The following was received as a feature press release and has received only minor edits by TSR…
On the evening of 30th October, under that autumn sky, the Indian Football League 2026-27 season will begin at the TRC Stadium. Real Kashmir, the Snow Leopards, will be at home. Their opponents will have crossed the country from the other end of India’s mountains, from the foothills of the Naga Hills, to play the first national-league match of their lives.
Three years ago, Nagaland United Sports Club did not exist. When the referee blows the first whistle of the 2026-27 season, it will be their whistle too. How a club so young came to go first is worth telling, and so is what it takes with it to Srinagar.
BORN IN A HURRY
Nagaland United were founded in 2024 in Chümoukedima, the town where the flat country around Dimapur ends and the hills begin to climb. They chose a motto that reads less like a slogan than an invitation: Rise Together.
Their first competitive match came on 28th January 2025 and the date was no accident. That evening a new football stadium opened in Chümoukedima on what would have been the 107th birthday of Dr Talimeren Ao, the Naga doctor who captained independent India at the 1948 Olympic Games. The ribbon was cut, the new Nagaland Super League kicked off, and the first team to walk out on that grass was Nagaland United. They lost 3-2 to Barak FC.
Anyone who knows football knows how little that means. Nagaland United finished the league phase second of seven, conceding only nine goals in 12 matches. Nisede Peseyie scored a hat-trick against 27 United and picked up one of the league’s individual awards, and the club’s coach, Khogen Singh, was named coach of the season. By the end of the playoffs, the newest name in the league had finished third.
Then, in October 2025, they won their first trophy. The NSF Martyrs’ Memorial Trophy has a quarter century of history behind it and is played at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in Kohima. Nagaland United entered at the pre-quarterfinal stage, newcomers among clubs with long memories, and swept through: 7-0, 2-1, 4-0. In the final on 18th October they beat Chedema Village Youth Organisation 3-1, with goals from Arap Konyak, Joel Haokip and Manton Konyak. Their players collected the awards for player of the tournament, best goalkeeper and best defender, and Khogen Singh was voted best coach again.
A first defeat in January, a first trophy in October. This was a club in a hurry, and it had its reasons.
THE INHERITANCE
To understand the hurry, go back to the man whose birthday the stadium shares.
A hundred years ago, on the mission playground at Impur in the Naga Hills, barefoot boys chased whatever they could find: rags knotted into a ball, a sphere of woven cane, sometimes a pomelo, heavy and thick-skinned, bruising toes and bouncing wherever it liked. One of those boys was Talimeren Ao. His father, the first Reverend in the Naga Hills, died of typhoid before the boy was out of his teens. His last wish was that his son become a doctor and serve the Naga people.
The boy did exactly that. Along the way, he also became captain of India.
On 31st July 31 1948, at Cricklefield Stadium in Ilford, east London, Ao led India out against France in the country’s first Olympic football match as an independent nation. Eight of his teammates played without boots, in thick socks and strapping. India missed two penalties and lost to a goal a minute from time. Afterwards a reporter asked the captain about the bare feet, and Ao gave an answer that Indian football has been repeating ever since: “We play football in India, whereas you play bootball.”
He went home to the hills, practised medicine and became Nagaland’s first Director of Health Services. He also left behind a love of football that has never dimmed. Almost every village in the state has its own ground, and the coach Kivilu Kiba reckons you can often find another one every few kilometres. “Football in Nagaland is more than just a sport,” he says. This summer, young men in Ungma village raised a World Cup trophy nearly fifteen feet tall beside the national highway, built from bamboo without a single iron support. They twice failed to get the globe at the top right, until the village elders stepped in and showed them how.
But Ao’s legacy had a quieter, stranger side. For 78 years, the state that gave Indian football its first captain never had a club in the national league. That was the inheritance Nagaland United took on in 2024, and it explains why waiting was never part of the plan.
A LANTERN PASSED
The long road was always open: season after season of climbing through the lower divisions and hoping. “It would have taken us years,” says Abu Metha, a member of the club’s board, “and we do not have the time.”
The short road came from a neighbour.
