Pakistan football's problem is the management, not the players

A midfielder who never stopped playing

The episode opens with Muzamil admitting he has been trying to book Faizan Sameer for a long time, finally found the nerve to ask on Instagram, and is glad it worked. The opening is standard — high school, what came next — but the answer immediately tells you where the rest of the conversation is going.

Faizan boarded at Cadet College Hasan Abdal, did his bachelor’s in human resources at Bahria University, and a master’s in project management at SZABIST. The thread that runs underneath all of that is football. He cannot remember when he started playing or following the game. The first World Cup he watched was 2002 — either Brazil or France lifted it, he says, and you can tell which kind of fan he is from the fact that he is not sure. At Cadet College he was the kid pulling other boys off the cricket pitch to play football instead. He played midfield. He has never really stopped.

That continuity matters because everything Faizan does now — the corporate role, the coaching, the UEFA course he is about to fly out for — sits on top of a single decision he made as a teenager: that football was the thing.

The IELL job at seventeen, and the slide into corporate

Before football became a job, Faizan was already working. At seventeen he picked up his first real role during the early days of Pakistan’s Article 19A right-to-information rollout, working with UNDP on the implementation side. From there he moved into a head start school in Islamabad — F-6/2 campus — as an HR admin coordinator who also coached football on the side.

That dual-track pattern is the through line of his career. Wherever he has worked, football has been threaded into the job description, sometimes formally and sometimes by sheer force of his showing up to coach after hours. Muzamil notes it back to him without prompting: every time an opening for football appeared anywhere in his life, Faizan took it.

Inside 18, and the structure that actually works

The conversation then turns to 18, the company where Faizan now runs football. He is careful to frame it correctly. 18 is not a football club. It is a corporate CSR initiative — the personal project of CEO Tariq Hamdi — that has been licensed to the company. The mandate is to engage youth through sport, and although they have a polo team in Lahore and Noorena Shams is on board on the squash side, football is the core.

The mechanism is concrete. 18 carries roughly seventeen or eighteen players, almost all of them early-stage university students who want to pursue football seriously. The company pays for their degrees. Faizan says five players have had their degrees fully funded by 18, two players have been sent abroad on sports scholarships, and the programme has been running for around three and a half to four years. He has been managing it for two and a half. “I feel very lucky to be a part of it,” he says.

Muzamil presses on the obvious question: why is this not the norm? Why does a single company’s CSR programme look more functional than the national pipeline?

”The issue is not with the players. The issue is with the management.”

Faizan’s answer is the cleanest line in the episode. “The issue is not with the players. The issue is with the management.” He repeats variations of it throughout the section that follows. Pakistan, he explains, is in the middle of a power struggle between two groups inside the football federation that has been going on for years. A disputed takeover of the football house in Lahore brought FIFA in. FIFA cannot tolerate a federation that is not properly constituted — just as you cannot run cricket outside the ICC, you cannot run football outside FIFA without becoming a private entity.

The result was a ban, then a suspension. FIFA dispatched a normalisation committee to resolve the dispute. The first committee got pulled into local politics. A second normalisation committee followed. Meanwhile the alleged illegal takeover of the football house compounded the issue. Faizan’s reading is direct: this is, top to bottom, a management failure.

Muzamil pushes the natural follow-up. If football is so commercially irrelevant in Pakistan, why is anyone even fighting over the federation? Faizan corrects him on the first premise. FIFA funding is real money. The federation receives serious funding because FIFA underwrites foundations and infrastructure in member countries. Beyond the money, he says, it is a passion-and-prestige play — and he points out, almost as an aside, that India hosted the FIFA Under-17 World Cup the year before last. That is the level of organisation the system is theoretically capable of, in this region.

Global Soccer Ventures, and the FIFA recognition problem

Later in the discussion, Faizan turns to what he calls the most exciting thing happening in Pakistan football right now: Global Soccer Ventures, or GSV. He is genuinely energised describing it. GSV is a private league built around five or six city teams. It is bringing in European clubs — tactical training staff, coaching teams — to train Pakistani players on the ground, and it has scouting plans to send promising players abroad for trials.

There is one fatal complication. GSV has its NOC from the wrong group. The faction inside the federation that signed off on it is not the one FIFA currently recognises. Until that changes, GSV is technically a private league. Its results will not count. Its players’ stats will not count. The winning team will not be sent to the AFC Champions League, where in normal circumstances the top one or two teams from each Asian country’s domestic league go to compete.

Faizan walks Muzamil through the pyramid analogy. In England, the Premier League is the top, and the EFL sits below it as the second division. Top teams from EFL get promoted. Bottom teams from the Premier League get relegated. A federation can only license one top-division league at a time — that is what a licence means. So GSV and the existing Pakistan Premier League cannot both be recognised. One has to win.

KRL, PIA, and the missing city brand

Muzamil takes the argument somewhere Faizan clearly has not heard framed this way before. The existing Premier League, he says, has a fundamental branding problem. The top teams are departmental — KRL, PIA, Pakistan Steel. Nobody outside the institution has a reason to care about them as football clubs. Muzamil concedes he respects them as institutions of the state but as football brands they do nothing for him.

