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Why is Mohun Bagan's barefoot 1911 IFA Shield win so famous?

The history of Mohun Bagan's barefoot 1911 IFA Shield win: how ten shoeless Bengalis beat a British regiment and why the result still matters in Kolkata.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · August 12, 2026

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Rev. Sudhir Chatterjee was the odd one out. On 29 July 1911, he lined up at left back for Mohun Bagan in the IFA Shield final in Calcutta, wearing boots. His ten teammates wore nothing on their feet. Across the pitch stood the East Yorkshire Regiment of the British Army, who had boots, military training and a reasonable expectation of winning.

They didn't win. The Mohun Bagan 1911 IFA Shield barefoot win is famous because it was the first time an all-Indian side took the Shield. They beat a British army regiment 2-1 in front of roughly 80,000 people, in a Bengal still angry about the 1905 partition. A football result became proof that the empire's pecking order could be flipped.

What happened in the 1911 IFA Shield final?

The first half was scoreless. The East Yorks went ahead from a free kick just outside the box, after a handball by a Mohun Bagan player. Jackson took it, and goalkeeper Hiralal Mukherjee couldn't get to it in time. Accounts disagree on the minute. One has the East Yorkshire captain, Sergeant Jackson, scoring with fifteen minutes left, and another puts it at the 75th. Same moment, different clocks. It was 1911.

Mohun Bagan's captain, Shibdas Bhaduri, answered within minutes. He had swapped places with his brother Bijoydas to confuse the English defence. Then, about two minutes from time, Abhilash Ghosh scored from a quick pass by Shibdas. The club's own history puts the goal in the 87th minute, and the episode tells it the same way. Bhaduri equalizes. Then he sets up the winner.

The road to the final was no stroll. Chris Horwedel says in the episode that Mohun Bagan beat four opponents, two of them British military sides, and conceded once. My count from other sources is a little worse. They beat St. Xavier's College 3-0, Calcutta Rangers 2-1 and Rifle Brigade 1-0. Then they drew 1-1 with Middlesex Regiment and won the replay 3-0. That is at least two goals against, if you count the draw. It's a small thing, and it doesn't change the story.

Did Mohun Bagan really play barefoot in 1911?

Ten of them did. Most accounts agree that Chatterjee was the only player in boots, and the episode says the same. Novy Kapadia, in his book Barefoot to Boots, writes that the entire team played barefoot. That's the minority view, and I'd go with the majority.

Chatterjee's boots have a dull explanation. He was a professor at a college in Bhawanipore. The college refused him leave for the first-round match against St Xavier's, so Bagan played that game with ten men and still won 3-0.

Why were the rest barefoot? The romantic answer is that boots cramped their style and bare feet gave them better touch. Kapadia calls that a myth. He thinks money is the more plausible reason, since hand-sewn boots were expensive at the turn of the century. One account puts a pair at no less than Rs 7, about an average schoolteacher's monthly salary.

I think both can be true. Horwedel says in the episode that playing without boots demanded its own technique and courage. Mohun Bagan's coach, club secretary Sailen Basu, was a Subedar-major in the British Indian Army. He built a style of short, quick passing around a barefoot side. Nobody chose bare feet as a tactic. Bagan made the best of what they had, which is a better story anyway.

Weather mattered too. The year before, a rain-slick pitch had helped boot-wearing opponents knock Bagan out. In 1911 the final was played on a dry pitch, more suitable for barefoot play.

How did 80,000 people follow the match? Kites

They couldn't, not from where most of them stood. The ground was built for far fewer people than showed up, and one account says it held about 10,000. So fans climbed onto carriage roofs, telegraph posts and rooftops. The East Indian Railway ran special trains. Extra steamers brought people in from Rayganj and Baranagar. Tickets priced at one and two rupees reportedly went for Rs 15 on the black market.

Estimates of the crowd run from 80,000 to 100,000. Nobody was counting heads in a tree.

So the news went up in the air. According to Reuters, volunteers flew a kite in the club colours whenever a goal went in. After the equaliser, maroon and green kites filled the sky. The Mohun Bagan club's account adds that black kites went up after the Yorkshire goal. The newspaper The Empire installed a temporary telephone line to the ground, so the phone was there as well, but the kites are what people remember. Horwedel's line is that a piece of fabric in the sky told the city something extraordinary was happening below.

