IMF, Pakistan and Football: When a National Budget Reaches the Pitch

The flight carrying the International Monetary Fund's review mission touched down in Islamabad in the morning, before the city had a chance to heat up. Over the following three days, the people sitting in the finance ministry's meeting rooms would turn the pages of two files bearing two acronyms: EFF and RSF. They would set those files against revenue targets, electricity tariffs, gas prices, fuel subsidies, public debt. In the end, they would sign or not sign a staff-level agreement. Nobody in that room brought football boots.

Roughly a thousand kilometres away, on the outskirts of Karachi, a group of young men still plays football at five in the afternoon. The pitch has no grass, only packed earth worn into darker streaks. There are no floodlights, so the match has to end before the light goes, which in winter means they get barely seventy minutes. The ball rolls unevenly, and whoever receives it has to guess the trajectory rather than trust it.

I put those two scenes side by side because they belong to the same story. We habitually separate macroeconomics from sport, treating them as two different worlds: one of targets that can bring down a government, one a game for children. But in countries that live on international financing programmes, both worlds draw from the same wallet. And when that wallet is tightened, the first thing to disappear is rarely defence, and rarely basic education. The first thing to disappear is the light above a pitch.

Context: two acronyms and a budget line nobody reads aloud

To understand how a meeting in Islamabad reaches a dirt pitch in Karachi, some basic concepts need spelling out, because I know that many sports readers — including some who look highly informed — skim past them without truly grasping them.

EFF stands for Extended Fund Facility. It is the IMF's medium-term lending instrument, designed for countries with prolonged balance-of-payments problems: more imports than exports, more maturing debt than foreign reserves, over a long stretch rather than a single short shock. RSF stands for Resilience and Sustainability Facility, tied to climate-adaptation spending and institutional strengthening. Article IV is the periodic economic health check the IMF runs with every member, rich or poor. A Staff-Level Agreement is the preliminary deal between the mission and the host government, still subject to board approval before it becomes real money.

According to Business Recorder's summary, this mission arrived to review the programmes above, and among the figures mentioned were a USD 1 billion disbursement, a USD 200 million tranche from the climate facility, and an overall financing structure reaching USD 4.8 billion. Bilal Azhar Kayani, Minister of State for Finance, was among the figures appearing in the discussions. For a finance reader, this is routine copy. For me, it is a weather signal.

Because these programmes are never only about money. They are about priority order. An EFF comes with commitments: raise revenue or broaden the tax base, cut energy subsidies, restrain current spending, cap the deficit. None of those commitments automatically touches football. No IMF clause says close a training ground. But when every line of expenditure is examined under the same magnifying glass, the line with no one to defend it gets struck out.

And football in most developing countries has no one defending it in the budget room.

What actually happens to a football ecosystem when the budget is squeezed

I once sat for a long time over the accounts of a small national federation, trying to work out which revenue stream was the fatal one — the one whose loss would collapse the whole system within eighteen months. The answer was almost always the same, and it surprised me the first time: the most fragile stream is never the international grant. It is the domestic counterpart funding.

FIFA's funding mechanism, known as FIFA Forward, runs on a four-year cycle and transfers money to every member association, including the smallest. Continental bodies such as the AFC run their own programmes. Those sums are small next to a national budget, but they are stable and predictable. The problem lies in the conditions attached: to receive the money, a federation usually has to show it has pitches, staff, a league system, operating capacity. That means a domestic share has to exist, funded by the state or by local private capital.

When the national budget is squeezed, that domestic share vanishes first. The international money stays put, sitting in an account, waiting for a condition that will never be met. I have seen facilities approved year after year without a single brick laid, because the thirty per cent counterpart nobody wanted to sign off on never came.

Pakistan is a case worth reading closely, not because it is unusually bad, but because it is unusually clear.

Pakistani football has a history interrupted by internal federation politics. FIFA suspended the Pakistan Football Federation's membership twice in the past decade, each time over third-party interference, and each suspension froze every transfer, every entry, every hosting right. After each one, FIFA appointed a normalisation committee to run things temporarily. A normalisation committee can rewrite a constitution. It cannot rewrite a generation of players who passed through the age of eighteen while the league system did not exist.

