My footballing credentials are purely physiological: instinctive, ever-present. We Uzbeks have a superstition: when you sneeze, you must spell out your wish and it will come true. Although I’m seventy-two now, every time I sneeze I still, quite involuntarily, repeat the wish of my seventeen-year-old self: “I will play better than Pelé!” Alas, that spell never worked. My mother died when I was twelve, and as an orphan I was left in the care of my ailing grandmother—devout, ill, and immovable. Every attempt to negotiate even a sliver of time for footy was met with her favourite myth: that football had been invented by kafirs (non-believers) who once kicked around the severed head of a prophet. Which prophet it was, I never managed to discover, but my footballing career was reduced to a nostalgic sneeze.
In 1962, Pakhtakor, the team representing Uzbekistan in the Soviet Top League, was steadily climbing toward a sixth-place finish, behind Dinamo Tbilisi, Dynamo Kyiv, and, of course, the Moscow clubs. (The word “pakhtakor” means “cotton-picker,” and it was the only team the whole of Uzbekistan cared about.) At Pakhtakor’s stadium in Tashkent, a huge scoreboard displayed the results of every match, with tiny, brightly painted plywood footballers pinned according to their team’s position on the table. I still remember Pakhtakor’s jersey, the red one, before they adopted the navy-and-yellow kits they wear today. I used to think the color came from Gennadi Krasnitsky, the team’s biggest star, who—according to legend—once killed a goalkeeper with the force of his shot. “Krasny” means “red” in Russian, so that must be why, I told myself.
That summer, my mother was sent as a medical nurse to look after Kazakh shepherd families, and I too set off there for my separate summer holidays, to a forest alive with dragonflies and butterflies in the valley of the Keles River. Hidden in that forest was a Pioneer camp run by the Communist Party, and in its dusty little stadium, children were always playing football, raising clouds of ochre dust. It was there, among boys much older than me, that I first heard the names “Pello”—I later learned it was Pelé—and Garrincha. Brazil had won the World Cup in Chile that year, and the echo of that victory had reached this remote Kazakh village at the edge of the earth.
Then there was the sight of real Brazilians in the flesh the very next year, when their team, Piracicaba, playing in the second or third division, came to Tashkent for a friendly with Pakhtakor. Pakhtakor was struggling: our star, Berador Abduraimov, had either been drafted into the army or grown restless and left for Moscow, and Gennadi Krasnitsky too, for some unknown reason, wasn’t playing. When things go badly, it’s as if the full moon refuses to leave the sky.
To see the mythological Brazilians, we walked all the way to Pakhtakor Stadium from the outskirts of Tashkent, because on match days the trams and trolleybuses did not run. A great white river of people flowed toward the stadium. We joined them, licking ice cream or sucking rooster-shaped candy. The oldest of us was eleven; the rest were seven or eight. On match days, the fifty kopecks our parents gave us for tickets we would spend on pistachios, almonds, sweets, and balloons, then we’d begin thinking of ways to get inside. We were true masters of the craft. We knew where the holes in the stadium walls were, and which gatekeepers would wink and pretend not to see us. We had even divided them among ourselves: “Today we’ll go through the gate where my uncle is standing,” I would say, and when he looked away for a moment, we would slip one by one into the courtyard. On the other side, of course, stood the militia. They were supposed to stop us entering the bowl of the stadium—but we had tricks for that too. One of us would help the ice-cream seller, another would climb over a low wall, and another would squeeze through some clever little gap. That’s how we made our way inside to see Brazilian magicians, alive and in full action, trounce Pakhtakor 4-1.
Even back then, there was not much time for football. On top of my studies, I had to earn my bread through all kinds of temporary work: loading railway wagons with watermelons, onions, or cabbages; baking bread for other people’s celebrations. This wasn’t just my fate. In the 1960s and ’70s, Uzbek children were not encouraged by their families or elders to play football or any other games. From early childhood they were expected to work in the cotton fields or at home. As a result, the stars of Pakhtakor were predominantly Russians—Krasnitsky, Yuri Pshenichnikov, Oleg Motorin, Vladimir Fedorov—or Soviet Koreans like Mikhail An, or even Greeks like Vasilis Hatzipanagis, but only rarely native Uzbeks like Abduraimov or Tulyagan Isakov.
That was the era of stagnation. The USSR, under the leadership of an increasingly frail Brezhnev, felt like a swamp pulling people down into alcoholism, petty workplace theft, and general social apathy. Only football in the summer—and hockey in the winter—managed to bring the “Homo Sovieticus” back to life. So Pakhtakor was everything for us.
You can imagine the scale of the tragedy when the entire team died in an airplane collision over Dnipropetrovsk in the summer of 1979. The team’s funeral turned into a national mourning. Afterward, the team was rebuilt from scratch. One of the young reserve players promoted to the main squad was Marat Kabaev—father of Alina Kabaeva, Olympic champion in rhythmic gymnastics and, allegedly, the second wife of Vladimir Putin.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the dollar took over from Lenin, and commercial advertising quickly achieved what ideological slogans had failed to. Opportunistic Uzbeks discovered that football could serve as a cash cow, so a national league was created and local magnates poured funds into clubs, largely to launder their dirty money.
In 1994, Uzbekistan won the men’s football tournament at the Asian Games, a triumph that announced the country’s arrival on the continental stage. Twelve years later, the national team came agonizingly close to qualifying for the 2006 World Cup. They defeated Bahrain 1–0 in the first leg of the playoff, only for FIFA to order a replay because of a refereeing error. The rematch finished 1–1 and the second leg was scoreless, allowing Bahrain to advance on away goals and leaving Uzbekistan heartbreakingly eliminated. The episode remains one of the most painful moments in Uzbek football history, so much so that stand-up comedians openly mocked the state of the national game in its aftermath.
Uzbek authorities, many of them former Communist Party officials who had retained power under the new People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, eventually sensed football’s potential as a symbol of national reform and political legitimacy. In 2019, they adopted a ten-year plan to take the sport under state control, establish new football academies, and install a comprehensive system for scouting and developing talent. Private owners were replaced by state-affiliated sponsors like Uzbekneftegaz (a government-owned oil-and-gas company), Uzbekistan Railways, and national banks. The resulting success was used as a political instrument, as a showcase of supposed national progress.
There has, admittedly, been much to celebrate: the U20s won the 2023 Asian Cup, the U23 team reached the 2024 Paris Olympics, the U17s won the 2025 Asian Cup, and now the national team has qualified for a World Cup for the first time. Though many promising young Uzbek players leave the country for mid-tier leagues abroad, stars like Abdukodir Khusanov, Eldor Shomurodov, and Abbosbek Fayzullaev have become household names. The future looks bright.
In 1991, I was sent off—to use the footballing term—and banned from the country, as were all my books, because of my allegedly subversive activity as a journalist and writer. I know how treacherous and perfidious state control can be, and its over-centralization and political instrumentalization now applies to Uzbek football as well.
Still, I dream of soccer. Exiled from the home of my lifelong team, Pakhtakor, I’ve replaced it with my local north London club, Arsenal, a team that, incidentally, also wears red. Will I support the Uzbek national team at the World Cup? I truly don’t know. But when I sneeze, I may finally change my wish, to “Uzbekistan will be the champion.” Perhaps that will help.