Hope, in Indian football, has rarely arrived without noise. It has come with announcements, declarations, and the familiar promise that this time, things will be different. More often than not, they haven’t been.
For Indian football, that hope has often felt like it was running on low battery. Too many false starts, too many “this is the turning point” announcements that never quite turned into anything, and a system that has often left fans doing the heavy lifting when it comes to belief. There have been moments, sure, but very few that genuinely provided the belief.
And then, on a warm April afternoon in Spain, it happened.
On April 3, at the Mediterranean International Cup, a tournament that once featured Lionel Messi, Neymar and Lamine Yamal as the promising talents of their generation, a group of boys from Punjab decided to make some noise. Minerva Academy U-15 beat Liverpool U-15 6-0.
Yes, 6-0.
It is the kind of scoreline that makes you double-check if you read it right.
Raj Singh grabbed a hat-trick, Mohammed Azam Khan added two, Lisham Amarson Singh applied the finishing touch, but beyond the goals, it was the manner and conviction of their performance that struck a chord with Indian football fans still clutching at straws.
Up against a youth system ranked among the top ten by the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) Football Observatory, Minerva played with a belief and authority that made it clear they were not just a team randomly drawn against the Reds, but one that truly belonged on that pitch.
If you have read this far, and you think that we are trying to sensationalise the win, hold on, let's put some context to this.
The MIC Cup is not your average youth tournament. It is one of those spaces where academies like Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Liverpool send their best young players to test themselves.
And Liverpool, as a system, are about as solid as it gets. Structured, well-funded, and built to produce top-level professionals year after year.
Minerva? A different story.
No big corporate backing. No federation cushion. Just an academy built on its own resources, a group that has grown together, and a process that has been followed without shortcuts.
And for 50 minutes in Spain (full length of youth football matches), that was enough to boss the game.
For fans used to “almost there” narratives, this felt refreshing. Not because it fixes everything overnight, but because it showed something that looked repeatable, not random.
But here’s the thing. The most remarkable part of this story is not what happened on April 3.
It is the fact that, just weeks before it, this team was not even sure if it would make it to Spain. There were days when the question was not about match-ups or preparation, but whether they would leave the academy at all.
The result against Liverpool will be remembered for a long time. What perhaps will get lost in time is how close this entire campaign came to not happening at all.
For Ranjit Bajaj, the founder of Minerva Academy and the man behind this entire setup, the bigger frustration in the build-up to the MIC Cup was not about tactics or team selection.
Instead of being a coach, he was sitting with bank passbooks, flight tabs open on his laptop, and a growing list of problems that needed solving before a ball could even be kicked in Spain.
The first issue was visas.
“Forget funding, the first issue was visas,” Bajaj said exclusively to India Today. “We applied for two months and didn’t even get a date. Ten days before departure, we still had no clarity. At that point, we didn’t even know if we were going or not.”
With less than two weeks to go, the situation was simple: they didn’t know if they were even travelling.
At that point, training sessions and match prep really did not matter. Bajaj was just trying to make sure the trip didn’t fall apart.
So the outspoken owner of the Minerva Academy turned to the one entity that he knew would not disappoint. The fans.
Bajaj went public.
“I made an appeal on social media, and it went viral. The fans picked it up, they pushed it, and that’s what got it to the right people. The Spanish embassy stepped in, and within 24 hours, everything was processed and sent back.”
Crisis one, was just about handled.
And just how problems go, the next one showed up right on time.
Flight tickets, which had initially been booked at around Rs 90,000, suddenly jumped to nearly Rs 3 lakh one way. The spike came in the middle of the Gulf conflict, with routes getting disrupted and fares shooting up overnight.
For a travelling group of over 30 people, this wasn’t just expensive, it was the kind of number which makes you clutch your hair right away and think, "Yeah, that's it"
“At one point, I was even looking at alternate routes, just thinking how do we get there, whatever it takes. We had to go. That was non-negotiable.” Bajaj added.
And this is where Minerva’s story becomes even more telling, because it reflects the current state of Indian football.
There’s no reserve fund waiting in the background for these boys from Mohali. No fallback option. Bajaj had already stretched himself, even mortgaging personal assets to keep things going. The rest had to come from wherever it could.
“The saddest part was this, I was spending five to six hours every day just arranging money, sorting tickets, figuring out logistics. That’s time I should have been spending with my boys, coaching them, preparing them.”
While most teams at this level are fine-tuning their game, Minerva were busy making sure they could even show up.
And somehow, through all of that, they did.
They got to Spain. They made history.
But the boys who pulled off that 6-0 win will probably never fully know the fight behind the scenes. Maybe that is exactly how it should be.
They travelled with one clear purpose: to play football, to test themselves against the best, and to believe they belonged. Everything else - the uncertainty, the scrambling, the quiet panic behind the scenes - was kept away from them.
“I couldn’t let the boys know any of this was happening. That was my job, to make sure they never felt it. They just wanted to play football, and that’s all they should be thinking about. They are the ones carrying the dreams, but this, this is the cost right now of dreaming in Indian football. And that burden, it can’t go on their shoulders.”
For those 50 minutes, none of it mattered. Not visas, not tickets, not the uncertainty of whether they would even be there.
Just the game.
And in playing it the way they did, they showed that they belonged on that stage.
What comes after is a different journey. One they have not had to think about yet.
For now, they remain what they should be - a group of kids who only wanted to play, unburdened, unaware of the problems that the world brings.
There are no calculations here, no awareness of what lies ahead, no sense of the weight that the system and its red tape bring in a country like India.
And maybe that's what the story is here. That it is about time that we do right by them.
Source: India Today