When the thought was offered, within the early 2010s, to convey kabaddi — a standard, largely rural, sport — to air-conditioned stadiums in city cities and showcase it with jazzy television-friendly graphics, it didn’t have many takers. The IPL was on the time India’s solely profitable, mainstream league, and fully dominated the nation’s sporting panorama.

Today, it is honest to say that the Pro Kabaddi League has revolutionised the game of kabaddi, remodeling it — thanks partly to tweaked, TV-friendly guidelines — into a contemporary sport for a contemporary viewers. The gamers, who had been sceptical about its viability when advised of the early plans, have been satisfied solely after they have been featured in photoshoots and promotional video campaigns. Their successors have been made into superhero figures, with one even nicknamed Baahubali.

The development has been in each side:

• The league itself has grown from eight groups to 12 — the entry of latest groups an endorsement of the PKL’s reputation, with traders keen to guess on it.

• Today’s gamers are incomes multiples of the early-season paycheques. Rakesh Kumar was PKL 1’s most costly participant, incomes Rs 12.8 lakh; present India captain Pawan Kumar Sehrawat was signed by Telugu Titans this 12 months for Rs 2.6 crore — greater than 20 occasions the worth.

• PKL can be now a magnet for worldwide stars, attracting gamers from 12 nations. It’s a little bit of a double-edged sword: the PKL was additionally not directly credited for Iran’s upset of India on the 2018 Asian Games.

• In viewership phrases Star Sports Network*, the league’s official broadcaster, says the present season has clocked 226 million viewers within the first 90 matches – a 17% enhance in attain in comparison with Season 9. In truth Season 10 has already surpassed final 12 months’s viewership figures, with the playoffs and finals but to be performed.

All this, and extra — fan engagement, for instance, as is obvious in case you watch a match on the stadium — makes the PKL comfortably India’s second-most-watched sporting league. It’s grown, on a number of parameters, from power to power. But what’s subsequent? How can the PKL maintain this success — and broaden much more?

Film producer Ronnie Screwvala, one of many league’s unique backers and proprietor of former champions U Mumba, believes it nonetheless has lots of potential to develop. “I would say that the initial growth was certainly exponential and as a team owner we broke even pretty much straight away. I do think, though, there could have and should have been substantial growth thereafter as well with the second round of media rights with more than 330 million people tuning in and kabaddi firmly becoming India’s second sport.”

He was referring to the public sale of PKL’s media rights in 2021, the place Star India* retained the media rights for Rs 905 crore for a 5-year interval. That charge translated to Rs 181 crore per season, reportedly double of what the sooner annual media rights charge was. However, Screwvala feels extra could be performed to unlock PKL’s true potential.

“We’re yet to unlock the full potential and value of the sport and we need pushes in the right direction, whether it be media rights, sponsorships or the overall growth of sport in an organized manner too,” he says. “With the media rights of the Women’s Premier League being Rs 950 crores in year one, given the substantially larger audience of PKL now in its 10th season, we should hopefully generate the growth that PKL deserves over the next 5-6 years.”

That bullish forecast is what inspired Capri Sports, a part of the monetary advisory agency Capri Global, to take over the Bengal Warriors franchise in 2023. Apurv Gupta, Capri Global’s head of contact sports activities, says their choice to hitch the PKL fold was pushed by the league’s success on a number of fronts.

“When you’re entering into Indian sports and you’re looking to grow a business, any entrepreneur, any businessman, any business house would look at kabaddi because it has sustained itself so beautifully over the last 10 years. In terms of viewership, player profiles, player salaries and the sustaining of the league through the bio-bubble — all the angles of the sport have grown.”

Preventing a plateau

The PKL was initially pushed by the league and its proprietor broadcasters. The feeling is that, going ahead, the expansion will should be franchise-driven, player-association-driven. The dialog is less complicated now for the league, with many franchise homeowners concerned throughout sport (like JSW with Haryana Steelers within the PKL, Bengaluru FC within the ISL and Delhi Capitals within the IPL), nevertheless it stays a difficult one.

Suhail Chandhok, CEO of U Mumba, feels an “active role is needed from everyone involved to ensure we aren’t sitting back and expecting the sport to grow itself over the next crucial phase.”

