India football team captain list: every captain from 1924 to 2026

Gurpreet Singh Sandhu has been captain of the India national football team since June 2024, when Sunil Chhetri retired. Chhetri led the Blue Tigers for 12 years, longer than anyone else on this list.

India’s footballing history is not as decorated as that of Asian rivals like Japan or Qatar, but the national team has produced its share of top-quality players and captains. Once the strongest side in South Asia, India won Asian Games gold in 1951 and 1962, finished fourth at the 1956 Olympics, and qualified for the 1950 FIFA World Cup before withdrawing before a ball was kicked. They have made five appearances at the AFC Asian Cup, finishing as runners-up in 1964, and have won the SAFF Championship a record eight times since it began in 1993.

The present is harder going. India were ranked 138th in the world in June 2026, a long way from their best mark of 94th in February 1996, and the AFC Challenge Cup in 2008 remains their only notable trophy since the turn of the century. Khalid Jamil took over as head coach in August 2025, the first Indian to hold the senior men’s job in more than a decade, and is rebuilding a squad that missed out on both the 2026 World Cup and the 2027 Asian Cup.

The first man to captain the side was Mani Das, in British India in 1924. Here is the complete India football team captain list.

India football team captain list

Who is the current India football team captain?

Gurpreet Singh Sandhu took the armband for the World Cup qualifier against Qatar in June 2024, days after Chhetri’s last match, and has kept it since. The Bengaluru FC goalkeeper was already one of the longest-serving players in the squad and had shared captaincy duties with Chhetri and Sandesh Jhingan for several years before that.

He is also one of the few Indian players to have built a career in Europe: a spell at Norwegian club Stabaek made him the first Indian to appear in a UEFA competition. For the rest of the current side, see our guide to the India national football team squad.

Sunil Chhetri, India’s longest-serving captain

Chhetri captained India from 2012 until 2024 and retired after a World Cup qualifier against Kuwait on 6 June 2024. That was not quite the end: in March 2025, at 40, he answered a call from then-coach Manolo Marquez and came back, playing on until India’s 2027 Asian Cup qualifying campaign ended. By then the armband had already passed to Gurpreet.

He finished with 95 goals in 157 caps, India’s all-time leading scorer by a distance, and for a stretch of his career he was among the most prolific active international goalscorers in world football.

The captains before him

Bhaichung Bhutia led India through most of the 2000s and did as much as anyone to open doors for Indian players abroad. Before him the armband moved around a good deal — I. M. Vijayan, Bruno Coutinho, V. P. Sathyan and Carlton Chapman all led the side in the 1990s, and the list runs back through Chuni Goswami, PK Banerjee and Sailen Manna to the golden era of the 1950s and 1960s.

The table also picks up the stand-in captains: Subrata Pal, Sandesh Jhingan and Subhasish Bose all wore it during Chhetri’s long tenure.

Photo credit: Alamy