New Delhi: From Monday to Friday, M Venkateswaran works as a senior product manager at Walmart Global Tech, but weekends are now about an American dream he says he’d never thought possible.
On a July afternoon, he stands outside the FIFA Fan Fest in Kansas City, steering an endless queue of fans in painted faces and national jerseys. Families take photos, kids run around in replica kits, and questions keep coming about directions to the merchandise store or restrooms. With a walkie-talkie in hand and his FIFA-issued badge clipped to his T-shirt, he keeps them all moving. For six weeks this summer, he is a World Cup volunteer, running crowd flow at one of 16 host-city fan zones across the US, Mexico and Canada.
From product managers to data scientists, Indian-origin residents in the US are standing up as volunteers and getting counted for a sport in which India barely registers as a global competitor. They are directing crowds, checking for fake tickets and unofficial merchandise, and helping fans navigate stadiums and FIFA viewing zones. India has no team on the pitch, but this is their way of getting into the action and finding a whole new way to belong.
Driving from his home in Bentonville, Arkansas, to Kansas City for his first shift, Venkateswaran stopped for fuel. A stranger there struck up a conversation about the World Cup. He was headed to the same Fan Fest.
“That caught me completely off guard,” Venkateswaran said. “I was a hundred miles away from the event and already making connections because of it. It hit me that this thing was bigger than anything else in the world right now. The World Cup energy was everywhere.”
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‘My 12-year-old self wouldn’t believe it’
When Venkateswaran reached the staff entrance at the Fan Fest by the World War I Memorial in Kansas City and pulled on the FIFA volunteer uniform for the first time, he had to take a moment to let it sink in.
“Standing there with the ID card around my neck, about to walk into my first shift, I just thought, ‘This is really happening,'” he said.
Growing up in Kolkata, Venkateswaran watched the Football World Cup on a television screen, usually past his bedtime. He fell in love with the game during the 2002 final between Brazil and Germany.
“I did not support any team that day. I was just captivated by the spectacle of it all,” he said. “That 12-year-old would have laughed off any suggestion he’d end up inside a stadium himself one day … he wouldn’t have believed it, not for a second.”
Five years ago, his career brought him to Bentonville, about a three-hour drive from Kansas City—one of the 16 World Cup host cities.
“How often does the biggest event in the world come to your doorstep?” he asked. Determined to be part of it, he dived into the time-consuming application process, starting in August last year. After in-person interviews in November, the confirmation email finally dropped in his inbox in February this year.
“It was a relief,” he said, adding that his family in Kolkata was surprised. “For them it was like watching something they had always seen in me finally come to fruition. The love for football.”
For the past few weekends, he’s been driving to the Fan Fest, working his shift, and then spending the night at the homes of local residents who have opened their doors to volunteers.
“It’s something I have never seen before. Strangers becoming hosts and friends within hours,” he added.
What has also stayed with him is what happens after the crowds leave. At the end of the day, volunteers put the stalls and barricades back in place so that everything is ready before fans return the next morning.
“That’s the part nobody sees,” he said.
But the most heartwarming story for him came from Lawrence, Kansas, where the Algerian national team set up its base camp. He heard that the town celebrated the team’s victories “as if the team were their own”, and that the University of Kansas Marching Jayhawks had performed the Algerian national anthem before one of the team’s open training sessions.
“I wasn’t there for that moment, but even hearing about it gave me goosebumps,” he said. “A college marching band in the middle of Kansas, playing the anthem of a North African country, for a team and fans who travelled thousands of miles to be there. That’s the World Cup at its best. This is football.”
A second chance—20 yrs later
In 2006, Soumyajit Paul came within breathing distance of the World Cup. He was among the final 10 candidates shortlisted from India to become an official FIFA ball boy in Germany, but missed the final cut.
Two decades later, the 34-year-old senior data scientist, who has lived in the US for a decade, has got his chance to make that old dream come true.
Now living in Seattle, Paul was one of just 700 volunteers selected from a pool of 30,000 applicants to work the matches at his local venue.
He is working in “brand protection”— patrolling stadium concourses for counterfeit tickets, unauthorised vendors and ambush marketing. The job means walking for hours and making sure rival brands do not advertise near official FIFA sponsors.
His favourite memory so far came on the very first day of the tournament. A child on the metro kept looking at his volunteer uniform.
“He was perhaps wondering if he wants to be a volunteer someday,” Paul said. “That incident took me straight back to my own teenage dream of being part of a FIFA World Cup.”
His first assignment was during the Belgium-Egypt match.
“I felt extremely proud, finally being part of this great event,” he said.
Paul’s father, brother, and father-in-law are flying to Dallas on 13 July for the semifinal. It is the only match in the tournament he will watch as a fan rather than as a volunteer.
