Power Thieves and Football Thieves: Inside Pakistan's Technical Audit

A machine tagged a news report about Pakistan's power sector as "football." I read it three times. By the third reading I had stopped laughing and started taking notes.

The meeting took place on a Wednesday, co-chaired by two federal ministers: Ahad Cheema, in charge of Economic Affairs, and Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari, in charge of the Power Division. They sat down to agree on one thing: to launch a technical audit of all of Pakistan's electricity distribution companies — collectively known as DISCOs. The goal was not load-shedding or a tariff hike. The goal was to establish exactly where the electricity had gone, who took it, and who was paying the price.

Replace "DISCO" with "football club," replace "power thief" with "talent thief," replace "circular debt" with "transfer debt," and you get the most precise diagnosis of Asian football I have ever read. And it was not written by a football journalist.

That is why I sat with it all evening.

Context: A chain that leaks at every joint

Pakistan runs a centralised power system. Generators push electricity into the transmission grid; from there, distribution companies — the DISCOs — deliver it to individual households and collect payment. In theory it is a closed loop: generate, transmit, distribute, collect. In practice, the loop leaks at almost every joint.

Two kinds of leakage have names. Technical losses are the electricity lost on the wires, in the transformers, in equipment long past its service life — the physical cost of ageing infrastructure. Commercial losses are the electricity taken without payment: direct theft, meter tampering, irregularities in billing and collection. Together the industry calls them T&C losses — technical and commercial losses.

Among the distribution companies, Pesco and Qesco stand out as the two most closely scrutinised, with the highest loss rates in the system. That is why the technical audit exists. But the wording matters: the audit does not aim to punish any particular individual. It aims to build a transparent and credible mechanism — in the exact phrasing used at the meeting. In other words, the problem is defined as a systemic one, not a human one.

In parallel, the government is running solarisation pilots at Pesco and Qesco themselves. The logic is neat: if an area that both suffers outages and suffers electricity theft can generate part of its own power on site, pressure on the central grid falls, and so does the incentive to steal.

Administratively, the Ministry of Information Technology has been given a technical support role. An Expression of Interest — an EoI — will soon be published to recruit independent experts. The Terms of Reference — ToRs — are expected to be finalised the following week. That document sets the scope, objectives and methodology of the audit.

Beneath all these procedures sits a debt with a harmless-sounding name: circular debt. It is circular because distribution companies do not collect enough, so they cannot pay the generators; the generators cannot buy fuel, so they cut output; the government steps in to subsidise, so the budget drains; and the loop closes, one layer thicker each time. The more leakage, the more the debt swells. The more it swells, the greater the pressure to raise tariffs. And every time that pressure rises, there is another promise that the burden will not be shifted onto ordinary people, that overbilling is unacceptable.

I have heard such promises in many places. In a city whose historical cracks were never patched, I learned that a promise is not an outcome, and that transparency is not something declared but something proven by numbers. "In Moscow, I learned to listen for the crack of history before the match itself cried out."

Reading this Pakistani report, I heard exactly that crack.

Analysis: When Asian football forgets it too has a grid

Start with the debt.

Asian football has its own circular debt; nobody just agrees to call it that. Remember Jiangsu FC. The club won the Chinese Super League in 2026. Four months later, in February 2026, it dissolved. It was not relegated, not docked points, not beaten in a play-off. It simply ran out of money, and no mechanism existed to catch it when the owner let go. A champion vanished while still holding the trophy.

Jiangsu was not an isolated case. Tianjin Quanjian, which once spent like water to bring in Europe's most expensive stars, also collapsed. Hebei China Fortune, Guangzhou FC — names that were once emblems of a league supposedly about to redraw the map of Asian football — slid one by one into the same condition: delayed wages, frozen contracts, closed academies, domestic players abandoned midstream. That league never managed to account precisely for how much money it burned, nor ever named who was responsible for what was lost.

That is circular debt, football edition. Sponsor money flows in, generates nothing, then snaps. When it snaps it does not merely drag the club down. It drags down agents, physios, cooks, reporters like me, and — most importantly — the fourteen-year-olds who were promised that if they trained hard, they would have a future.

In Europe the same lesson wears a different label. Barcelona once carried debt beyond any healthy limit, and its escape route was not selling players but financial levers — selling future rights for cash today. When that structure was pulled apart, what lay underneath became visible: a wage bill nobody controlled, an administrative machine inflated by the stands' expectation of victory.

