The 2025–26 season was supposed to mark a breakthrough for Indian women football a season of expanded competition, continental visibility, and a renewed push toward the AFC Women’s Asia Cup 2026.
Instead, the upcoming calendar has exposed deep structural cracks in the system where ambition clashes with governance, and growth is threatened by overreach. At the heart of the crisis lies a compressed, contradictory schedule that overloads players, confuses clubs, and risks undoing years of slow but steady progress in building a professional women’s football ecosystem in India.
A Calendar That Pushes Players Beyond Limits
The conflict begins in mid-November 2025 and stretches through April 2026, a six-month period packed with overlapping commitments.
The sequence looks impressive on paper:
- AFC Women’s Champions League (AWCL) group stage (mid-November)
- FIFA International Window (November 24 – December 2)
- SAFF Club Championship (December 5–20)
- Indian Women’s League (IWL) season (October 2025 – April 2026, officially)
- 83-day National Team Camp (January–March 2026)
- AFC Women’s Asia Cup (March 1–21, 2026)
- AFC U20 Women’s Asia Cup (April 1–18, 2026)
In theory, this structure aims to maximize match exposure for Indian players giving them nearly 30 competitive games in six months. In practice, it’s a logistical and physiological nightmare.
Players will have no rest periods between competitions. Those finishing AWCL matches on November 20 will have just three days to recover before joining national camp for the FIFA window, followed by another two days before the SAFF Club Championship. That’s 35 days of continuous competition and travel, with minimal recovery time.
Sports science warns that such scheduling directly increases the risk of serious injuries particularly ACL tears, which are already alarmingly frequent in women’s football. Fatigue not only affects the body but also decision-making, reaction time, and coordination. In short, the structure that was meant to build experience may instead break athletes down.
Governance Contradictions: The IWL Conundrum
The calendar chaos extends beyond player fatigue it also reflects a governance disconnect within the AIFF. The federation’s official competition calendar lists the IWL 2025–26 as running from October 25, 2025, to April 30, 2026. But the national team’s Asia Cup preparation plan requires the IWL to end by January 2026, so that an 83-day training camp can begin in mid-January.
This three-month mismatch has triggered a structural conflict between club and country.
If the IWL runs until April, national players can’t attend the full preparation camp. If it’s shortened to January, clubs including Gokulam Kerala, East Bengal, and Kickstart FC lose nearly two months of scheduled competition, which affects player contracts, sponsorship deliverables, and broadcast revenue. For a league still finding financial stability, such abrupt changes are disastrous. Clubs operating on tight budgets rely on predictable schedules to attract sponsors and plan logistics. This uncertainty, compounded by the lack of clear communication, risks driving away potential investors precisely when Indian women’s football needs stability to professionalize.
This dual-calendar confusion mirrors long-standing issues in Indian football governance reactive decision-making and poor synchronization between strategic ambition and regulatory planning. The AIFF cannot push for elite national team preparation while simultaneously destabilizing the domestic foundation on which that team depends.
The AIFF’s target of ensuring each national pool player participates in at least 30 matches between August 2025 and February 2026 is commendable in intent but deeply flawed in design. Research from top European leagues shows that elite women players need a minimum of five full recovery days between high-intensity matches to avoid elevated injury risk. The proposed Indian calendar repeatedly violates this threshold forcing players into back-to-back matches across competitions governed by different bodies.
Beyond physical danger, there’s the question of mental health. Continuous travel, performance pressure, and separation from home environments especially during the planned 83-day national camp can lead to burnout. FIFA’s newly introduced Women’s International Match Calendar (WIMC) 2026–29 explicitly prioritizes rest and recovery, recognizing that sustainable growth depends on player welfare. Ironically, India’s 2025–26 schedule moves in the opposite direction, overloading athletes in pursuit of short-term “exposure.”
The U20 Dilemma: Development at Risk
Perhaps the most damaging overlap lies in the March–April 2026 window. The AFC Women’s Asia Cup (senior team) runs from March 1–21, followed immediately by the AFC U20 Women’s Asia Cup (April 1–18).
This overlap places unprecedented strain on India’s developmental system. Several players eligible for both squads many of them already key figures in the IWL will be expected to play back-to-back tournaments at continental level, totaling nearly eight weeks of nonstop competition. Instead of nurturing the next generation, this scheduling risks overexposing young players to fatigue and injury, undermining both the senior team’s performance and the youth program’s long-term goals.
Moreover, both the senior and U20 setups share overlapping coaching and technical staff. Managing simultaneous preparation for two major tournaments is simply unfeasible. The result will be diluted focus and compromised readiness on both fronts.
Fixing this crisis requires immediate, authoritative intervention. Experts within the federation have outlined several key reforms:
- Calendar Decompression: The IWL must be formally shortened to end by January 2026, with recovery buffers of at least five days mandated between major competitions. This aligns with FIFA’s global welfare benchmarks.
- Compensation for Clubs: A structured financial mechanism must reimburse clubs for releasing players to the 83-day national camp. Without guaranteed compensation and injury insurance, clubs will understandably resist player release.
- Centralized Load Monitoring: A unified system tracking match minutes, training loads, and recovery across both club and national team environments is essential to prevent overuse injuries.
- Separation of Senior and U20 Cycles: Future schedules must maintain a minimum 4–6 week gap between senior and youth tournaments to ensure developmental sustainability.
- Institutional Accountability: The AIFF must adopt a binding annual competition roadmap, locking dates at least eight months in advance to restore club confidence and enable proper planning.
The 2025–26 calendar exposes a paradox at the heart of Indian women’s football a federation eager to accelerate development without the structural foundation to sustain it. The goal of preparing competitively for the AFC Women’s Asia Cup is admirable. But without synchronized governance, player protection, and predictable scheduling, that ambition risks collapsing under its own weight.
For Indian women’s football to thrive, progress must be measured, not manufactured. Growth built on exhaustion will not take India to Asia’s elite it will only take the game back to square one.
Headline suggestion:
“Ambition Without Rest: Inside the Scheduling Crisis Threatening Indian Women’s Football”
Word count: ~815