Then came the 2026 World Cup qualifiers. Pakistan's men's national team advanced past a World Cup qualifying round for the first time in its history, a milestone most international media gave a single line. I watched that match on a flickering stream, the stands were not full, and what stayed with me was not a passage of play. It was the moment the players stood still after the final whistle, nobody running, nobody shouting, just looking at each other like people who had found something they thought they had lost.

Then they entered the second round, met opponents from another tier, and lost. There was nothing surprising about that. What was surprising was that they were there at all.

The distance between those two facts — a national team producing a historic milestone, and a federation still unable to run a stable league for its under-19s — is the distance international financing programmes cannot measure.

The problem is not the amount, it is the time structure

This is where I want to spend the most words, because it is the hardest part to see and the part that decides everything.

A typical EFF runs three years, extendable to four. A professional player development cycle, measured from the moment a twelve-year-old enters a decent academy to the moment he can play at senior international level, runs eight to ten years. A football generation — meaning a group of players deep enough to give a national team an identity — takes twelve to fifteen years.

Those numbers do not match. And they fail to match in a very specific way: the three-year cycle can always prove it completed its task, while the fifteen-year cycle is always judged to have produced no results. When a government has to choose between these two kinds of spending, the choice almost always tilts toward whatever can be reported. Football cannot report in three years. It can only report in a generation.

I first noticed this while working with a dataset on countries that had received large-scale football development support across two decades. One pattern made me stop and read it three times. The countries that increased football spending most aggressively in the early phase tended to fall behind in the later phase — not because they spent wrongly, but because they spent on what could be seen: stadiums, training centres, foreign coaching contracts. Those things need something else to sustain them — a domestic league with paying spectators, a layer of grassroots coaches paid a living wage, schools for children aged ten to fifteen — and nobody funds that, because it does not photograph well.

Based on my experience watching matches, including in leagues whose commentary language I do not speak, I have drawn one simple observation: the quality of a football ecosystem lives on the third tier, not the first. The first tier is the national team. The second is the domestic league. The third is school and grassroots football. The third tier is the only one that almost never appears in any financing negotiation, and the only one whose disappearance is discovered ten years later.

In Pakistan, the third tier was frozen in the literal sense during the years the federation was suspended. No national youth competition. No call-up lists. Nothing for a fourteen-year-old in Quetta or Peshawar to aim at.

There is one name I always think of when writing about this: Zesh Rehman, of Pakistani heritage, who played in the Premier League for Fulham, later returned to wear the national shirt and went on to coach. He is proof that Pakistani players do not lack talent. He is also proof that the pathway, across two decades, produced essentially one person who walked it. When a football nation produces one such person in twenty years, the problem was never the people.

The blind spot: too much money and too little money fail in the same way

Here I have to tell another story, one most readers will find more familiar.

Across the same decade in which public budgets were squeezed in many countries, another region poured unprecedented sums into football. The Saudi Pro League signed a wave of stars past their peak on contracts European football could not or would not match. Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Neymar — those names need no explanation. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund also bought a Premier League club, Newcastle United.

The default reaction in the football public is anxiety about financial imbalance. I understand that reaction, but I think it asks the wrong question. The problem with an enormous flow of money into a football economy is not that it is large. The problem is what it goes looking for.

When you bring in a thirty-eight-year-old player, you are not buying a player. You are buying a poster. You are buying a social media post, a crowded unveiling, a short video cut twelve ways and broadcast across twelve countries, a reason for people to book a flight to a city they had never considered. That is an entirely rational strategy. It is simply not a football strategy.

And here is the part that convinces me these two stories are one: both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia struggle at the same tier. Both are trying to buy the first tier. One buys by spending far too little and running out of patience. The other buys by spending far too much and also running out of patience. What neither can buy is time at the third tier — where there are no cameras, no press conferences, no disbursement recorded in any minutes.

