Comeback Season

In returning to a childhood love, Aneesha Labroo and Shayoni Nair built a league that allows women to make football their own.

- By GEETIKA SACHDEV

For many women, ending their association with sport is often not a conscious decision—it simply fades from their lives. School finishes, schedules get crowded, and the spaces that once made room for play disappear. Not because the love for the game dies, or the ability wanes, but because finding the time, the people, and the “permission” to keep playing becomes harder with age.

Entrepreneur Aneesha Labroo remembers that feeling clearly. Growing up, football was a constant, but when she moved back to Delhi after several years abroad, the game she loved felt oddly inaccessible. Around her, men her age were still showing up for weekend matches, still building their lives around sport. She tried slipping back in. “I joined a few games,” she recalls. “But playing with men is different. It’s louder and more aggressive.”

Shayoni Nair, the founder of Net Gala, a recreational sports community, had felt the same loss. Football had shaped her childhood—training camps, school tournaments, the discipline and joy of the sport. But adulthood came with an unspoken understanding that this chapter was over, folded away neatly as life moved on.

There’s serendipity in how Labroo and Nair’s paths crossed again. They had first met on a football field when they were 10. When they reconnected years later, sometime around 2017, the conversation wasn’t about ambition or building something new. It was about reclaiming something they thought they'd lost. “The desire was to start playing the game again, with more women,” says Nair.