Bhaichung Bhutia Joins ZEE5's Panel as the FIFA World Cup Moves to Streaming in India

For most of the country, the World Cup has always arrived through a television set. This year it arrives through a phone. ZEE5 is streaming the FIFA World Cup 2026 live in India, the matches having kicked off on June 11, and the platform has put Bhaichung Bhutia at the centre of how it plans to talk about the tournament.

Bhutia on an expert panel is the kind of casting that does not need a press note to justify itself. For a generation that grew up with almost no Indian footballer to point to on a global stage, he was the one, the captain and the face the sport borrowed when it needed to be taken seriously here. Putting him at the analysis desk is ZEE5’s way of signalling that the coverage is built for Indian viewers rather than piped in from elsewhere, someone who can read a match and place it in terms a home audience actually feels.

“For generations of football fans in India, the FIFA World Cup has been a source of inspiration, big dreams and unforgettable memories,” Bhutia said of the role. “It is a tournament that goes beyond the sport and unites people through a shared passion. I am happy to join the expert panel with ZEE5 and Unite8 Sports, and proud to help connect fans even closer to the stories, rivalries and moments that make the World Cup what it is. At a time when the football fan base across India keeps growing, this is a real chance to deepen the bond between the game and the people who follow it.”

The streaming sits inside a larger arrangement. Zee Entertainment is carrying the World Cup across two platforms, ZEE5 and Unite8, as the opening act of a partnership with FIFA that runs through 2034. The live coverage is being offered in English, Hindi, Bengali and Malayalam, so viewers can follow the run of play in the language they think in rather than the one a broadcaster defaults to. The same deal covers the FIFA World Cup 2030 and the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027 down the line, which means this is less a one-tournament rights grab than the platform planting a flag in football for the next decade.

What it adds up to is a shift in habit as much as a content announcement. The men’s World Cup, the single most-watched event on the planet, is now something an Indian fan opens an app to watch, with a familiar Indian voice making sense of it on the way through. ZEE5, better known on these pages for its Tamil and regional film slate like Gandhi Talks, is betting that live sport is the thing that gets people to keep the app open between movies. The matches are running now; the test is whether the audience stays for the full month.