Football's collective memory has one very specific blind spot: it binds money tightly to development. See a big transfer and the reflex is to believe that football nation is rising. See a poor federation and the reflex is to believe it stands still for lack of money. Both reflexes skip the only question that matters: which tier is the money entering, and how many years is it designed to last.

There is one word in the name of the climate facility I mentioned earlier that keeps me thinking: sustainability. It is also the word football uses for clubs that live on owner money. One word, two industries, and in both it is being misused.

A woman in Lahore, and the question nobody asks in the meeting room

I will tell a story I have never told in full.

A few years ago, while making a documentary about stadiums during the period when sport was frozen, I interviewed more than three hundred people across twelve countries online. One was a woman in Lahore. She had been on the organising committee of a provincial women's football competition. It survived four seasons. In the fifth there was no money to rent pitches, so teams had to borrow school grounds, and by the sixth season no team registered at all.

She told me one detail I still remember: when the budget was cut, the first things to go were always pitch rental and transport. Not prize money, not kit. Transport. Because there is nothing to make a fifteen-year-old girl walk twenty kilometres to a pitch if nobody pays for the ride.

Women's football in Pakistan has had real advances, with a national team appearing in regional competitions, with names like Hajra Khan, who captained the side. But those advances were built on ground that loses a layer every time the budget is squeezed.

I have been told that women do not understand football, and it took me years to understand that the sentence is not wrong in the way people think. It simply describes a different truth: people do not want women to understand football, because those who understand football tend to ask questions that are very hard to answer. Like the question the woman in Lahore asked me, and which I have never been able to answer: if a women's football league dies for want of bus fare, which report on earth will record that death?

An empty pitch turns out to have its own sound, the sound of missing. It is not loud. It has no reporters. It is simply that nobody plays there at five in the afternoon any more.

Reading the Islamabad review again, from outside the touchline

Back to the meeting room.

When the mission leaves, the outcome may be a staff-level agreement, meaning everything still waits on the board, meaning more meetings in the coming weeks, more numbers adjusted, more commitment lines added or struck. For financial markets this is an ordinary sequence. Bond prices will tick, the currency will react, a few analysts will update forecasts.

For Pakistani football, this is an event that may leave nothing behind, or may leave a great deal, with no way to know in advance.

I have no data proving that an EFF harms a country's football. Nobody has that data. This kind of correlation sits outside every dataset, because nobody counts the children who stopped playing after a subsidy was cut. We count goals, passes, the kilometres a player runs in a match. We do not count what did not happen.

That is why I have written this piece at a deliberately uncomfortable pace. I have no data finding to put on the table. I have only two images placed side by side: an air-conditioned meeting room in Islamabad, and a dirt pitch in Karachi with no lights. Between them lies the entire question of what a country decides matters, and where that decision gets recorded.

A coach once told me something I have carried for years: football never dies suddenly, it simply stops being born. When an academy closes, you see no consequence for three years. In year four, the under-17s are short of players. In year six, the under-20s are short. In year nine, the national team is missing a generation. By then nobody remembers the academy existed, and nobody can trace the cause.

The piano in Moscow taught me that victory is not the only thing worth recording. I wrote that line in 2026, and every year it feels more true. What we record determines what we remember. Football may be the most heavily documented industry in entertainment, and also the one that leaves out the most.

What I keep thinking about now

Before they are a contract, before they are a line on a balance sheet, before they are a thirty per cent counterpart nobody signs off on, they are children carrying a dream while looking for home. And a child's football home is not a country. It is a surface.

If there is one thing I want to put back to my readers, it is the question of what we choose to measure. A financing programme can be measured by disbursement rates, by the deficit, by the number of conditions met on schedule. A football ecosystem cannot be measured that way. It can only be measured by the one thing that appears in no minutes at all: how many children are still playing at fourteen.

Perhaps in a few years Pakistan will clear another qualifying round, and the world will give them a line again. Perhaps not. Either way, the afternoon in Karachi will still begin at five, and the match will still end before the light goes.