The Better India · 147 days ago

How Laibi Phanjoubam Used Football to Empower Girls in Manipur

A geography teacher who never played football and has never left her village has sent generations of girls to compete across India, funding their dreams by weaving textiles and tending a small farm in the shadow of Manipur's political unrest. Laibi Phanjoubam understood what the boundary lines of sport could offer restless youth in the 1980s: not escape, but expansion-a way to claim space in a world that had drawn their lives too small. Her insistence that girls "first, learn to fend for yourself, earn money, and build an identity" reveals the quiet radicalism of her vision, where a football club becomes a portal through which young women pass from predetermined lives into self-authored ones. The girls call her Ebo Laibi-grandmother-a title that captures how she has mothered possibilities rather than players, nurturing a lineage of confidence that transcends any scoreboard. At four feet tall, she stands as proof that transformative love is measured not in stature but in the stubborn refusal to let circumstances dictate destiny.