Kabaddi's Second Decade: From Clay Courts to a Broadcast Economy

Kabaddi has long been called India's 'second sport' in the sense that everyone plays it and nobody buys a ticket to watch it. That assumption has been partly broken over the past decade. The sport now has a television product, a franchise league, sponsors and athletes whose faces travel from neighbourhood courts to brand campaigns. But the structure underneath, namely district associations, school competitions, coaching, medical support and post-retirement security, has not grown at the same speed as the market above it. This imbalance is the central story of kabaddi today. The rules are deceptively simple: a court, seven players, a thirty-second raid, and one unforgiving condition that a raider must cross into the opponent's half while holding his breath and must touch at least one defender before returning. This simplicity is both the sport's strength and its weakness. The strength is that no rulebook is needed to start watching. The weakness is that depth has to be manufactured by television production and team strategy. Once you learn to read the decisions inside a raid and a tackle, the game looks like chess, but that literacy is not automatic for a viewer. It has to be taught. The first institutional turning point was the 2026 Beijing Asian Games, when kabaddi became a medal sport after appearing as a demonstration event at Delhi in 2026. Inclusion in the Asian structure forced every country to build a federation, a selection process and a calendar. It prevented the sport from remaining a purely Indian domestic matter, but it also created an odd contradiction: international competition stayed limited to a small set of countries because the sport's base was cultural rather than universal. Where the game existed as tradition, competition was thin; where competition was manufactured, tradition was absent. The kabaddi World Cup, first held in India in 2026, attempted to fill that gap and to give countries with diaspora communities a stage. It sent an important signal that the sport is not exclusively Asian, but it did not establish a permanent global calendar. The tournament returned at irregular intervals, and every edition had to build an audience from zero. That is kabaddi's second structural weakness: it lacks a continuous international competition. The real change came in 2026 with the launch of the Pro Kabaddi League. This was not merely a new competition; it changed the ownership structure of the sport. Federations had run kabaddi, with organising and selection as their core functions. The market began to run it. Franchise owners invested on the premise that a domestic television audience would watch kabaddi if it were packaged properly. The opening season was built around eight teams, later expanded. Crucially, the league changed presentation: courtside cameras, close-ups of players, the speed of the mat, and bilingual commentary that explained the strategy of a raid to a new viewer. Broadcast economics made this possible. Kabaddi arrived at a moment when Indian television had very little sports content besides cricket. It filled that vacuum, especially in Hindi-speaking regions, smaller cities and towns where audiences were large but advertising rates were far below cricket's. That became its economic base: low cost, a long season, regional-language commentary and brands that could not reach metropolitan audiences through cricket. The franchise model also created a new category inside the sport: the athlete who becomes a league star before becoming a national team regular. The auction made player valuations public, and that public price became part of their identity. A good raider used to be known at district level; now he was a name that got sold. This created an appetite for professionalism, but also a new risk: a player who went unsold in the auction had no strong economic alternative outside the league. As a result, player income has become two-tiered. On one side are regulars with contracts, endorsements and media presence. On the other are players dependent on state association tournaments and government sports-quota jobs. In between is a large group that must re-earn its place every season. That instability is the weakest part of professionalisation, because a player's career is short and the path afterwards is unclear. The talent pathway still begins mostly in villages and small towns. Kabaddi's great advantage is that it needs no expensive equipment, no large ground and no costly academy. A flat patch of ground and a dozen children are enough. That is why the sport reaches families for whom cricket or football academy fees are impossible. But the same strength sets a limit: because the sport is cheap, investment in its organisation has rarely been a priority. Until the league drew attention, there was no established practice of spending systematically on coaching, physiotherapy and nutrition. Training has visibly changed in recent years. The traditional method emphasised strength and endurance: morning runs, rope skipping and long practice sessions. Teams now have strength and conditioning coaches, video analysts and physiotherapists. This was necessary because the game has become faster. A modern raider makes several decisions inside thirty seconds, and a defender must react to a constantly shifting situation. Muscle reactivity and mobility matter as much as raw strength. Tactically, the sport has moved toward specialisation. A good player once did both jobs; now teams divide clearly into raiders, cover defenders and corner defenders. Traditional raiding has been replaced by risk-calculated raiding: when to go alone, when to split two defenders, when to take the bonus-point risk and when to simply kill time and return. This change also helped television, because the difference between a slow raid and an aggressive one became legible to viewers. Data analysis is the natural next step. Teams now track an opponent raider's preferred routes, a defender's tackle patterns and a player's fatigue markers. This information has become part of pre-match preparation. But a caution applies: data is only as useful as the competition behind it is large and reliable. Teams without a long domestic calendar do not have enough data to analyse. The benefits of analytics are therefore distributed as unevenly as the calendar itself. Injury and player welfare is the area with the most unfinished work. Kabaddi involves direct physical contact; tackles load the neck, shoulders, knees and ankles. Fatigue accumulates across a long season, and injury risk rises with it. Professional teams have medical support, but players outside the