Passported out
India spent 18 years turning away footballers who wanted to play for it. A proposal now with the Prime Minister’s Office would reopen the door, if New Delhi and FIFA can agree on what nationality means.
In August 2012, Arata Izumi did something that looked irrational on paper. He surrendered one of the world’s most powerful passports for the right to pull on an international footballing also-ran’s shirt.
He gave up Japan, the country that raised him, the small burgundy booklet that opens border after border, to represent India, then drifting outside the world’s top hundred, a stranger to the game’s main stages.
India had been his first nationality. A quirk of Japanese law made him Indian at birth because his father was foreign. For four years, he lived as an Indian citizen. When the law changed in 1985, he became Japanese and remained so for the next 26 years. Then, in his thirties, he chose to hand it back.
Izumi arrived in India in 2006 as an import: a foreign signing for East Bengal, a quick midfielder with a career to build. Over six seasons, he moved clubs and learnt the cadences of the country. His Gujarati features did the introductions for him. From the day he landed, officials kept asking the same question: when would he play for the national team? The law never allowed it.
Indian regulations required a passport that he did not hold. Around 2010, his British agent began to test the rules. The deeper they dug, the narrower the path became. In the end, there was only one option: full, irrevocable renunciation of his Japanese citizenship.
The paperwork took two years and, to Izumi, was a private referendum on his life. He went to family and friends, to anyone whose counsel he trusted. His brother in Japan broke the deadlock.
“He just told me, ‘You enjoy’,” Izumi tells The State of Play. “Then I decided, okay, fair enough, I will go ahead with it.”
In February 2013, he came off the bench against Palestine and became the first naturalised foreign-born player to wear an India shirt. India lost 4-2.
That human cost is what a proposal in New Delhi is meant to erase.
First reported by Khel Now, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports has sent a framework to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Home Affairs proposing a “Sports Passport”, a device that would allow Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) and Overseas Citizens of India (OCIs) to play for India without shredding the passports on which their lives are built.
Football is the immediate target, though the logic extends to other team sports. Eligibility would be judged case by case and routed through the relevant federation; in football’s case, the All India Football Federation. The government is still “considering” the plan, with a decision due within six months.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, India finished 71st, with six medals and a formal bid for the 2036 Games now in train. In football, the national team failed to qualify for the AFC Asian Cup. Last year, Sunil Chhetri, then 40 and freshly retired, was coaxed back because no successor had emerged to carry the attack.
Izumi, now a technical director with Rising Pune FC, has heard the refrain for two decades. “Since 2006, we have been saying we are sleeping giants,” he says. “In 2026, we are still talking about being sleeping giants.”
