The 2025/26 I-League, India's Indian Football League, ended with a first-time champion and two historic clubs going down. Diamond Harbour won the title for the first time and with it the promotion that comes with finishing top of the second tier. Namdhari and Churchill Brothers were relegated.
How the season was structured
The campaign was played in two stages: Stage I from 27 February to 19 April 2026 and Stage II from 24 April to 23 May 2026, with eleven clubs in the competition. Splitting a season into two blocks creates two separate races — the first decides who is in contention, the second decides everything else — and it compresses the decisive football into a short, intense window.
That structure rewards squads that stay fit and available rather than squads that start well. A team can lead after Stage I and still lose the title in the four weeks that follow, which is exactly what several clubs discovered.
Diamond Harbour's run
Titles in a split season are usually won by the side that finds form in the second stage, and Diamond Harbour's form was the most convincing in the league. They put together five consecutive wins and a nine-match unbeaten run, the best sequences recorded by any club in the campaign.
Nine matches without defeat in a season of this length is the kind of consistency that looks inevitable in hindsight and was anything but at the time. The run was built on the unglamorous part of the game: squeezing a lead, defending a single-goal margin and refusing to lose matches that were drifting towards a draw.
The numbers behind the season
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Champions | Diamond Harbour (1st title) |
| Promoted | Diamond Harbour |
| Relegated | Namdhari, Churchill Brothers |
| Matches played | 66 |
| Goals scored | 201 |
| Top scorer | Marcus Joseph (9 goals) |
| Stage I | 27 February – 19 April 2026 |
| Stage II | 24 April – 23 May 2026 |
| Longest winning run | Diamond Harbour (5) |
| Longest unbeaten run | Diamond Harbour (9) |
Two hundred and one goals in sixty-six matches is a fraction over three goals a game, which is a healthy rate for a division where defensive organisation often separates promotion from mid-table. Marcus Joseph winning the scoring chart with nine goals is the other number worth pausing on: in a season where the champions won with consistency rather than by blowing teams away, nobody ran away with the golden boot.
The relegation stories
Namdhari's season ended with four consecutive defeats, the sort of run that turns a difficult campaign into a decisive one. Real Kashmir's collapse took a different shape — seven matches without a win, including four defeats in a row — and it is the reminder that in the second tier a bad month can consume a season's work without ever looking like a crisis at the time.
Churchill Brothers' relegation is the most striking outcome of the campaign, not because of the football but because of what followed it: the club finished in the relegation places and will still be playing top-flight football next season, having taken over a league place in the Indian Super League. No table in the 2025/26 I-League tells that part of the story.
What 2026/27 inherits
The next I-League season inherits a champion's ambition, a division with one fewer historic name, and a renewed argument about what the second tier is for. Diamond Harbour's promotion is the league's best advertisement; the complicated fate of their top-flight place is the thing nobody wanted to talk about.
Either way, the 2025/26 season did what a second division is supposed to do. It produced a champion, sent two clubs down, averaged more than three goals a match and delivered a run of nine unbeaten games that will be the benchmark for every promotion push to come. The full picture sits on our I-League pages.
