You cannot drive ten kilometres across Kerala right now without meeting two things. One falls from the sky. The other is bolted to the roadside, as tall as the coconut palms behind it: Messi or Neymar dripping in the monsoon and watching the traffic go by.
Last week, a two-and-a-half-storey Cristiano Ronaldo rose from a paddy field in Omassery. Within a day, Brazil fans answered three kilometres away with a Neymar taller still, planted in the wet green of the field. The Brazil group spent over ten thousand rupees on theirs, and motorists now stop to photograph a footballer standing in the paddy. Three years ago, the village next door floated a Messi on an islet in the river, four storeys high, and FIFA itself shared the picture. The cutouts come back every cycle, bigger each time, and so does the logic behind them: nobody here builds a monument to their own team. They build it to beat someone else’s.
Far beyond the United States, Mexico, and Canada, where the FIFA World Cup 2026 is actually being played, Kerala has made the tournament its own. A state where most people have never seen Argentina or Brazil except on television has spent decades adopting two football nations as a second identity and arguing about them the way it argues about everything else. The World Cup is when the argument gets a stage. Allegiance to a team nine thousand miles away outranks caste, party, and occasionally marriage.
That is the grammar of the season: In Kongad, Palakkad, Argentina fans put up a flex the width of a football pitch, Messi lifting the trophy with Di María and Alvarez at his shoulders, the whole thing carried into place on the shoulders of twenty men. A stretch of road stopped being a road and has become, for now, a small piece of Argentina. So Brazil replied. In Munda, Malappuram, a fan club lined the inter-state highway with a banner you could not photograph in one frame from across the road, the full squad printed life-size and then some.
It runs through the front door and splits the household. A television channel found one family holding three countries at the dinner table: the father for Brazil, the son for Argentina, and the wife for Portugal. A man has wrapped his scooter in a banner of Ronaldo. Another has painted the fuel tank of his motorcycle in Brazil yellow. There are bedrooms turned into shrines to a single player, and houses done end to end in one nation’s colours by men who will have to live inside it long after the tournament ends. The newest costume is the mundu, the traditional white wraparound, printed in team stripes, so a man can stand at a temple festival, white above the waist and Argentina blue below it.
Mundus printed in the colours of Argentina, Brazil and Portugal on display at a shop in Kerala. (Instagram/rakhesh_k_nair)
There is an older version of this that most people pass without seeing. Kerala’s government signboards are blue and white, like those of Argentina, and the official explanation is a poem about the state’s geography rendered in two colours. While that may be true, what is also true is that Elias George, the IAS officer who designed them, became an Argentina fan after watching Maradona in 1986.
The fever lives hardest on the campuses. At Devagiri College in Kozhikode, Alan Biju George, a B.Com finance student, has spent the past weeks organising the college fan show with his friends. He describes how it works: the World Cup starts, and the WhatsApp groups form overnight – Argentina Fans Devagiri, Brazil Fans Devagiri, Portugal Fans Devagiri. Forty students throw whatever they can into a common pot, and a flex goes up.
At night, boys hang giant flags belonging to both the KSU and the SFI, party rivals the rest of the year, but united for the moment under their favourite World Cup banners. Then begins the show: the three camps arriving in decorated cars with Nashik dhol and samba, faces and bodies painted, wigs and horns and smoke, a flash mob of girls in different jerseys, and a penalty shootout to close it. The college backs it. For the soft launch this year, they unrolled a flex down the side of a block reading One Last Dance, because Messi, Ronaldo, and Neymar are all assumed to be playing their final World Cup, and the boys wanted to mark it.
Posters of the Argentina Fans Devagiri and Brazil Fans Devagiri groups in Kozhikode. (Indian Express/Nidheesh MK)
“The World Cup,” Alan says, “has become a Kerala festival on the order of Christmas and Easter, and parents who once worried about where their sons were now find them turned, for a month, toward football instead of something worse.”
The matches fall in the small hours this time, kicking off after children are meant to be asleep. The father of a nine-year-old is glad his son can recite Neymar’s career and holds firm opinions about Lamine Yamal, but is losing the bedtime battle, because there is school in the morning and the boy will not move.
On the campuses, the arguing has gone almost scholarly. The Argentina fans point out that Brazil have not lifted the cup since 2002, twenty-four years and counting, a whole childhood. The Brazil fans answer that Argentina win about once a generation, 1978, 1986, 2022, and that the country went forty-four years between the first and the last, long enough that the men who celebrated the first one were watching the third from their deathbeds. Both are right, which is why it does not stop.
