WALK INTO any room in India with a display from now till the tip of May and you can find your self watching the Indian Premier League (IPL), a wildly standard cricket event that’s by some measures the world’s most profitable sports activities league after America’s National Football League. Until a couple of days earlier than it began, late final month, the identical screens would have been displaying the Women’s Premier League (WPL), IPL’s ladies’s counterpart. Early March additionally noticed the inaugural season of the Indian Street Premier League—cricket performed with a yellow tennis ball.

It is a truism that Indians are obsessive about cricket. Yet the success of IPL has had the unlikely impact of spurring an efflorescence of home leagues in different sports activities, too. Over the previous decade leagues modelled on IPL have emerged in hockey, tennis, badminton, soccer and handball, together with indigenous video games comparable to kho kho and kabaddi. Some, notably kabaddi, have even been commercially profitable. A cricket-mad nation is diversifying.

Cricket took 87% of each rupee spent on sports activities promoting, sponsorship and endorsements final 12 months, in keeping with GroupM ESP, a advertising and marketing company. But that was down—a smidge—from 88% in 2021 (see chart). “The pie for non-cricket sport is going to grow,” says Divyanshu Singh of JSW Sports, which owns groups in IPL, WPL, Pro Kabaddi League and the Indian Super League, a soccer event.

As in some other growth, not all ventures will succeed. Some leagues have already folded. Yet the perpetrator shouldn’t be the dominance of cricket however a spread of inside components. For a brand new league to draw viewers it should provide the easiest expertise in that exact sport, says Sanjeev Tripathi of the Indian Institute of Management in Indore. With world sports activities accessible on tv and streaming, the distinction in high quality between, for instance, Indian and American basketball leagues is obvious. Kabaddi’s success can partially be attributed to the league providing the very best high quality of play accessible in that sport.

Moreover, leagues are inclined to succeed solely in staff sports activities. It is tough to construct up loyalty for synthetic groups in player-driven sports activities comparable to tennis and badminton. Any new league should even be nicely ruled and provide its backers a good probability of recouping their funding. That means setting wise caps on participant salaries, holding prices down and investing in excessive manufacturing requirements, says Anupam Goswami, commissioner of the Pro Kabaddi League. As with the standard of play, viewers accustomed to world sports activities are turned off by amateurish manufacturing. Another essential cause for non-cricket sports activities to achieve India, says Mr Singh, is success itself: “As a TV-viewing audience, we are not such fans of sport. We are fans of superstars.”

Yet crucial consider sustaining the sports activities growth is one the place progress stays sluggish. Though Indian viewers are glad to observe sports activities, charges of bodily exercise are low. A latest survey by YouGov, a pollster, discovered that whereas 57% of respondents described themselves as followers of cricket, solely 31% had really performed the sport within the earlier 12 months. Rates for different sports activities are even decrease. Three-quarters of Indian adolescents are bodily inactive, in keeping with the UN’s World Health Organisation. “The younger generation has never played these sports,” says Jinisha Sharma of Capri Sports, which owns cricket, kabaddi and kho kho groups. “How do you keep finding newer talent?”■

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