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Brazilian Football Team Favored in Karachi's Lyari Slum
Pakistan-made Brazuca soccer ball is believed to have started high football fever in cricket-crazy Pakistan. The most fanatic among Pakistani soccer fans are the Sheedis of the Karachi slum of Lyari. Since Pakistani football team does not qualify to play in the World Cup, the sheedis' favorites are the Brazilians with whom they have much in common. Sheedis, like many Brazilians, are part of the worldwide African diaspora created by the slave trade.
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Lyari Football Club |
Who are Sheedis?
Sheedis are thought to be the descendants of African slaves brought to the shores of Pakistan at the height of the international slave trade that started in the 7th century and continued into the 18th century.
Also known as Siddis in other parts of South Asia, they are believed to have arrived in India in 628 AD at the Bharuch port. Several others followed with the first Arab invasions of Sindh in 712 AD. The latter group are believed to have been soldiers with Muhammad bin Qasim's Arab army, and were called Zanjis. Siddis are related to the Bantu peoples of Southeast Africa. They were brought to the Indian subcontinent as slaves by the Portuguese.
The Sheedis of Pakistan, also known as Makranis, live primarily along the Makran Coast in Balochistan, and southern part of Sindh. In Karachi, they are mainly concentrated in Lyari. Pir Mangho is revered by Sheedis as their patron saint. Sheedis have an annual celebration in Manghopir area around the shrine of their patron saint.
Soccer Fever in Lyari:
People bring big screen television sets and projectors into the streets to watch Brazilian team play against their opponents at dozens of spots in Lyari . Others head to a nearby sports complex for a screening, where hundreds of adults and kids arrive toting mats and picnic baskets, according to a PRI Radio report. Here's a excerpt from it:
"Almost everyone here supports the Brazilian team, and residents proudly point out that the neighborhood has been labeled “mini-Brazil" thanks to its fervor. “God willing, Brazil will win today and it will keep on winning," says one boy sitting on the ground surrounded by his friends. Other boys express their admiration for their hero, Neymar, a star Brazilian forward. Karachi's roots in soccer go back to the days of the British Empire. As one of British India's key seaports in the early twentieth century, many ships carrying European sailors would dock here. In their free time, visiting sailors played soccer near the harbor and would invite locals to join them. “This became a tradition — that whenever sailors came, these people used to go there and play with them,” says Nadir Shah Adil, a veteran journalist from Lyari. While much of Pakistan took on the British game of cricket, says Adil, people in Lyari chose soccer. It wasn't just because of the European sailors, though. Soccer was also a much more affordable sport for poor Lyari residents."
Street Child Football Championship:
Earlier this year, Pakistan's football team made up of mainly Lyari kids surprised the world by winning third place in the Street Child World Cup held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The team drew special praise for crushing arch-rival India 13-0 at the Rio tournament.
Pakistanis scored 2-0 win against Kenya and a 3-0 triumph against Mauritius before drawing 1-1 with the US team to reach the top in their group. In the quarter-finals, they defeated the Phillipines 3-2 but lost to Burundi 3-4 in the semi-finals. They played US again for third-place match and won 3-2 on penalty kicks to clinch the bronze medal in the seven-a-side tournament.
Hope For Lyari:
Lyari is a place known mainly for its poverty, drugs, violence and gang warfare that have ravaged the area for decades. Lyari gangsters with names like Baba Ladla, Rehman Dakait, Uzair Baloch and Arshad Pappu make more headlines than the neighborhood's sports talent in boxing, football and other sports.
Recent success in the Rio Street Child Football World Cup and now the Soccer World Cup 2014 fever represent an opportunity for the government and the civil society to offer Lyari youngsters an alternative to the life of drugs, violence and gangs. Let's hope that they will seize this opportunity.
Related Links:
Science of Pakistan-Made Brazuca
Johnson-Ali Model of Success in Olympics
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Comment by Riaz Haq 3 hours ago
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Pakistan’s Lyari defies Bollywood’s gangland label to rise as boxing haven
Food, football and history mingle in Karachi’s oldest settlement. And a boxing coach teaches girls to defy stereotypes.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/5/pakistans-lyari-defies-boll...
Karachi, Pakistan – Over a few breezy winter weeks in Karachi, boxing coach Younus Qambrani sent a steady stream of WhatsApp messages from his neighbourhood of Lyari – videos, photos, old newspaper clippings that together formed an extensive archive of how he teaches girls to throw a punch.
In one of the videos, the bearded and skullcap-clad Qambrani, 60, uses the palms of his hands and ducks as his young students practice throwing their punches. The thuds of the colliding boxing gloves and the scuff of the sneakers against the concrete floor of Qambrani’s Pak-Shaheen boxing club mask the din on the street.
Outside, motorcycles speed and sputter on narrow, labyrinthine roads, past omelettes sizzling on outdoor skillets in the many bun kebab stalls that pepper the neighbourhood of nearly 950,000 people: that is the population of Amsterdam packed into about three percent of the Dutch city’s land area.
To millions of followers of Bollywood, the Indian film industry across the border, Lyari is synonymous with brutal gang warfare waged against a perpetually grey background. It is where Bollywood’s highest-grossing film of all time, Dhurandhar and its recently released sequel, Dhurandhar The Revenge are set.
The films – about a fictionalised covert mission conducted by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) on Pakistani soil – have each earned more than $100m. In the first film, an Indian spy infiltrates Lyari’s criminal underworld and neutralises threats to India’s national security. In the sequel, the same agent continues his deep-cover operation inside Pakistan’s crime networks, again moving through Lyari’s streets.
But to Lyari locals, the neighbourhood is much more than the backdrop to blood and gore: It is a melting pot of cultures and tradition, rooted in history far deeper than Bollywood has dared to explore. It has an emerging rap and hip-hop scene, launching acts such as hip hop group, Lyari Underground, and masked rapper, Eva B, onto the national stage. The neighbourhood has also earned the nickname of Mini Brazil for being Pakistan’s mecca of football.
To be sure, Lyari has had a past rife with gang violence and unrest. Armed groups held significant influence from the mid‑2000s into the early 2010s, when battles between rival syndicates were at their peak. Gangs led by figures such as Rehman Dakait and, later, Uzair Baloch – both depicted in the Dhurandhar film and its sequel – turned parts of the neighbourhood into a militarised conflict zone. At the height of the violence, human rights groups reported about 800 people killed in Karachi in a single year, many of them in and around Lyari.
In 2012, the government launched what became known as Operation Lyari, a major crackdown in which police, backed by the Sindh Rangers paramilitary force, moved against armed groups in the area. The operation, and subsequent security campaigns, dismantled the main gang hierarchies and largely ended the era of open, large‑scale gang warfare in Lyari, even if other forms of crime persisted.
But Lyari, said social anthropologist Adeem Suhail, has always been about much more than that period of violence.
“Think of Naples or Sicily in Italy, which are among the major cultural hubs of the country (food, literature, music, etc) despite having long been associated with Mafia violence,” Suhail, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania-based Franklin and Marshall College, told Al Jazeera.
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