Now swap the words back. What Asian football lacks is not money. What Asian football lacks is a technical audit humiliating enough to force insiders to look directly at the leakage they have always called by another name.

Power utilities have technical and commercial losses. Football does too.

Football's technical losses are infrastructure: pitches, academies, preventive medicine, nutrition, youth coaching. That is talent lost physically, before a player has grown. A boy in a rural province, with the physique and the mind to become a centre-back who reads the game well, but with no pitch to standard, no doctor, no trained coach — that portion of talent disappears quietly. No spreadsheet records it. Nobody is reprimanded. Yet it costs as much as an ageing transmission line.

Football's commercial losses are what is taken without payment: young players sold cheap, contracts terminated without compensation, broadcast money not shared correctly, transfer commissions flowing to people who never played a minute, and the match-fixing cases that, once exposed, see a handful of individuals punished before the file is closed.

In Pakistan, both kinds of leakage coexist in football, alongside real power cuts. I followed South Asian football for years. The first thing to say is that the Pakistan Football Federation — the PFF — has been suspended by FIFA more than once, including periods in 2026 and 2026, over political interference and internal leadership disputes. When a member federation is suspended, the consequences are not in the office. The national team does not play. The national league is not staged. Academies lose direction. Players lose the monthly wage they were promised.

Under those conditions, Pakistan's best talents have had to save themselves. Kaleemullah Khan, who played for Dordoi in Kyrgyzstan and scored enough to become one of the standout forwards in the Central Asian league, is one example. Hassan Bashir, a forward raised in Denmark, is another. They are the rare watts that escaped the distribution grid to reach the bulb. Most of their generation did not.

When I watched South Asian teams in those years, what I remember is not the scorelines. I remember the silences in the stands when the national team went months without an international fixture. I remember the sigh at the touchline of coaches who did not know where their players' next match would be. "An empty stadium does not take away the shouting; it only lets us hear the sigh from the bench more clearly."

Back to the Pakistani audit. What caught my attention was not that they would find culprits. It was how they defined the culprit. They did not say they would arrest anyone. They said they would build a transparent and credible mechanism, invite independent experts through an EoI, define the scope through ToRs. That language is so dry it is almost tedious — and precisely because it is dry, it is more credible than any slogan.

Can football do the same?

A league that wants to know what it is losing would have to do what almost no Asian league dares: hire outsiders, give them the right to read the books, read the contracts, interview the lowest-paid staff, then publish the findings even when they wound the people who commissioned them. If a league published what share of sponsor money flows to agents, what share of broadcast money never reaches the academies, how many clubs are living on debt — we would have a picture more shocking than any transfer story.

Nobody would dare. And that is exactly the difference.

Pakistan, in one sense, is doing what most Asian football federations will not: naming the leakage, and declaring that naming it is not a hostile act.

I wonder why a football observer like me has to learn that from the power sector.

One more detail made me pause longer than everything else: the solarisation pilots at Pesco and Qesco.

Technically, this is an admission that the central grid cannot be fixed in time. Rather than wait for the wires to be repaired, let users generate for themselves. It resembles a suspended football federation realising it cannot save the professional domestic league in the short term, and shifting all its resources down to local academies, community clubs, school pitches.

In football, that kind of decentralised solution is usually treated as a second-tier option. It generates no broadcast money, produces no elite fixtures, allows the media no blockbuster stories. But it endures, and it does not depend on a single owner.

I am at an age people call sufficiently weathered. I once said on camera to a Russian broadcaster that Germany would be eliminated in the 2026 World Cup group stage, while the whole studio laughed. I once said home-team win rates would collapse when stadiums emptied, and was fiercely pushed back on. I once learned something I still hold to: what is not recorded will never be repaired, while what is named correctly at least has a chance.

So reading about a technical audit for the power sector, what I see is a lesson Asian football forgets every season.

The counter-intuitive angle: Finding the leak is not sealing the leak

Here I have to say what most football writers avoid: Pakistan's audit may well fail.

Not because the problem will not be found. Because finding the problem is the easy part.

Look at the administrative sequence. ToRs are expected within a week. The EoI will follow shortly. Experts must be recruited, scope locked, survey schedules set for thousands of substations and millions of meters. Then data collection, cross-checking, report writing, submission to the committee, approval, conversion into recommendations, then waiting for another body to enforce them. Every step is a chance for this to quietly become an archived file.

And even if the report is published in full, it is still just a document. Electricity does not seal itself because someone wrote down that it leaks.

