The year 2025 marks a historic turning point for Indian football governance. For the first time ever, an Indian woman Valanka Alemao, CEO of Churchill Brothers FC and Chairperson of the AIFF Women’s Committee has earned a seat at the global table.
Her appointment to the FIFA Women’s Football Development Committee (2025–2029) is not merely symbolic; it represents India’s ascension as an active participant in shaping world football policy. Alemao’s new position situates her in Geneva, working directly alongside FIFA’s senior leadership to guide strategy, funding, and global development programs for women’s football. It is the first time India will have a direct voice in the FIFA decision-making architecture that determines how global football’s vast developmental resources are distributed a voice that will now speak from the Indian subcontinent.
A Historic Appointment with Far-Reaching Impact
Alemao’s inclusion on the committee, formally confirmed by the FIFA Council on October 2, 2025, makes her the first Indian woman ever appointed to a FIFA Standing Committee. The 25-member panel, chaired by former French international Laura Georges, is responsible for advising FIFA on its global women’s football strategy from grassroots participation to professional league sustainability and leadership diversity.
This position is both an honor and a strategic opportunity. It gives India a direct conduit to global policy, enabling Alemao to align FIFA’s developmental programs with India’s domestic priorities particularly the AIFF’s Vision 2047 roadmap. The timing is serendipitous: Indian women’s football is riding unprecedented momentum, from the senior team’s historic qualification for the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup to the U20 squad’s breakthrough entry into the AFC U20 Asian Cup after two decades.
For Indian football, Alemao’s seat at the table is more than representation. It’s influence. For the first time, India transitions from being a beneficiary of global football aid to a policy contributor one capable of shaping funding flows and governance models for developing markets worldwide.
Valanka Alemao: A Career Built on Club and Country
Few administrators in Indian football can claim the same breadth of experience as Valanka Alemao. As CEO of Churchill Brothers FC since 2007, she became the first woman to lead a top-tier Indian club, bringing over 17 years of operational, financial, and managerial expertise to the sport. Her experience is not abstract. Under her stewardship, Churchill Brothers built one of Goa’s strongest women’s teams, which qualified for the Indian Women’s League (IWL) after winning the Goa league. This hands-on engagement with both men’s and women’s teams gives her an invaluable understanding of the structural and financial disparities that define Indian football’s ecosystem.
In 2022, Alemao entered national governance, becoming the first woman elected to the AIFF Executive Committee. As Chairperson of the AIFF Women’s Committee, she has led reforms focused on professionalizing the IWL, improving player welfare, and implementing progressive policies from menstrual health guidelines to maternity and family leave for female athletes.
“Professionalism gives parents confidence to allow their daughters to dream,” she once remarked. It’s a philosophy she now carries to the global level ensuring that structural support for women’s football is not an exception, but a standard.
The Global Platform: From Vision 2047 to FIFA’s Core Agenda
The FIFA Women’s Football Development Committee is the world governing body’s principal think tank for the women’s game. Its core mission revolves around three pillars:
- Increasing participation at the grassroots level.
- Strengthening competitive structures, including leagues and infrastructure.
- Inspiring future generations through role models and leadership opportunities.
For India, these pillars overlap directly with Vision 2047, the AIFF’s long-term blueprint to make India a top-eight Asian nation in women’s football by 2026. Alemao’s new role therefore allows her to integrate India’s national agenda into FIFA’s global development frameworks.
For instance, through the FIFA Women’s Development Programme, member associations can apply for specialized technical support, equipment grants, and targeted financial assistance. Each member association receives up to USD 500,000 in funding dedicated to women’s football under the FIFA Forward initiative. Alemao’s presence ensures India can now position its proposals like the establishment of the first dedicated women’s football academy in Hyderabad to align precisely with FIFA’s evaluation criteria, dramatically increasing the likelihood of long-term funding.
Equally vital is her access to the Talent Development Scheme (TDS) led by Arsène Wenger. By integrating FIFA’s technical insights into the AIFF’s domestic systems, Alemao can bridge the existing gap between India’s grassroots potential and elite performance execution.
