The world’s top competitive sports team has been heading to India for the 2019 World Cup.
Competitive Sports Coordinator of India, Virender Gupta, announced the news on Tuesday, telling The Hindu: “I am very excited about the India 2020 World Cup which is the first one-day international football competition in India.”
It will be the second time that a football team has participated in the 2019 edition of the World Cup and will be hosted by India at the Kolkata Oval in Bengaluru.
The team was also present at the World Football Confederation (WFC) meeting in Brazil last year.
India, which has been playing in the FIFA Club World Cup since 2018, is the only country outside the United States to have hosted the tournament in a professional format.
It will be India’s first professional international competition since 2002, when it hosted the World Club Challenge.
It has been a tough start for the country, which missed out on the World Cups for the last two years due to a lack of participation.
The Indian team was one of the four countries that failed to qualify for the World Championships in 2019 and 2020.
The 2019 tournament was the second in the past five years for India, with its second place finish in the 2015 tournament marking the first time the country failed to make it to the final stage of a World Cup in over three decades.
India has qualified for the tournament once again, but this time it will be led by the country’s top-ranked football team, as well as a host of young players.
The two-time world champions won their first major title in the top tier of world football in 2016, with a 2-0 victory over Portugal.
