge. That also created an unexpected split in Kolkata fandom. Ronaldo fans in the city were almost always supporters of Portugal, but not all Portugal fans were backing Ronaldo. This year, many of them felt Portugal’s excellent midfield was let down by a strategy centred on the fading captain.

When Portugal were finally knocked out by Spain on July 7 , few Kolkata fans mourned Ronaldo’s departure. They saw him as a former footballing saint who had remained on the world stage so long as to undermine his own legacy. In contrast, Messi — small, slight, yet somehow superhuman — remains the colossus driving Argentina’s challenge: not only an all-time great, but a grizzled veteran chasing one last fairytale.

The city’s famous “FIFA galli” (Fakir Chakraborty Lane, known popularly as FIFA Lane) in north Kolkata – historically a Brazil-supporting neighbourhood traditionally decked out in green and gold for the World Cup – still had its obligatory odes to Neymar. It also had murals of Messi and Ronaldo and, radically, even some streamers of Argentina flags.

It seemed that in the Kolkata of 2026, Messi had hoovered up a lot of the new generation of football fans, leaving Ronaldo far behind. Equally, Brazil’s long hold on Kolkata fandom was finally fading after 75 years, as Argentina became the dominant choice and those fans who did not back Argentina gravitated towards Portugal, Spain or France.

The working-class roots of football

Yet the Messi wave has not swept away every older football memory in Kolkata. A small but stubborn Brazilian tradition still survives, keeping alive homage to a lineage that runs through Pele, Garrincha, Tostao, Socrates, Romario, Bebeto, Ronaldo Nazario, Roberto Carlos, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo and, most recently, Neymar.

On the highway into town from the airport, a striking scene appears beside Salt Lake Stadium: a huge green-and-gold Brazilian flag fluttering gently above long rows of laundry in another small garden, with a few Argentina flags hanging nearby as a tribute to Kolkata’s shifting football allegiances. Here, the life-size cutouts are of Neymar, whose quest for the World Cup in three previous tournaments — including the 2014 edition hosted by Brazil — ended in heartbreak, as it did this time around, too.

More than anything else, this image recalls football as an everyday, working people’s game, worlds away from the elite-leaning structures of top-level football and the World Cup today, which have brazenly priced out fans of modest means.

Even today, most of Kolkata’s working class handwash their clothes, often beside a water pump on the street, or one of the small ponds that dot the city beside the Ganga, India’s great river, before it empties into the Bay of Bengal south of the city. For respite from life’s travails, people look up from their rows of drying vests and underwear to the fluttering football flags and games caught on the fly or on the sly.

“Our tea shop is open from early in the morning till late in the evening,” said Sapna Patra. “Outside of work, my husband has only one passion: football.”

“Brazil aren’t the same without Neymar,” said Sudhansu Singh, a 34-year-old server at the Park Street branch of Subway and a passionate Brazil fan, as he leaned over the restaurant counter to watch the game on the big TV mounted on the wall. “So far, (coach Carlo) Ancelotti has only brought him on as a substitute. I’m worried for them.”

He was right to be concerned: Brazil were knocked out three days later. But Singh’s relationship to football went beyond backing a team. For him, the sport was pleasure, passion and freedom.

“The best thing about this World Cup is the timings!” he enthused, “Because of the time difference, all the games take place between 9pm and 9am (India time). This branch of Subway is open 24 hours a day. There’s never been a better time to work the night shift!”

“Even so,” he said, a true representative of the Kolkata school, “I prefer playing football to watching football”.

Like many other football fans encountered that week, Singh preferred playing football to watching it — a reminder that in Kolkata, devotion to the game still begins with feet on the pitch.