The 2025 calendar year will go down as one of the most difficult periods in the modern history of the Indian men’s national football team.
By December 22, 2025, India had slipped to 142nd in the FIFA World Rankings, their lowest position in nearly a decade, marking a sharp and worrying regression from the relative stability achieved between 2017 and 2023. This fall was not sudden, nor accidental. Instead, it was the cumulative result of technical instability, repeated coaching changes, failure in continental qualification, and an unprecedented administrative breakdown within Indian football’s governing ecosystem.
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India’s ranking decline accelerated rapidly through 2025. After finishing 2024 ranked 126th, the Blue Tigers entered the new year already under pressure. While they briefly touched 127th early in the year, successive poor results pushed them steadily downwards 133rd by July, before eventually settling at 142nd by December .
To put this into perspective, this ranking represents India’s worst position since 2016, effectively undoing nearly seven years of gradual progress. Between 2017 and 2023, India had managed to re-enter the top 100 twice, peaking at 94th in 1996 historically and hovering around the 100–105 range in recent cycles. The 2025 collapse, therefore, stands out not as fluctuation, but as structural failure.
Coaching instability and lack of direction
One of the defining features of India’s 2025 campaign was technical instability. In a span of just over a year, the national team transitioned through three coaching regimes, severely affecting continuity and tactical clarity. The year began under Manolo Márquez, whose domestic success in the ISL failed to translate to international effectiveness. India recorded a win percentage of just 13% under his tenure, with the only victory coming in a friendly against Maldives. A winless Asian Cup qualification run forced the AIFF to terminate his contract by mid-year .
In August, Khalid Jamil was appointed head coach, becoming the first Indian to lead the senior men’s team in 13 years. While his appointment was symbolically important and brought short-term optimism, including a third-place finish at the CAFA Nations Cup, the deeper issues remained unresolved.
Asian Cup qualification failure
The most damaging sporting outcome of 2025 was India’s failure to qualify for the 2027 AFC Asian Cup the first time the country missed out since the tournament expanded to 24 teams.
Placed in a group with Bangladesh, Hong Kong and Singapore, India entered as the highest-ranked side but finished bottom with zero wins from five matches. Draws at home against Bangladesh and Singapore, followed by away defeats including a historic 1–0 loss to Bangladesh in Dhaka, India’s first in 22 years sealed elimination.
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That defeat encapsulated India’s problems: defensive lapses, inability to defend transitions, and a lack of cutting edge in the final third despite dominating possession.
The Sunil Chhetri paradox
Another stark indicator of regression was the forced return of Sunil Chhetri. Having announced his international retirement earlier, the 40-year-old was persuaded to return due to India’s acute goal-scoring crisis.
While Chhetri’s presence provided leadership and a short-term solution he scored once in 2025 it also exposed a deeper systemic issue: India’s failure to develop a reliable successor. Even with promising forwards like Vikram Partap Singh, Mohammed Sanan and Irfan Yadwad, the gulf between domestic success and international effectiveness remained evident.
Chhetri’s definitive retirement at the end of 2025 leaves India entering 2026 without a proven international striker.
Administrative paralysis and ISL crisis
Beyond results on the pitch, Indian football’s governance crisis played a major role in the national team’s decline. In 2025, the AIFF appeared in the Supreme Court more times than the national team played matches, reflecting the scale of administrative dysfunction. The expiry of the Master Rights Agreement (MRA) between the AIFF and FSDL led to the suspension of the 2025–26 ISL season, bringing India’s top-tier domestic football to a halt. Training routines were disrupted, foreign players planned exits, and domestic players struggled for match fitness .
This chaos directly impacted national team preparation, with clubs reluctant to release players outside FIFA windows and long-term camps becoming impossible to organise.
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India’s struggles were magnified by regional comparisons. While India regressed, teams like Vietnam, Jordan and Uzbekistan either maintained or improved their standings. Even within South Asia, Bangladesh and Nepal closed the gap, eroding India’s long-held dominance.
The loss to Bangladesh was particularly symbolic, confirming that India no longer carries the psychological edge it once did in the SAFF region.
India’s 142nd FIFA ranking at the end of 2025 is not merely a number it is a reflection of a broken ecosystem. The collapse of domestic structures, instability in leadership, failure in succession planning, and administrative paralysis combined to produce a year that can only be described as a backward step. As India moves into 2026, the challenge is no longer about short-term ranking recovery. It is about rebuilding trust, restoring domestic football, and creating a coherent long-term vision. Without that structural reset, any improvement in rankings will remain cosmetic masking deeper issues that 2025 laid bare.