league have uneven access. If the sport is to be durable, recovery periods, insurance and rehabilitation must become mandatory parts of league contracts. On the international map, the biggest shift is Iran's rise. Iran treated kabaddi as a systematic sports project, investing consistently in selection, training camps and physical preparation. As a result, India can no longer expect comfortable wins in every Asian competition. The presence of Iranian players in the Indian league deepened this effect, because it gave them an inside view of Indian playing styles. Names such as Fazel Atrachali and Mohammadreza Shadloui became symbols of that shift, demonstrating that Iranian defensive systems can pose a lasting challenge to Indian raiding. Bangladesh, South Korea, Japan, Chinese Taipei and Thailand have maintained programmes as well. Some built a base by introducing the sport in schools; others prepared teams around the Asian Games cycle. All face the same constraint: a small domestic market means no year-round calendar to keep players busy, and without that, international improvement stays slow. Women's kabaddi is a different and important story. Women played a key role in establishing the sport in the Asian Games, and the Indian women's team has long been one of the strongest units in the game. Domestically, however, they never received a platform on the scale of the men's league. The consequence is direct: when a girl cannot see a future in the sport, her family will not let her stay in it. The availability and continuity of a women's league is therefore not merely a commercial decision but a question of retaining half the sport's human resources. At the grassroots level, the biggest challenge is identifying talent and looking after it. India does not lack kabaddi talent; it lacks timely identification and a structured pathway. District and state competitions remain irregular, have no public calendar, and selection transparency has repeatedly been questioned. Until a player can trust that good performance leads somewhere predictable, a large share of talent will leave the sport. Infrastructure raises a related point. Professional league matches are played on mats, while most kabaddi in India is played on clay. The demands differ: sliding and falling on clay is different from speed and balance on a mat. A player raised on clay takes time to adapt. The absence of high-performance training centres is therefore not just a comfort issue but a technical gap that directly affects performance. Governance is the most sensitive part of this picture. As the commercial value of the sport rises, the balance of power between federations, the league and players must be renegotiated. Who sets the calendar, when national camps are held, and whose interests prevail when the league and the national team collide are questions that only institutional clarity can answer. Without that clarity, the player is caught in the middle of every dispute. Integrity can no longer be set aside either. As betting and prediction markets press on the sport, the risk of match-fixing and unethical conduct rises. Alongside this, the framework for anti-doping testing and education must be strengthened. Smaller leagues have weaker oversight, and weak oversight is the biggest risk of all. On media and storytelling, kabaddi has achieved something significant: it turned regional identity from a weakness into a strength. Commentary in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Bangla brought the sport to audiences who felt distant from English cricket commentary. But there is a risk here too. If coverage stays confined to matches and stars, the sport's structural problems will never make headlines. Sports journalism's job is not only to build excitement but to show the system in which athletes are made and broken. At community level, the sport's reach is its greatest asset. Kabaddi is still played in villages every evening, and that is the reservoir from which talent emerges. The question is how to give that reservoir institutional form. Local tournaments, school leagues and panchayat-level competitions, if bound into a single calendar, would make talent identification far easier. It is not expensive; it needs only organisation and continuity. Globalisation is in an awkward position. The sport is played in many countries, but domestic markets there are too small for professional leagues to survive. This means the global centre of the sport will remain India, and the stronger that centre is, the more durable the sport will be. It is an uncomfortable truth, but accepting it makes policy easier: stabilise the sport in India first, then expand abroad. Olympic inclusion is raised periodically. Realism is needed: to earn a place on the Olympic programme, a sport must be organised and competitive across a large number of countries, not merely popular in a few. Kabaddi has popularity but limited geographic spread. Rather than treating this as a short-term publicity theme, it should be part of a long-term development plan: permanent national federations on every continent, regular continental competitions and coaching exchange. Commercial risk is real as well. The revenue model rests mainly on broadcast rights and sponsorship. If viewership falls in a given year or a major sponsor exits, the effect lands directly on team budgets and player contracts. Diversifying revenue is essential: stadium attendance, ticketing, local sponsorship, digital subscriptions and merchandising. All of this is possible only if a team's relationship with its city is emotional rather than purely commercial. The way forward can be divided into three levels. First, make player welfare and safety mandatory: insurance, medical support, standardised contracts and post-retirement assistance. Second, fix the competition structure: a public calendar from district to national level so that talent gets a predictable chance to be seen. Third, give women's kabaddi an equal platform, because no sport can reach its full potential while discarding half its human resources. Kabaddi stands at a rare turning point. It has achieved what few Indian sports have: a television audience, a professional league and durable public space. But that achievement is not an end in itself. The next decade will be decided by whether the sport sees its success as merely a media product or as an institution in which athletes are safe, the talent pathway is clear and competition is geographically spread. The first path looks faster; the second is sustainable. The journey from the clay court to a broadcast economy is complete, but the work of keeping that economy connected to the clay is still pending.