Team IFSA was received on 28 July 2026 at the Defence Wing of the Embassy of India in Paris by Brigadier General Veeresh Thapar, Defence, Military and Naval Attaché. Our Founder and President, Rohit Sharma, and our Football Project Coordinator, Joe Paul Bence, went in with seven projects to place before him.
The seven: the Indo-French Football Tournament, heading to Indian soil this autumn; #SundayOnCycle, bringing India’s Fit India movement to the streets of Paris; a basketball pathway with the Ligue Nationale de Basket, under a signed letter of intent; student-athlete routes with LOSC Lille and the Université de Lille — the degree and the game, not one or the other; para-sport cooperation with INSEP and the Paralympic Committee of India; a Durand Cup training pathway; and the UNESCO “Fit for Life” pilot in India.
And yet most of the hour was not about competitions at all. It was about people.
The Indian community in France is large, young and quietly athletic. Students arrive for a master’s; young professionals for a posting; families have been here twenty years. Almost all of them played something at home — football on a school ground, cricket in a street, badminton at a club. Almost all of them stopped, and not for lack of desire. There was nobody to play with, and nobody had built the door.
That conversation reframed the afternoon. For the Indian community here, it means the next thing we build in Paris will be built for you, and shaped by you. For our French partners, it means this bridge now has both ends in view rather than one. And for our counterparts in India, it means Paris is part of the conversation rather than a postscript to it.
One line from the meeting stayed with us: in sport, as in service, you are judged on what you deliver — not on what you announce. Fair enough. Our thanks to the Defence Wing for the time and the counsel; the work now is to earn the sentence.
And so one request. If you are an Indian student, athlete, coach or sports professional living in France — or you know someone who is — we would like to hear from you. Not for a database, but because everything we build here is built for you, and we would rather be told what you need than guess at it. Write to us at info@indofrenchsport.com. The community is already here; it has simply never been introduced to itself.
