Walk through the parks of Lahore on a Friday evening or the open spaces of Peshawar on a weekend morning and the evidence is clear: football is growing in Pakistan with a momentum that was not visible a decade ago.
The drivers are multiple. Widespread access to streaming services has connected millions of young Pakistanis to the Premier League, La Liga and Champions League. The global popularity of players like Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappé and Vinicius Júnior has created a new generation of engaged, knowledgeable fans who follow European football with genuine passion.
At the grassroots level, academies and community clubs are providing structured pathways for young players in a way that previous generations rarely had access to. The quality of coaching is improving and the infrastructure, while still developing, is slowly becoming more organised.
Pakistan will not produce a World Cup team overnight. But the trajectory of the sport domestically — in terms of participation, spectatorship and commercial interest — is clearly upward. The challenge for football administrators is to channel this energy into sustainable institutional development rather than allowing it to remain purely grassroots and informal.
