From hand-painted murals to flag-draped lanes, the city that loves football more than most has made the FIFA World Cup 2026 its own — one wall at a time. Lensman Rupak De Chowdhuri captures the fever, the colour, and the devotion of Kolkata, a city that never needed an invitation to fall in love with the beautiful game.
There is a wall somewhere in Kolkata where Neymar and Raphinha stare down at children playing football in the dust. The kids don’t need the wall to tell them who those men are. They already know. They’ve known for years.
This is what sets Kolkata apart. In a country where cricket is religion, this city chose a different faith — and every four years, when the World Cup arrives, that faith gets painted on the walls.
It started, as it always does, before the first whistle. By June 10, well before the tournament kicked off, a lane in Howrah had already been transformed. Giant flex banners of Portugal’s finest lined the street, national flags strung between them, the whole corridor a declaration of allegiance. No one asked for permission. No one needed to. This is what the city does.
Ask any Kolkatan which team they support and the answer, almost always, comes down to two: Brazil or Argentina. The city has been split along that fault line for decades, street by street, family by family, sometimes person by person. 
It is the oldest argument in the city’s football calendar, relitigated every four years, never resolved. But since Qatar 2022, something has shifted. Messi won his World Cup, finally, at 35, in a final that felt scripted by someone with a taste for the dramatic — and Kolkata wept and danced in a way that even the Brazil loyalists could not entirely resist.
The man, who also visited Kolkata, had earned it. The city, which had waited alongside him for what felt like a lifetime, felt it had earned something too. His image now appears on more walls than any other player’s, a coronation that has never quite ended.
By June 12, the murals were going up in earnest. On one stretch of road, a fan-artist worked through the heat, filling a wall with the faces of the tournament’s biggest names — Messi commanding one corner, Ronaldo occupying another, Vini Jr. blazing through the middle.
The coexistence of those three names on a single wall says something about Kolkata’s relationship with the game. Even in its Brazil-Argentina divide, there is room for everyone. The city holds its allegiances fiercely but its love of
football more fiercely still.
The fan zones reflect the same spirit. Across the city, supporters strung up displays and banners celebrating players from half a dozen nations — with Messi’s image appearing most often, the Copa del Mundo still fresh, still felt.
And then there are the children. There are always the children. On June 13, in front of the freshly completed mural of Neymar and Raphinha, a group of kids played football in the street, as children have always played football in the streets of this city. The mural was the backdrop. The game was the thing. That image — small figures, big wall, the oldest sport in the world — is as close to a symbol of this city’s football culture as anything.
Photographer Rupak De Chowdhuri has spent years documenting this ritual, the city’s biennial transformation into something between a street gallery and an open-air stadium. His images from this World Cup capture what is easy to feel but difficult to describe: the way Kolkata holds football not as entertainment, not as sport exactly, but as a kind of civic identity. The murals are not decorations. They are statements.
Kolkata does not have a team in the World Cup. It never does. But it shows up anyway — in paint and flex and bunting and late nights and arguments in tea stalls about Brazil and Argentina that will outlast any tournament, any player, any era.Some things you can paint on a wall. Some things are the wall.
Text: Sujoy Dhar
IBNS-TWF
