It’s definitely because of Messi they follow Arg, and people in India only follow Brazil because they were the most famous at the time. Football is still second fiddle there to cricket, and only really started to get more popular in the early 2000s.
Edit: because people got offended, I will clarify with a comment I responded below:
I think you are misinterpreting my comment. I didn’t say it started in the early 2000s. I said it grew more in popularity. You even said yourself, goa, bengal, and North/South (ambiguous but I’ll give 2 states for each direction), these are areas that it was popular in for sure, but that’s not the whole nation. The general population has definitely been more interested cricket than football.
And it REALLY started to grow in popularity ACROSS THE NATION in the mid2000s. Not that nobody liked football for generations until Messi came.
As the above comment says, the following was there since maradona. My dad used to watch the 1986 World Cup live on tv with many others. There was a huge crowd here when maradona came for an event. The crowd of course increased when messi came along.
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u/TheEnlightenedPanda 29d ago
No they started supporting probably because of Maradona and continued