‘Real Kashmir Football Club’ Series Review: The Sport of Good Storytelling

When it comes to reviewing shows, binge-watching is the default mode of the job. It’s mostly a mad rush to finish all the preview episodes and start writing. There’s no time to be immersed in a universe long enough; the next title is always waiting. So you’re more wired to look for inventive themes and catchy in-points. It’s not often critics get to see a show as it should be seen — steadily, on a drip, one episode at a time, spread over a few days. I had this rare luxury with Real Kashmir Football Club and its eight episodes. Ideal as it sounds, this can go wrong, too; the choice to walk through a show brings with it the risk of losing rhythm and interest. But I found myself ‘waiting’ to watch Real Kashmir Football Club and voluntarily returning to it: during meals, after breaks, before sleeping, between films. Not out of suspense to know what happens next, but out of curiosity to know more. That’s the sign of a rooted and fundamentally sound series. Like a good host, it invites you in without gimmicks and touristy offers, lets you experience it on your own terms, transcends terms like “addictive,” and allows you to establish more of a lived-in relationship. It’s not a perfect bond, but it can be a satisfying one. And it’s kind of fitting for a story set in Kashmir, the one place that cannot be reduced to snap judgments and plain scrutiny.

Inspired by the true story of the two men who founded the first ever club from Jammu & Kashmir to compete in a top-flight Indian football league, RKFC unfolds like any solid underdog drama — the sport itself is the goal, and the life around it forms the expansive field between the goal-posts. The Kashmir in it is not a prop (like in, say, Songs of Paradise); it’s a living, breathing land of contradictions, beauty, biases, broken histories and spilled blood. Yet there’s a matter-of-factness and humanity in the way the series plays out: without fetishising the Valley, without resorting to partisan political stances, and without servicing the rest of India’s divisive perception. It’s not an easy tightrope walk in 2025, so the streaming platform deserves just as much credit for green-lighting a project that’s geopolitically expressive in an old-fashioned manner. There’s an Iranian-film vibe about it, too, especially in terms of how a game becomes a unifying force in a place where cultural identity is a privilege. The tackles and offside traps happen off the pitch between the locals who find a reckoning in pursuit of an escape: the managers, coaches, owners, players, their families, the unspoken resentments, and the yearning for a time when kicking was an act of enjoyment rather than a gesture of violence and oppression.

The first episode stages a classic sports-story moment. The two men, Sohail (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) and Shirish (Manav Kaul), call for tryouts in a ramshackle yard in Srinagar. They don’t know if anyone will show up, or if anyone cares at all. The sun is setting; the bibs lay untouched; the makeshift registration desk waits. Just as hope dwindles, young men and boys start to appear on foot and on bikes. Faces light up. There’s a nervous tension in the air. Once it gets dark, scooter beams double up as floodlights. (The feel-goodness of the scene brought to mind the underrated Ferrari Ki Sawaari, whose maker Rajesh Mapuskar is one of the directors of this show). It’s a familiar genre trope; the reason it feels more uplifting here is because by now we have sensed the stakes in a town where conflicts are entrenched, not spelt out. It’s more subtext than context. Perhaps it’s a script that has to be coy in this age of intolerance and censorship. But the lack of exposition — where the series expects the viewer to catch onto the not-so-hidden faultlines in the region — ensures that nothing is performative or social-message-esque.

It’s never explicitly mentioned that Sohail and Shirish belong to two sides of history. Sohail is a Muslim ex-journalist who has become disillusioned with the Kashmir he grew up in, while Shirish is a Pandit who has returned as a successful businessman. This ‘conflict’ is never milked; the markers of their identity are more subliminal. For instance, Shirish faces protests for his alcohol business from a hardliner youth outfit (“you call it protest, we call it war”). Sohail quits the newspaper when his boss asks him to push the protests and interview its radicalised leader instead of doing ‘secular’ stories about Muslims protecting a temple. Shirish is shown struggling to visit a childhood home because he is haunted by the traumatic memories of the exodus; his experience isn’t exploited to make a statement though, because it’s more of a human moment than a political one (interestingly, Manav Kaul recently played a Muslim officer living in a haunted Pandit home in Baramulla). Similarly, Sohail scolds a younger colleague for reporting on an extremist outfit and spreading their propaganda. These little details could’ve been twisted by a lesser show in many ways.