‘One big family for a while’
Rishu Saxena wasn’t even a diehard football fan. A product manager who has lived in the US for over five years, she had never watched an entire World Cup match from start to finish before this edition.
“I have always been a fan of the big names, and not someone who tracked a tournament match by match,” she said.
What drove her to apply as a volunteer was the idea of an event bringing strangers from around the world together, and wanting to be part of the machinery making it happen.
She beat long odds to get there; FIFA received over 1.1 million applications worldwide for roughly 50,000 tournament volunteer spots. When her email came through, she had to read it twice.
“I was shocked and then immediately just so happy,” she said.
The first time she felt she was truly part of the tournament came on her way to a shift. When she first stepped out in her uniform, several strangers speaking different languages started stopping her for directions, trusting her simply because of what she was wearing.
When it ends, she says, what she’ll miss most is the atmosphere of the entire World Cup.
“It’s about the celebrations and the hustle and how we all became one big family for a little while,” she said.
A family experience
Viren Razdan’s earliest World Cup memory goes back to the 2006 final in Germany: Zidane’s headbutt, Italy winning on penalties, and watching with his father and cousins on the same sofa while his mother kept asking them to turn the volume down.
“We didn’t lower the volume that night,” said the 29-year-old product manager, who now lives in New York. Italy lifted the trophy, but he became a France fanatic.
“That night, I went to bed feeling robbed. You don’t become a fan when your team wins. You become a fan when they lose, and it still hurts the next morning,” he said.
When the confirmation email that he’d been selected as a volunteer landed, he called his father right away.
“The word spread through the extended family even before I could cut the call. Just like another Indian household,” he laughed.
Ever since then, his volunteering gig has become a family experience.
One of the most overwhelming moments for him was when a goal was scored in one of the matches. The stadium erupted around him.
“Immediately, I called my parents again. I just said, ‘Yaar, Papa, you won’t believe what I just saw and felt,’” he said, adding that the call lasted for 20 minutes.
The same sense of disbelief returned when he saw his name printed on a credential and was allowed to walk through the staff entrance.
“I was going somewhere that isn’t for everyone,” he said. “That was something special.”
He now talks to his parents after nearly every shift. They ask which teams played, what the crowd was like, and what he actually did that day. One photo of him in uniform even ended up as his father’s WhatsApp display picture—something Razdan found out about two days later through a cousin.
“That’s when I knew it had gone properly out of control in my home,” he said.
‘All the people were so nice to me’
Seattle resident Alif Nasrin heard about the volunteer programme from her husband and decided to apply on a whim.
“Volunteering wasn’t a dream; it was situational,” the 32-year-old supply chain manager said. But when she was selected, she immediately told her family in West Bengal.
As a child in Santiniketan, she’d watch matches with her father on their small box television, snacks in hand. It was like another festival. Whichever team he supported, she supported too, which meant she grew up rooting for Germany.
But nothing prepared her for being bang in the middle of the World Cup.
“The entire tournament feels larger than life,” she said. “The chants, the visuals, the fans all ring in my ears all the time,” she said. It doesn’t hurt that the perks from FIFA include goodies like mementoes, t-shirts, shoes, and even deodorant.
Nasrin tries to give back in her own way. One fond moment was of a day when she was pinning small flags onto fans’ hats.
“Instead of moving people through quickly, I slowed down, giving each person more time than the task required. And, all of the people were so nice to me; their behaviour, their calmness, everything. It has stayed with me,” she said.
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A shared bond & sense of loss
When Indian volunteers cross paths, the connection is immediate, according to Saxena.
“It’s like we already know each other, even if we just met,” she said.
For Venkateswaran, that moment arrived over lunch in the volunteer tent.
“You don’t need to explain the backstory, they just get it,” he said.
Often, those conversations turn toward the pitch, where India’s total absence brings a sense of longing and regret into the mix.
“You’re surrounded by fans who are there for their country, and you feel that,” said Razdan. “It’s a little bittersweet if I’m honest. But what can you do? You just hope that someday it’s different.”
Paul too rues the gap between India’s population and its footballing footprint.
“Look at Cape Verde, the underdog country. It has only 5 lakh people; my hometown Howrah itself has 16 lakh people,” he said. He also pointed to Japan’s decades-long, deliberate rebuild of its footballing system as the kind of undertaking India has never attempted.
“It’s a sad state of affairs not to see India on this global stage,” he added.
For now, India’s most visible presence at the tournament is these volunteers—Venkateswaran corralling crowds in Kansas City every weekend, Paul patrolling the concourse in Seattle, and Nasrin taking her time with every fan she meets.
Saxena, meanwhile, is still holding out hope.
“I genuinely believe India will get there one day,” she said. “I want to be able to say I stood inside a World Cup stadium long before that happened.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)