When a country invests in women’s football, results appear: Amelia Valverde
The Indian women’s national team arrives in Australia for the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup not as participants but as a side that qualified on merit, and stands one knockout result away from a historic first appearance at the FIFA Women’s World Cup. “When a country begins investing in women’s football and giving women the opportunity to play, results start appearing,” Indian women’s football team head coach Amelia Valverde tells The Bridge from Perth. “That is never a coincidence.” For decades, the World Cup in Indian football has belonged to a sentence that begins with someday. Now, for the first time, it belongs to a tournament in front of us. The team carrying that possibility is not the one with the longest professional structure or the largest budget, but the one that rebuilt itself after disappearing from the FIFA rankings in 2009, after years of inactivity, after generations that played without a system around them. A month of adaptation Valverde’s appointment in January was always going to be a race against time, a World Cup …