Aizawl FC know something about defying expectations. In 2017, a club from the Mizo hills that had nearly gone down the season before travelled to Shillong on the final day needing a point. They came from behind to draw 1-1 with Shillong Lajong and became the first club from the North East to win the national league. People called it Indian football’s Leicester City moment, and a Naga was on the bench to see it. William Koso, the first coach from Nagaland to earn an AFC A Licence, was Aizawl’s assistant coach that season.
This June, Aizawl came to Nagaland under the banner of Football for Peace. On 6th June they played Nagaland United at Chümoukedima in a match billed as “Match for Peace, Goal for Hope”. Tickets cost Rs 20, and the takings went to an orphanage. Aizawl won 2-0. Their owner, Robert R Royte, put into words what the crowd already felt: Nagaland deserved a club in a national league.
Three months later, on 9th September, the All India Football Federation approved a goodwill agreement. Nagaland United took Aizawl’s place in the IFL, and Aizawl pledged technical and development support. After 11 straight seasons in the national league without relegation, Aizawl carry on in the Mizoram Premier League.
Football rarely gives anything away. This was one hill club passing a lantern to another. The fixture list, as fixture lists sometimes do, has found the poetry in it: on 25th November Nagaland United play in Shillong, where Aizawl won their title, and on 7th December they travel to Aizawl itself.
BUILDING AGAINST THE CLOCK
Then came the real work, with the clock running.
The club advertised for coaches and support staff, and hundreds of applications arrived, some from as far away as Argentina, Spain and Brazil. It inherited a squad and staff with national-league experience, but the board set one principle from the outset: local Naga players come first.
What that means could be seen on 17th October in Chümoukedima, where a local car dealership held a small ceremony for two young men. Ghuqhe Chishi, a 20-year-old central midfielder, and Vinato Achumi both came through Nagaland’s U-20 sides, and both have now been selected to play for Nagaland United in the IFL. It was a modest, local occasion, the kind a town holds when two of its own are heading somewhere big.
The club’s coordinator, Gentleson Vashum, used the evening to sketch out what lies ahead. There will be twenty league matches, ten at home and ten away. FIFA-approved artificial turf is to be laid at Chümoukedima. And the club wants to become a symbol of Nagaland that the rest of India, and the wider world, will notice.
Metha is not hiding behind modest expectations either. “Whenever you enter any arena,” he says, “you enter to win.”
THE ROAD AHEAD
After Srinagar, the calendar tells a story of its own.
On 14th November, Nagaland United play their first home match in the national league, against Gokulam Kerala at Chümoukedima, the same ground where they lost that very first game. Dempo, the old Goan powerhouse, visit a fortnight later. On 19th December Mohammedan Sporting arrive from Kolkata, the city where T Ao captained Mohun Bagan. One can only guess what the old Bagan captain would have made of his people’s club taking on one of Mohun Bagan’s great Kolkata rivals.
The IFL’s audience has grown fast, with last season’s television viewership four times that of the season before. This season, the league returns to a full home-and-away format, which means that every other week, national league football will be played beneath the Naga Hills.
The club has asked for one more thing: that wherever it plays, Naga people living across India, students above all, come and fill the away end. Picture a small knot of young people from the hills on a cold night in Srinagar, scarves pulled from suitcases, singing for a team that only last season was playing in its state league.
GOING FIRST
On the evening of 30th October, all across Nagaland, people will gather around screens: in community halls, in living rooms, in shops with their shutters half down. On the village grounds outside, children will chase a ball into the dark until somebody calls them home. Behind them the hills will turn blue in the dusk, as they always do.
A hundred years ago, a Naga boy chased a pomelo across a mission playground because there was nothing else to kick and nowhere for the game to take him. When the game finally did take him somewhere, the road led away from home, to Guwahati, to Kolkata, to London.
The children on those grounds now have a road that runs the other way. It leads down out of the hills to Chümoukedima, to a stadium opened on T Ao’s birthday and to a club that plays in the Indian Football League in Nagaland’s name.
On 30th October the whole season begins with them. Nagaland waited 78 years for a place in the national league. Now it gets to go first.
(Photos contributed. NSF Martyrs’ Memorial Trophy champions and India vs France at 1948 Olympics)