Faizan partially defends them — corporate-sponsored top-division clubs exist in other countries too — but Muzamil clarifies he is making a branding point, not an ownership one. “Manchester United has a sponsor on the shirt,” he says. “Everyone knows it. That doesn’t make Manchester United a sponsor brand.” The problem is not that KRL sponsors a football team. The problem is that nobody has built a Karachi football identity, or a Lahore one, or an Islamabad one, that fans can fight over.

This is exactly the gap GSV is trying to close. Faizan confirms it. The GSV model is C-league, B-league, A-league, with promotion and relegation at every step, and the top tier — assuming federation recognition — would be city-branded. “If our top-level issues get fixed,” he says, “the league system fixes itself automatically. Participation in SAF games, AFC Cup, all of it starts coming back.”

He drops in a story that lands hard. The reason Kaleemullah landed his US contract was not a scout. It was a foreign coach who had trained Pakistan’s national team, gone back home after his contract ended, and personally recommended Kaleemullah and Adil to people he knew. The pipeline is informal because the formal pipeline is broken.

The UEFA course, and ten months of football management

Faizan is about to fly out for a certification in football management offered by the UEFA Academy. UEFA, he explains carefully, is the European federation that runs club competitions — the Champions League, the Europa League — and its academy offers courses for people working inside football organisations. The certification is eight to ten modules, ten months long, hybrid format because of COVID, with in-person seminars in three different countries at three different points in the programme.

“It’s not just a coaching course,” he tells Muzamil. It is about how football management actually works at a country level. Muzamil’s read on it is unsentimental: in twenty years, he says, he expects Faizan to be heading the entire federation, and the rest of the country will pretend they always saw it coming.

ATV, conventional media collapsing, and an acting role he barely understood

The conversation pivots away from football. Before his wedding, Faizan was already working in media — specifically at ATV, one of only two terrestrial-antenna channels in Pakistan alongside PTV. He started as an HR coordinator. He left as HR manager.

He uses the window to make a sharper point. He watched the collapse of conventional electronic media happen in real time. In the early days he could close five or six million rupees of business from a single client in a month. By the end, he was relieved to do one million in a full month. He blames two things: the rise of digital, and the spending pattern of the previous government. He explains in detail how government ad rates differed by channel — Geo at three-and-a-half lakh per minute, ARY at three lakh, Samaa at two-and-a-half — and how that revenue base evaporated.

He has also hosted a live show on ATV called Boom On Live, and acted in a drama that aired on Bareeya’s channel. He is honest about the acting. “Maybe acting is not my thing,” he says. “Aaliyah is natural with it. I’m not.” It taught him something useful regardless: a single shot can take hours, and your only job for those hours is to stand exactly where you were told to stand.

Public marriage, the dark side, and Aaliyah as partner

Muzamil opens the longest section of the episode with a question he clearly thinks about himself. Being a public couple looks easy from the outside — photos, brand work, TikToks — but there is a cost. The work bleeds into the relationship. The audience bleeds into private life. How are the two of you actually managing it?

Faizan’s answer is calm. He says they are siller and goofier in private than they are on camera, and that the way they resolve disagreements is to go quiet in the moment — pull the issue out of the picture for the time being — and come back to it logically later. He admits he was anxious early on about how much of their life they were putting out there. Then a stranger messaged Aaliyah and told her that her Instagram stories were her “me time” at the end of a long day. “I have no right to take that away from her,” he says.

He brings up something that someone asked him on another podcast: do you not feel that you became famous because of your wife? His answer is sharp. “Becoming famous shouldn’t be a thing in the first place. Being successful is a thing.” Muzamil takes the cue and runs with it. He talks about working at a data consulting firm while his wife launched an e-commerce business, being proud of her, watching society treat her success as an oddity. “In our society,” he says, “the concept of women-first success doesn’t exist.” Faizan agrees, and is direct about the asymmetry: “I have no problem with what she does. I didn’t do any of this to become famous either.”

Hate, and the thing Aaliyah said that he carried with him

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks the question that everyone with a public profile eventually faces. Did the hate ever land? Faizan admits that early on it landed hard, and at one point he told Aaliyah he wanted to stop. She told him something he has held onto since. He paraphrases it: “Look — you, me, we didn’t start this work because of people. We didn’t start it for them.” That was the line that kept him going.

Muzamil closes the episode the way he often does — direct, generous, without any softening. He says Faizan is part of a power couple, that the media side will keep working because Aaliyah is a superstar and Faizan brings the operational depth, and that on the football side he is rooting for him. “I’m hoping you’re a beacon of light for this space, for this industry, and for the nation,” he says. “I’m excited to see what football looks like in thirty years because of you.”

Faizan’s parting argument is about media’s role in the rebuild. He has been telling TV channels that they will have to enter the football pipeline themselves. A local futsal tournament with thirty-two teams of five players each is, at minimum, one hundred and sixty households watching their boys play. Their friends watch. The next year’s organisers watch. Past organisers watch. None of that audience exists in Pakistan football today because nobody is putting a camera on it. The pipeline starts with broadcast, not with talent. The talent, he keeps repeating, was never the problem.