Both men here strive to capture Kashmir’s lost glory — a “Kashmiriyat” that has been customised by anyone with an agenda — through the idea of this humble football team. It’s a glory that belongs to both of them and neither of them. You can also tell that they’re figuring out their motives along the way; the goal posts keep shifting without sacrificing the integrity of the mission. Sohail starts out thinking it’ll be a worthy distraction for wayward Kashmiri youngsters looking for direction after the 2014 floods (and decades of social conditioning), but the ambition isn’t entirely selfless. It’s the kind of personal patriotism that doesn’t have to be flaunted to be proved. He meets a melancholic Shirish in the washroom of an investors’ conference; you don’t need their backstories to know what drives them into such an unlikely partnership.

Similarly, the other characters of the team exist as people who begin to see themselves as humans within the labels. A grieving coach juggling two jobs; a drifter who inches away from the extremist group to work as the team’s logistics manager; a talented striker weighed down by the responsibility of being the man of his house; a goalie who must defy his parents’ privilege and bigotry (“how can he play with those boys from downtown?”); a boy who keeps his football practice a secret from his cricket-loving dad; a Kashmiri superstar whose Ronaldo-sized ego clashes with his coach’s team-first mentality. And the wives of Sohail and Shirish, who struggle to keep the faith in their husbands’ shapeless project. What really works for the series is that the journey of the team through bureaucratic and technical hoops doesn’t overshadow the arc of its individuals. It’s clear that they may not have the skill yet, but it’s the perspective — of finally kicking a ball, not a grenade — that propels them forward. It’s an unfussy and busy narrative in that sense — no big peaks or lows, a constant hum like a locomotive stopping at several stations. In fact, the mandatory training montage doesn’t appear till the last episode. The conflicts, too, are low-key: domestic situations, skeptical locals, Delhi roadblocks, communal tensions. None of them hijack the story, and the focus remains on the plausibility of sport in a valley that’s overflowing with coping mechanisms.

The narrative dryness has its cons, however. The series loses a bit of momentum after the first four episodes, largely because the plot is more horizontal than vertical. The disharmony in the team, and particularly the rift between the star and the coach, becomes repetitive. Once a Scottish coach is hired, the no-nonsense-outsider vibe feels a little too staged. Many scenes are obviously designed to have him wonder and be transformed by their complex circumstances, almost as if he’s the coming-of-rage protagonist of a parallel storyline. In these portions, the series also struggles to reach the crescendo it should in terms of the actual sport — a climactic football match against Jammu in a cantonment stadium doesn’t carry the dramatic flair that it should. It’s not so much the on-field action (most of the choreography and cutting is convincing, if not professional enough), but the inability to punctuate the emotions of a sequence. The restraint of the themes bleed the DNA of the sports genre. Every member gets a resolution moment, but there’s no real release. Even a cute team-building montage — where everyone turns the pitch into an overnight wedding venue for one of the guys — doesn’t land the way it’s supposed to.

Having said that, I like that Real Kashmir Football Club only explores the bottom-to-top construction of the club — up until the moment they feel real. There’s never a sense that they will go on to break stereotypes, perform minor miracles and supply the identity of Indian football. It resists the sexier parts of such stories: the big wins, the tournaments, the coming-together of skillsets. It helps that the cast is efficient. Manav Kaul resorts to SRK-coded expressions in the heavier scenes, but his character is perhaps the most rewarding one; at no point does Shirish feel like the kind of hero whose victory is “owning” a Muslim-majority team. There’s no bitterness, and no antagonisation of locals to amplify his nobility. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub does empathy and moral spine better than most Hindi film actors, and it shows in characters like Sohail. Sohail’s sense of dwindling masculinity (as a husband and father) challenges his status as a disillusioned Kashmiri Muslim; he’s not your typical change-the-world patriot, because there’s nothing aspirational about his grit. Football is his religion, but he seems to be on a quest to conquer his own cynicism; he is under no illusion about a country that has invisibilised the plurality of Kashmir.

Of the supporting performances, Mu’azzam Bhat nails the deadpan ambiguity of the coach who finds his calling; he has such a distinct face that one can almost see the toll, scars and porous borders of Kashmir on it. That’s the thing about watching a show like this at a time like this. It’s not just the unwitting nod to what football — far from India’s most popular or sustainable sport — means in an era where even its topmost league has become financially untenable. It draws a parallel to how Kashmir, much like Indian football, is mired at the intersection between fantasy and faith. After all, the “Real” in Real Kashmir FC is both a wing and a prayer. It’s at once a plea for recognition and a mark of authenticity.