When Real Kashmir Football Club was nominated for the 2026 International Emmy Awards in the Drama Series category earlier this week, it brought a unique Indian sports journey onto one of television’s biggest global stages.
The OTT series is based on the true story of Real Kashmir FC, a professional football club from Jammu and Kashmir. But while the series takes creative liberties with its characters and narrative, at its centre is a very genuine footballing experiment in Kashmir.
And the man behind that is Shamim Meraj, the founder and former co-owner of Real Kashmir FC.
A football story in a cricket country
In the series, the central character Sohail Meer is a reporter who decides to form a football team in 2016 J&K. In reality, that reporter was Meraj himself.
Speaking exclusively to Ekalavyas, Meraj said the Emmy nomination was significant not just for the show, but for what it represented for Indian sport.
“An Indian sports drama being there in the Emmys in itself is a story. It also shows that Indians have the capacity to engage with the larger global audience beyond cricket.”
“To have a show based on Indian football in a place called Kashmir, which has its own set of issues, to be nominated for Emmys, I think in that sense, the Indian culture of the sport story, we’ve already won,” Meraj said.
“There is appetite, there is connect and there is an audience for the most beautiful game in the world,” he added. “So yeah, it gives me hope that it is perhaps it couldn’t have come at a better time for Indian sport.”
A show Meraj hasn’t watched himself
There is an unusual twist to Meraj’s connection with the series: he hasn’t actually watched the show himself, for a number of personal reasons.
However, he said he has been told about the series and believes the story works because of how it presents his people.
“It’s a very nice, soft, feel-good film. It’s shot in Kashmir. It shows Kashmiris as normal, you know, people with normal aspirations, normal ambitions, normal set of problems,” he said.
At the heart of that portrayal is football.
“Football is a metaphor that connects everything.”
I-League Division 2 Champions
The club’s journey between 2017 and 2020 provided much of the material that made the story compelling in the first place. For Meraj, those years were remarkable not because they were a sporting fairy tale, but because of how quickly football became embedded in the community and gave people a purpose.
“And to be fair, at that point of time, 2017 to 2020, Real Kashmir did some stellar work,” he said.
“We had 25,000 people in the stadiums.”
The scale of that response was particularly striking for a club from a region that has historically faced a number of issues.
In fact, the project was so influential that the club had a Scottish coach. Meraj recalled that the coach had even stayed at his own house for two and a half years.
Since then, Real Kashmir FC has won the I-League 2nd Division in 2018 and the IFA Shield in 2020.
Looking back, Meraj is reluctant to describe what happened as a fairy tale.
“I wouldn’t say a fairy tale,” he said. “But it was something that was just too, you know, in your face, too nice to be ignored.”
International Emmys results out in November
The 54th International Emmy Awards will be held in New York City on November 23, 2026, when the winners across the categories will be announced.
The nomination also potentially places Real Kashmir Football Club in a small piece of Indian television history, alongside Delhi Crime, which became the first Indian program to win an International Emmy, taking home the Best Drama Series award in 2020.
For Meraj, there is only one thing left to hope for.
“Now they’re there, I hope they just go all the way [and win it].”
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