The Indian Women’s League: Potential vs. Fragility
At the heart of India’s women’s football growth lies the Indian Women’s League, which has undergone meaningful evolution but continues to face structural challenges. The league expanded to a home-and-away format in 2023–24 and now features eight teams, with Odisha FC emerging as champions. Yet, its commercial fragility persists.
The IWL’s biggest issue is “structural asymmetry” the gulf between the resources, visibility, and media value of the men’s and women’s leagues. AIFF’s attempt to mandate a minimum annual salary of ₹3.2 lakh for at least 10 Indian players per club was rolled back after financial pushback from teams. Instead, the federation introduced a ₹25 lakh subsidy per club, a short-term relief that underscored the league’s dependence on central funding.
This reversal exposed a larger problem: India’s booming grassroots participation aided by the ASMITA leagues, which saw a 232% increase in registered players in just one year has outpaced the professional system’s ability to absorb emerging talent. The result is a bottleneck between supply and opportunity. Alemao’s global role can directly help address this by channeling FIFA’s commercialization expertise into the IWL developing media partnerships, broadcast strategies, and revenue models that make the league self-sustaining. Her committee’s access to case studies from transitional markets like Morocco, Vietnam, and Colombia offers a ready roadmap for India’s leap forward.
The Performance Argument: India’s Case for Investment
The competitive argument for India’s growth story is strong and growing stronger.
Under head coach Crispin Chettri, the Blue Tigresses scripted history in 2025 by qualifying for the AFC Women’s Asian Cup 2026 entirely on merit. Their campaign featured dominant wins over Mongolia (13–0), Timor-Leste (4–0), and Iraq (5–0) before defeating hosts Thailand 2–1 to top the group. The result propelled India to 63rd in the FIFA World Rankings, its highest position in recent history. Parallel success at youth levels underscores structural progress. The U20 team, led by Swedish coach Joakim Alexandersson, qualified for the AFC U20 Women’s Asian Cup for the first time since 2006, topping their group with seven points.
Meanwhile, the U17 team dominated the SAFF U17 Championship, scoring 30 goals in six matches. These results are not isolated. They confirm the growing efficacy of India’s developmental framework one that now needs global investment to translate potential into podiums.
The 2027 World Cup Ambition
India’s next major goal is clear: qualification for the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The route runs through the 2026 Asian Cup, where six slots are available for Asia’s best. Alemao has boldly asserted that “the Indian women’s team can make it to the World Cup before the men” and the data supports that optimism.
But bridging the gap between regional dominance and global competitiveness will require one missing ingredient: consistent exposure. India must play 10–12 high-quality matches annually against nations ranked between 40 and 60 teams like Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Alemao’s FIFA platform offers the influence to facilitate such scheduling through inter-confederation programs, ensuring the Blue Tigresses gain the experience and ranking points necessary for a World Cup breakthrough.
Beyond competition, Alemao’s advocacy has already shaped progressive domestic governance. In 2025, the AIFF amended its Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP) to include menstrual health and maternity provisions among the most comprehensive in Asia. Her next objective: extending this progress to club licensing, ensuring that all top-tier men’s clubs (ISL and I-League) are mandated to field women’s teams by 2028. Equally crucial is her vision for leadership pipelines. Alemao intends to leverage FIFA’s “Project Diamond” and other programs to create international exchange opportunities for Indian women administrators, coaches, and referees accelerating the presence of women in football governance.
From Goa to Geneva: A New Era of Influence
Valanka Alemao’s ascent to the FIFA Women’s Football Development Committee marks more than a personal milestone; it’s an institutional leap for India. Her journey from leading a Goan club to influencing global football policy reflects the new direction Indian women’s football is heading: bold, strategic, and globally connected. Her task over the next four years is monumental: to transform representation into results.
If she succeeds in channeling FIFA’s technical and financial resources into India’s domestic structures, she could help engineer the single most transformative period in the history of Indian women’s football one where grassroots promise, professional opportunity, and global competitiveness finally converge.
By bridging Goa’s fields and Geneva’s boardrooms, Valanka Alemao isn’t just representing India she’s redefining it.
