Kolkata : There are football stadiums that belong to clubs, franchises, and sometimes to a city. And then there is Salt Lake Stadium. For more than four decades, this cauldron has been the place where India’s football has met some of the finest of the world.
Oliver Kahn, the German football great, was playing his final match for Bayern. Ze Roberto, Mark van Bommel and others were in the visiting team. The stadium has shrunk, physically and metaphorically. Old terraces have welcomed seats. Hospitality boxes have come up. Its name too has officially become Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan. Along with all this has the football economy changed around it. From state tournaments and club derbies of the IFA Shield, it started hosting National Football League, I-League, ISL and FIFA events.
The stadium opened in January 1984 with the Nehru Gold Cup, conceived on a scale that now seems almost fantastical—120,000 spectators—making it for years one of the largest football arenas in the world. FIFA records that its official attendance record came in 1997, when 131,000 people packed in for the derby between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. On 27 May 2008, Bayern Munich brought a star-studded side to Kolkata to face Mohun Bagan. Bayern won 3-0, but the result became incidental when Kahn left the field in the 55th minute to an enormous ovation. Bayern’s own account describes it as the goalkeeper’s farewell from active football, aptly in front of a reported 120,000 strong crowd. Then came Lionel Messi, on September 2, 2011, when Argentina, with their talisman taking over as captain, played Venezuela at Salt Lake in a friendly. Six years later, the venue acquired another distinction when it hosted the final of the 2017 U-17 World Cup, the first FIFA tournament staged in India. England came from two goals down to beat Spain 5-2 in front of 66,684 spectators, with Brazil also playing the third-place match here. The capacity too has fallen from the vast 120,000 of its early years. It was renovated for the U-17 World Cup. The playing surface changed from natural turf to artificial, before it reverted to natural grass in 2016.
A few months earlier, the stadium had witnessed something more substantial.
Diego Maradona made his way to Salt Lake in December 2008. Brazil’s senior team has never played a match in India, Uruguay’s last encounter with India in Kolkata was in the 1982 Nehru Gold Cup, before Salt Lake existed. There is a larger context beyond the numbers though. Salt Lake became the stage from where India’s football ambition was broadcast to the wider world. The stadium hosted World Cup qualifying football, the South Asian Games, Super Soccer tournaments and international competitions involving teams from Europe, Asia and the Americas. It became the natural home for the city’s clubs and, increasingly, for the national team, as well as a pit stop for the occasional international. He didn’t play a match there. Still, he showed a glimpse of his magic for a few minutes, juggling a football before a crowd intoxicated simply by his presence. The image was unmistakably Kolkata: the world’s most famous footballers could arrive as visitors, but the city treated their proximity to a ball as an event in itself. Its permanence is what makes the Brazil and Uruguay fixtures feel so significant. Now with both nations playing at the amphitheatre, this feels like another housewarming.
