Old newspapers reveal Kathmandu's World Cup fever in the 80s and 90s

In the 1980s and 1990s, Kathmandu's engagement with the FIFA World Cup was vastly different from today's digitally saturated experience. Back then, newspapers served as the primary source of information for football fans, with television being a luxury. A letter to the editor from 1986 in The Rising Nepal highlights this reliance, with readers pinning their hopes on the newspaper for coverage once the games began, as they did not own TV sets.

This reliance on print media often led to disappointment. Newspapers like Gorkhapatra and The Rising Nepal showed little enthusiasm for World Cup coverage in the decades leading up to the early 1990s. While football was known in Kathmandu since the 1920s, Gorkhapatra, established in 1901, offered only sporadic coverage, with a small piece in 1958 being an early exception. This lack of comprehensive reporting contrasted sharply with the growing interest in the World Cup among Kathmandu's residents by the 1980s.

Furthermore, the World Cup fever of past decades was not as pervasive as it is today. While fans now flaunt jerseys, adopt favorite stars' hairstyles, and engage in heated online discussions, the experience in the 80s and 90s was more limited. Issues like loadshedding disrupted the few available television broadcasts, and fan reactions were intense but localized. Notably, while Kathmandu was immersed in World Cup fever, the article points out that women in the city remained largely untouched by the prevailing mood, indicating a less universal engagement with the sport compared to contemporary times.

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Thank you for the nice coverage to the preparations for the ensuing World Cup football in Mexico. The news about the different teams, their aspirations, strengths and weaknesses that appear almost daily in your paper are also informative. However, we also hope that you will maintain the coverage also when the games actually start on May 31. As we do not own any TV sets, we have pinned all our hopes on TRN.