Why did the 1911 win matter in colonial Bengal?

“A football match didn't end colonial rule. It just made the unequal relationship briefly visible, then reversed the expected outcome in public.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

Bengal had been partitioned in 1905, and the protests and the Swadeshi movement, with its push for self-reliance and boycott of imported goods, had been running ever since. The episode points out the irony in the timing: the partition was formally revised in 1911, the same year as the final.

British stereotypes made the stakes personal. Educated Bengali men were often portrayed as physically weak. Indian clubs answered by treating the trained body as an argument. Horwedel's description of Mohun Bagan's early years makes the club sound like a gym with a football team attached, with fitness and discipline expected of every member.

Nobody thought it was only a game. The Englishman newspaper said Mohun Bagan had done what the Congress and the Swadeshi campaigners hadn't managed. It had exploded the myth that Britons were unbeatable in any sphere of life. Great Gama, the wrestler, had just held off Stanislaus Zbyszko for over two hours in London in 1910. Kapadia argues that Gama's win and Bagan's together dented the idea of European superiority.

Horwedel is careful about what it meant, and I think he's right. Newspapers argued over it. Nationalist writers saw strength and cooperation. Others praised a British game for creating common ground between ruler and ruled. The players didn't carry a manifesto. The match, as the episode puts it, made an unequal relationship briefly visible and then reversed the expected outcome in public.

What happened to the Immortal Eleven's legacy?

July 29 is still Mohun Bagan Day. The players are still the Immortal Eleven, a name the Amrita Bazar Patrika used the morning after. The club didn't stay stuck in that one afternoon. The episode runs through a defender nicknamed the Chinese Wall, who captained India and became the first footballer to receive the Padma Shri. It also names Shailen Manna's generation of defenders, and then Chuni Goswami. Goswami spent his whole club career at Mohun Bagan, captained India to the 1962 Asian Games title, and played first-class cricket for Bengal. Horwedel's joke is that footballers often claim they could have played another sport, and Goswami saved everyone time by actually doing it.

In 1977, Pelé and the New York Cosmos came to Eden Gardens. Before roughly 80,000 people, Mohun Bagan drew 2-2.

How is the 1911 story tied to the East Bengal derby?

East Bengal were founded in 1920. The episode ties the club to families who moved west from the eastern part of Bengal, especially around the 1947 Partition. Mohun Bagan became associated with the Ghoti families of western Bengal. Fans joke about it in food: prawns for Mohun Bagan, hilsa for East Bengal.

Here's the irony. The 1911 team wasn't simply "western". One fan-run history says more than half the squad had roots in the then divided East Bengal. How a rivalry built on that split came to claim the team as its own, I can't tell you. The episode adds its own caveat, and it's a fair one: modern support is far more tangled than any map drawn generations ago.

The derby also has a dark page. In August 1980, trouble in the stands during a derby contributed to the deaths of 16 spectators. The anniversary is now Football Lovers' Day, marked with remembrance and blood donation drives.

Why did Mohun Bagan fans protest against the ATK name?

Commerce arrived in 2020. The RPSG Group, owners of ATK FC, acquired an 80% stake in Mohun Bagan's football company, and the side entered the Indian Super League as ATK Mohun Bagan. ATK dated from 2014. Mohun Bagan dated from 1889. Many supporters saw a newer brand placed beside, or in front of, an institution whose history belonged to Indian football itself.

The protests were not subtle. Fans marched near the club tent on the Maidan and at the CESC office, and "Remove ATK" placards filled the stands at Salt Lake Stadium. One complaint was that the new crest left off the founding year, 1889.

The fans won. After the 2022-23 ISL final, a 4-3 penalty shootout win over Bengaluru FC, owner Sanjiv Goenka said ATK was being removed. The name became Mohun Bagan Super Giant from 1 June 2023. The "Super Giant" part follows the group's naming for its other teams, including the IPL's Lucknow Super Giants. Not everyone was satisfied. One fan told The Bridge his reservations remained until the club's history was presented on shared handles and a shared website without ATK.

Horwedel's reading is that money bought shares in a company, not the right to rewrite a shared past. Since the rename, the team has won two league shields and, per the episode, a Shield and Cup double in 2025.

The detail I like best is on the shirt. When the club rebranded in 2023, the new crest put 1889 back.