In football we know this well. We have watched match-fixing investigated for years, ending in a thick report, a few suspended sentences, and a few names vanishing from a list. Then everything returns to normal. We have watched clubs go bankrupt, be rescued, go bankrupt again, each time producing another statement about reform.

There is a truth I am certain of, however unpleasant it sounds: power thieves are not the cause of Pakistan's electricity crisis. Power thieves are the symptom of a system in which tariffs have been politicised to the point where ordinary people cannot afford to pay — and people who cannot afford to pay will find another way. The solar panels going up at Pesco and Qesco are not an anti-theft tool. They are a confession that the wire to those homes is too long and too expensive to keep.

The same holds for football. A player sold cheaply is no traitor. He is simply finding a way out of a system that cannot pay him. An agent earning huge commissions did not appear from nowhere; they exist because football's payment structure was designed to benefit them. And an owner who pulls his money out is not the cause of collapse. He is the first to see what everyone else is still singing about.

This is where I recall a line I keep in my notebook: "It took me thirty years to understand that the golden boy does not rise up; it is our layer of expectation that begins to crack." A technical audit is that paint beginning to crack. It does not improve the wire. It only makes it impossible to keep pretending the wire is intact.

And of course, I may be wrong. I am always capable of being wrong. That is why I write down my predictions, so that later I can read them back and see where my sight failed. A sixty-six-year-old man has no right to certainty. He only has the right to record.

What I am more certain of: this audit, win or lose, will reveal more about Pakistan than any of their football matches in the same period.

A view from the bench, and from those who are not counted

There is a group both Pakistan's power audit and every football audit ignores: the people operating at the lowest level.

At the DISCOs, they are the meter readers, the repair crews on the poles, the bill collectors walking the alleys. They know exactly where power is stolen, by whom, at what hour, and who upstream has allowed it. If the audit interviews only management, it will find nothing but numbers that have already been cleaned.

Football's equivalent is the physios, the kit men, the groundstaff, the interpreters for foreign players. They know which player has been three months behind on wages, which academy has stopped paying its electricity bill, which contract was signed in two different versions. Nobody asks them. Nobody pays them to speak.

"They call the uprising of young men a breach of discipline; I call it a contract rewriting its own clauses." The young people of Asian football — players and staff alike — are rewriting the clauses by leaving. They do not strike. They do not protest. They move to another league, another country, another profession. It is an undeclared strike, and it is more effective than any press conference.

Pakistan is attempting something football rarely attempts: measuring loss before it becomes tragedy. In power, loss can be measured in megawatts. In football, we have no unit. We only know that every year some country loses a handful of players nobody ever heard of, because they quit at sixteen, because the family could not afford to send them to training, because the only pitch in the district was turned into a shopping complex.

I once sat in a meeting room in Barcelona where analysts presented data on pressing efficiency and recoveries in the final third. Those numbers were beautiful. But in that moment I realised no spreadsheet measures the talent lost for want of money to buy boots. Modern football has tools to measure everything on the pitch, except what vanished before anyone stepped onto it.

That is the kind of loss no audit can see, because it leaves no paperwork.

And here is what I want to say plainly: if Asian football wants to learn from Pakistan, learn the spirit of its first week. Not the press-conference spirit. The decision to name the loss correctly, without apologising for it.

What can be verified

I like to leave predictions that can be checked, because neither football nor power forgives half-hearted forecasts.

Prediction one: the Terms of Reference will be published within about a week, exactly as the meeting stated. This is the most likely part, because it only requires paperwork.

Prediction two: it will take at least several months before any field data is gathered in meaningful quantity, and the final report will most likely be delayed.

Prediction three, and the one I believe most: within two years, the direct result of the audit will not be less electricity theft but restructuring of the distribution companies — mergers, rebranding, or replaced management. Losses will fall on paper before they fall on the ground.

And prediction four, for football: in the same window, at least one Asian club that has won a domestic title will announce bankruptcy, dissolution, or the sale of its entire squad — and no technical audit will be conducted to explain why.

You can read these four lines again in two years. I will still be here.

But what I want to leave with the young people working in football in Pakistan, in South Asia, anywhere the stadium lights depend on an ageing wire — is this. The audit is not for you, and it is not for football either. It is for those who come after. Those who will only know that there was once a league, a player, a goal, and then it all disappeared with nobody recording the reason.

"There is no great prophecy, only an old man weathered enough to see the crack the crowd chooses to ignore."

The crack is there. It is only waiting for someone to call it by its name.