Adding to the frenzy this time is the fact that a Malayali is actually in the tournament. Tahsin Mohammed Jamshid, 19, whose family is from Thalassery in northern Kerala, is in Qatar’s final squad. His father played for Calicut University and once shared a field with Jo Paul Ancheri, one of the best footballers Kerala produced in his day. Tahsin was born in Doha and came up through Qatar’s academy system. His face is already printed on jerseys in Kerala.
Tahsin Mohammad Jamshid (centre) with his father, Jamshid Thachankandy (left), and elder brother, Mishal Mohammed. (Special Arrangement)
For all its scale, the map of the fever is changing. Football mania used to belong to the northern parts of Kerala. It is climbing south now. Up in the high ranges of Idukki, a hilly region with little history of this, cutouts of Messi are going up by the check dams. Idukki gave India two of its finest runners, KM Beenamol and Shiny Wilson, off these same slopes, and is only now getting a proper stadium built.
For all the flags, the state of sport in Kerala is thinner than the noise suggests. The stadiums that exist are mostly locked, held by the Kerala State Sports Council, the apex statutory body under the state government, which itself pleads a shortage of funds. The real gap is not floodlit turf but plain open ground, somewhere a boy can walk onto with a ball. The coast and the high ranges once sent the country some of its best athletes. They send fewer now, which makes it less of a surprise that the youngster from Thalassery reached the World Cup through Qatar, and not from here.
Everyone is selling through the hole the World Cup cuts in the state’s attention: clothing shops, the tourism department, the campaign against drugs. The reel-makers are having the month of their lives, some of them passing off old footage of cutouts as this year’s, which works because the underlying devotion does not change.
Where does all this affection come from? Probably in the roots that are not only sporting.
Kerala chooses sides for a living. Mammootty or Mohanlal at the movies. Communist or Congress at the ballot. The state organises its loyalties in pairs and argues them to the end, and Brazil against Argentina slotted into that habit as if it had been waiting for it. There are other footballing allegiances — France, Portugal, Germany — but none of them carries the heat of the old two.
The Latin American teams arrived wrapped in something Kerala was already inclined to love. Messi was raised in Rosario, the same city that produced Che Guevara, whose face has been imprinted on Kerala’s youth for longer than Messi has been alive. The Left found in football a language to talk about poverty and power with people who would never sit through a pamphlet.
A Lionel Messi cutout towers over a roadside in Kozhikode during the 2018 FIFA World Cup. (Indian Express/Nandagopal Rajan)
There was a territorial pull too, a sense that these were the teams of the global underdog, the colonised, the working poor, that felt closer to Kerala’s own self-image. And then there was the man himself. Many in Kerala saw their first World Cup in 1986, the tournament that handed them Maradona at his peak, and a generation that fell for him then has never entirely got up.
The game also bred a literature of its own here. NS Madhavan wrote Higuita in 1990, naming it after the Colombian goalkeeper, and it remains one of the most anthologised Malayalam short stories. Sudani from Nigeria, the 2018 film about an African player on a Malappuram sevens team and the household that takes him in, came out of the same soil.
The origin of the frenzy, the side-taking and the showing-off are hard to date, because the obsession grew among ordinary people before anyone important noticed it. Kerala’s pre-Independence freedom fighters were not remembered as footballers, yet North Kerala held on to stories of barefoot Malayalis taking on boot-wearing British officers on the same grounds.
A 1982 photograph by Ali Kovoor shows a gallery packed with women watching a match, which tells you how far back, and how wide, the phenomenon already ran. What turned a regional habit into a mania was television. Before it, following top-flight football was something you did out in the world: at the maidan, the sevens ground, the stadium, places coded working-class and rooted in North Kerala and the coast. Television took that passion and dropped it inside everyone’s living room, so a middle-class family in rural Kerala could now catch the same fever without ever standing on a muddy touchline.
The 1982 photograph by Ali Kovoor. (Instagram/malabar.manual)
It made the whole state a spectator, and it has not left the room since. The maidans are still there, the sevens ground in the north still filling on weekend nights, men playing seven-a-side on mud for hours, the winners going home with a trophy and not much more than a plate of al-faham. But the game most people follow now is the one on the screen, where the fans run into the millions.
The result is that the projector on the street, playing the World Cup, is the oldest and most level thing left about Kerala. A giant screen, two big speakers, plastic chairs under a tarpaulin in the rain, and a hundred people who otherwise have less and less to say to one another, the auto driver next to the bank clerk next to the schoolboy, all watching the same match in the open. Nobody’s asking who you voted for or who you pray to.
Football, as Jurgen Klopp once called it, becomes the most important of the least important things.
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