Young Man's Football Passion Empowers Local Community in Remote Area of Pakistan
Chitral's remote location, inadequate infrastructure and poor state funding have brought a slow development of sports infrastructure, despite football's extreme popularity among the youth. One young man from Lahore, Bilal Mumtaz, is trying to change that, one tournament at a time.
SputnikLocated among Hindu Kush mountains in northwest Pakistan, Chitral is a beautiful and remote region of nearly 15,000 km². Apart from its scenic beauty and ancient cultural heritage, it is home for many football fans.
Bilal Mumtaz is a 32-year-old businessman and an avid football fan. He organizes football tournaments, finds sponsors and donors and facilitates district championships and football camps in this remote area.
"[The] first time I went to Chitral was back in 2011. I was studying in a university in Canada and I had come home to Lahore for my summer break. I had this dream of visiting the mountains of Chitral so I invited my friend to come along with me. One of the main reasons why I wanted to go there was to meet a former teacher of my father, Major Geoffrey Langlands, an Englishman who had lived in Pakistan, at that time, for 63 years," Mumtaz told Sputnik.
Langlands was a British educationalist who spent most of his life teaching in and leading schools in Pakistan, instructing many of the country's elite. In World War II, he served in the British Army and afterwards in the British Indian Army, where he worked to keep the peace during the partition of the British Indian Empire in 1947.
After Pakistan was formed, Langlands took up a teaching position at the Aitchison College in Lahore, which was Mumtaz's father's alma mater.
The Role Model That Changed Everything
"For me it is important to mention Langlands because he is someone that I draw my inspiration from. In the late 1970s he had a choice, either becoming principal of the newly-founded Beaconhouse school or moving to the remote area of North Waziristan to run a cadet school there. He chose to go to the tribal areas and after spending ten years there, he moved to Chitral in 1989 and took up the position of principal of Sayurj Public School for Boys," Mumtaz told Sputnik.
"Langlands witnessed and had a role to play in the transitional change in which Chitral became the region that held the second-highest literacy rate in the country, only after Abbottabad. So this was a major inspiration to me and I wanted to go meet him and give back to him since he was such an instrumental mentor to my father and his friends, who became prominent businessmen, industrialists and esteemed politicians in Pakistan," he shared.
Mumtaz's father had inherited a family business in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry, which is now run by him and his four brothers.
"In 2011, there in Chitral under the guidance of Major Langlands, I held my first football camp for Langlands School students with a friend of mine, in conjunction with the District Football Association (DFA) of Chitral and that's how my football journey in Chitral started," he told Sputnik.
The Ball Started Rolling
Langlands may have retired and moved to Lahore in 2013, but Mumtaz's passion for developing footballers in Chitral didn’t stop. In 2017, Mumtaz held another camp between the students of Imran Khan Foundation (IKF) and former Langlands students. The IKF had also been involved in developing football amongst the youth of Chitral, and once they even sent four Chitrali boys to play football in Barcelona.
According to the latest stats released by Football Connect, Lower Chitral is one of the most football-obsessed districts in the country, with one football club per 11,000 people.
"You hardly see anyone playing cricket there, which is the country's favorite sport. In Chitral, it is football that brings communities together and it is a dream of every kid to become a famous footballer, so it is like Brazil of Pakistan when it comes to football," Mumtaz explained.
In 2019, an Australian NGO paid $200,000 for a new football stadium in Centennial Public School in Chitral. Mumtaz's family startup, an online pharmacy, Sehat, was one of the organizers of a football game in this stadium at night time, under the floodlights, between the Centennials and IKF's players. Before that, all matches were played in the daytime only as there was no infrastructure for playing after dark. The match even made the national headlines.
"These three events that I had been a part of were focused on the youth of Chitral, but since 2020 I also got involved in helping the veterans football, which is football for people 40 and above. The team of Chitrali veteran players needed support in getting to Lahore, accommodation etc., for the nationwide veterans football tournament. Their team was the only team from the whole of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) representing the province. The team did very well given their lack of experience in tournaments in other areas of Pakistan and performed strongly all in all: they were the runner-ups in 2020, semi-finalists in 2021 and again runner-ups in 2022."
The Memory Lives On
In mid 2020, tragedy hit Mumtaz's family when his father, Nadeem Ahmed Mumtaz died of Covid.
To honor his father's memory he decided to continue developing football in Chitral and organized the Nadeem Ahmed Mumtaz (NAM) Memorial super cup in 2021 with six teams, held with the support of Ailaaj, which is what his family startup converted into after a merger that same year. This continued to this day, and in May 2023 another edition of this Super Cup was held. Due to the overwhelming demand, the now four-team tournament was extended to a ten-team tournament.
"I would say that my father had a very instrumental role in developing education in Chitral. On paper he was simply the co-founder of Langlands School and College Endowment Trust – involving him and a prominent lawyer friend of his. They were both Aitchisonians, graduating from the college under Major Langlands, so they both raised funds which helped the school grow, and it did so under principal Langlands," Mumtaz shared.
Langlands died at the age of 101 in a hospital in Lahore in 2019 following a brief illness. Many of his students, especially those from Aitchison College, rose to high places.
One of them was the former Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan. In a tweet he paid tribute: "Apart from being our teacher, he instilled the love for trekking in our northern areas in me, even before the KKH (Karakoram Highway) was built." Other former students include former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and media tycoon Aleem Khan.
To honor the memory of two of his favorite people, Mumtaz kept his focus on growing football in Chitral and recently the Lower Chitral district became the first in Pakistan to organize District Football Championships to validate their football clubs via Football Connect, which is Pakistan Football Federation's new club registration platform, by which clubs are given FIFA-registered ID’s.
Potential Hub of Future Champions
Talking about some of the prominent players that had played in his football camps, Mumtaz said that a camp that he held in 2011 and 2017 in Chitral had one player named Zia-us-Salam that ended up playing for Pakistan's national football team. Zia made his international debut on November 19, 2012, in a friendly match against Singapore in a 4–0 loss.
"There have also been five players who ended up playing for some of the most reputable football clubs across Pakistan, so there is definitely a lot of potential in the players coming out of Chitral," he said.
Today, Mumtaz is the team principal of the Football Association of Lower Chitral and de facto head of the organization since 2021. He has given Chitrali youth a platform to hone their football skills, raised funding and sponsorships for youth clubs of the region.
A mere four months after his appointment, the DFA Chitral Team that he took the reins of were victorious in the Ufone Cup in KPK Balochistan out of 71 districts. Seven members of that team remained his trainees in his previous tournaments and camps, and more than ten took part in the first Super Cup held in his late father’s honor.
"Now I have formalized support for a combined Chitral team across all age groups, and I work directly with the District Football Association (DFA) and it is set up nicely. It is a non-profit organization, it is run mostly by former veteran players and they work so well together, in such a cohesive manner. I think it is because all of them have this passion for football and have so much experience playing the sport, so they organize all these tournaments very well," he said.