“It’s about [franchises] creating their true brand value,” says Nic Coward, an skilled advisor to the PKL who has additionally labored on high international sports activities occasions such because the Premier League. “It should be an asset growth story. Ultimately, these are owners of a franchise in a league who are building that value. And I still think sometimes that there’s a great disparity between the franchises. Some absolutely understand, not least because they have a portfolio perhaps now of different properties (like a JSW).”

The league, then, has to deal with franchises as totally different and distinctive. “And you want this because you want a difference in your league.” He takes the instance of Puneri Paltan, who revisited the thought of what their franchise needs to be early on. They felt there was an absence of gamers in India and the one option to deal with that situation was by organising an academy to create a pathway and have homegrown gamers make up their group.

Academies — as a dependable and constant feeder system for the groups — are essential for the expansion of any league. As of now, solely three groups have academies: Puneri Paltan, UP Yoddhas and Tamil Thalaivas, with a majority of the gamers within the league coming from personal academies run by PKL coaches or from the quite a few Sports Authority of India centres. However, for an even bigger pool of gamers, it will largely profit groups all throughout if they’ll arrange a feeder system to unearth the next-gen of kabaddi stars.

Kailash Kandpal, CEO of Puneri Paltan, says the group took inspiration from soccer golf equipment and cricket leagues. “We saw that the sport was picking up, but there was a shortage of players in the pipeline. So, we decided to develop talent from the grassroots and get a new supply of players for our team’s sustenance.”

Their concept was to recruit gamers between the ages of 16 and 17 in order that by the point they joined the PKL-fold across the age of 20, they might have reached the height efficiency level of their careers.

“We have players from across the length and breadth of the country. It’s not that we only have players from Maharashtra because we’re Puneri Paltan, we have boys from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Haryana and Punjab as well. And we have shown them that there is something for all of them here, they can make it to the A team if they do well.”

It’s additionally one thing that the PKL’s Mr. Consistent Maninder Singh — the one present participant to have performed within the inaugural season — want to see going ahead: extra groups being attentive to the grassroots. “A few teams have academies and that has helped them prepare players before they join PKL, which adds stability. Like in football, clubs have players from the U14 level who then grow into the senior team. It would be great if we had a similar system in kabaddi too.”

Also, says Chandhok, it is essential to have an ecosystem for the gamers in the course of the non-PKL months.

He says, “I think player education is a big element that could come in to ensure that the athletes remain professionals for the nine months of the year that players aren’t playing the PKL. I also think that the ecosystem itself needs to grow as a whole by welcoming new stakeholders that want to take the sport to new parts and grow it, whether that be in India, or at the grassroots level in an organised manner or to take the sport globally and send coaches from India abroad to bring new nations to the sport.”

There is just one initiative thus far that has sought to bridge the hole — the Yuva Kabaddi Series [YKS]. Launched in 2022 by Suhail Chandhok and Arvind Sivdas, the YKS is performed twice every year and caters solely to gamers under the age of 20. The concept behind establishing the YKS was to supply an expert platform for junior gamers and likewise double up as a feeder system.

Each match is streamed on-line, giving younger gamers an avenue to showcase their expertise and entice alternatives to play for PKL groups, that are in any other case largely restricted to trials. A number one instance is Sudhakar M, whose stellar exhibiting within the YKS earned him a name from three-time champions Patna Pirates this season.

More rule modifications

There’s additionally room for extra technological innovation — these rule tweaks have been essential to kickstart the league and, 10 years down the road, there are extra being deliberate.

E Prasad Rao, the PKL’s technical director fondly often known as “Kabaddi Rao”, explains. “We are still making changes to the rules. On day 1 we got a mud sport to the mat and changed small rules and now we are getting into complicated rules, like the lobby rule. I tell all the international kabaddi bodies – the PKL is the biggest laboratory where we can do experiments. Like the lobby rule, for example, we changed it and now, after the Asian Games, everyone sees why we made the change.”

He provides, “We’re trying to inculcate a way where if a player is tagged, then like the bails in cricket, something should be lit up. Or if someone crosses the line, then there should be a light to signify that.”