What can be inferred from the writer’s remark that ‘No one owns footb…

Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.

My grandmother has followed cricket for sixty years, and last month she sat beside me through a BGMI final. On screen, four young men in matching jerseys hunched over their phones, headsets on, faces lit blue. The commentator was nearly hoarse. When a squad from a small town in Assam survived to the end, she clapped. Then she asked me whether this was really a sport.

The usual objection is that nobody sweats. I find this less convincing than it sounds. Shooting is an Olympic event, and the Olympic movement recognises chess, yet neither asks much of the lungs. They test steadiness and judgement. What a good BGMI squad trains is of the same kind: reflexes, the memory of every ridge on a map, and the harder skill of four people deciding in half a second whether to fight or slip away. Teams keep fixed practice hours and employ coaches, and a player whose form dips is dropped, as in any cricket side.

Yet there is one difference I cannot argue away. No one owns football. Boys in a village can mark goalposts with two slippers and play by the same rules as the World Cup. BGMI belongs to a company. It can redraw the map or weaken a favourite weapon in a single update. The company decides who may hold a tournament, and no event goes ahead without its sanction. Indian players learnt how fragile this is in 2022, when the game was blocked for months.

So my answer to my grandmother was a cautious yes. The players, I said, are athletes in every way that matters: discipline, nerve, teamwork. The game itself is still a product. She nodded, though I suspect she mostly wanted the remote back for the evening match.