Dugout Tales -- From ball-boy to team manager, meet Chinmoy, who refused to let go of football

Chinmoy Kalita was 10 years old when he entered the football pitch as an escort kid for NorthEast United FC. Twelve years later, the love for the game has brought him to the other side of the touchline.

For every footballer who makes it to the professional stage, there are countless others whose dreams end long before they get there. Some walk away from the game. Others find a different way to belong.

Chinmoy Kalita was 10 years old when he first saw grass on a proper football pitch. It was a cool October evening in 2014; the Indian Super League had just started. He walked out as an escort kid with NorthEast United.

Joan Capdevila, a 2010 World Cup winner, stood right beside him. Sachin Tendulkar, arguably India's greatest cricketer, stood in front as a co-owner of Kerala Blasters, and 29,500 fans cheered around him inside the Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium.

What caught his eye was something relatively trivial: grass.

"We had never seen such a professional pitch before. The academy where I played did not have grass. It was a muddy ground. For the first time, I saw a proper grass pitch at an ISL stadium. We would touch the grass and look at it. We really liked being on that ground," Chinmoy recalls.

And really spent time there, first as an escort boy, then as a ball boy, before joining the team's youth academy and making it to the reserves squad as a goalkeeper, alongside Gurmeet Singh. "Gurmeet was then the third-choice goalkeeper, and I was fourth," he says.

Unlike Gurmeet, who went on to win the league with Hyderabad FC in 2022 and two Durand Cup titles on his return to NorthEast United, Chinmoy could never turn pro.

"I would experience pain while playing, but I did not know what was happening," he says. For a child of 14, trying to make it into a professional league, the pain in the right knee felt like any other bruise -- rub it and move on. The truth, sadly, was that his knee never recuperated to be able to play competitive football.

The pandemic, followed by failed attempts to play through the pain, saw him end his playing career at 17. A harsher truth hit him. "My family's financial condition was not particularly good either. I had to look for a job," he says. But the sport, despite difficult conditions in his personal life, enamoured him.

"I wanted to remain in football," he says. Through NorthEast United's team manager then, Shahashad Muhammed, he applied to be the kit manager and, at the same time, started to prepare for an AFC license.

He worked as the Highlanders' kit manager for three seasons -- arranging the jerseys, ensuring kits were in order during practice and matches and at the same time, watching coaches teach. After all, he wanted to become one someday.

He learnt from Naushad Moosa, the current Under-23 India coach, Juan Pedro Benali, the head coach of NorthEast United, and passed his AFC-D and AFC-C licence examinations.

Four years later, he stands where Shahashad once did -- as the team manager, and has won two Durand Cup titles as part of the contingent. NorthEast United is still like the home he walked into when Chinmoy was a toddler. Gurmeet and Redeem Tlang are two of his best friends, who have seen it all.

"Recently, when we - Tlang, Gurmeet and Chinmoy -- were travelling back from Goa, we spoke about what a big circle it was. We had played together, they had continued playing, and I had moved into a different line of work," Chinmoy says, smiling.

Football has strange ways of keeping people in love with it. Chinmoy knows that more than most.

So does former Dempo SC forward Kanan Priolkar, whose own early retirement came after a knee injury forced him off the pitch. Before he returned to the game, he joined the India under-15 contingent as an assistant coach, finding a new way to contribute from the touchline.

Richard Hood's path was even more winding. The former Indian Bank player drifted away from football entirely, at one point working on the sets of Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited. But the pull of the game proved too strong. He eventually returned in a player development role for Bengaluru FC, the Tata Football Academy, and the All India Football Federation -- proof that distance from the game does not always mean leaving it behind.

Love for the game has always lured them back -- perhaps that's why football is called the 'beautiful game.'

"If football requires me to get up at six in the morning and work until midnight, I can do that," Chinmoy says. "But I have never thought about working outside football. I don't think I will ever be able to do that."

From legends like Fabio Cannavaro and Pep Guardiola to stars like Phil Foden and Trent Alexander-Arnold, the arc from ball boy to professional footballer is one of football's most satisfying narratives.

But what happens when the final door shuts? As it goes, another opens. For Chinmoy Kalita, that door led him right back to the pitch, just not in the way he once imagined. And for him, that is enough.