Big Name, Small Purse: Haryana Kabaddi Champions League Expansion and the PKL Silence

I spent three hours at a trial ground in Bhiwani. I wasn't counting the players; I was counting the queue of form-fillers. The paperwork said 6,400 registrations. On the ground, the queue was so long that the registration counter stayed open well past noon on day one. Out of that queue, 300 names eventually made it to the Kabaddi Champions League auction, and the highest bid was Rs 17.4 lakh — for Ayan Lochab. The league's name suggests a new national stage for Indian kabaddi. But when you open the auction purse, you find that each franchise has just Rs 5 crore — roughly US$600,000, a small fraction of what a single Pro Kabaddi League team typically spends.

I have spent years on kabaddi training grounds. A training ground tells the truth before the scoreboard does — that is what I have learned. And this time, what the ground said was not just about Haryana.

The Pro Kabaddi League silence no headline is carrying

The biggest fact in this entire expansion story is buried in the fourth paragraph of the report. Pro Kabaddi League's 13th season, which would normally have started by now, has been pushed to June-July 2027. The stated reason is clear: no new broadcast rights deal has been signed. No replacement partner has been named either. For a sport like kabaddi, this is not merely a scheduling change. Kabaddi's entire revenue depends on television ratings and short-format packaging. If the flagship league has no broadcaster, the spine of the whole ecosystem is weakening.

I once spent 47 days inside an empty-stadium bubble in Bengaluru with Tamil Thalaivas. Those 47 days taught me what a crowd does to a stadium. But even then, the league was running. Matches were on TV. Commentary was happening. Now the situation is one step further — the league itself is stalled. And into that vacuum, the Kabaddi Champions League is announcing expansion, from 8 teams to 10.

Big name, but how big a game?

Look at the ten franchises. Bhiwani, Rohtak, Karnal, Gurugram, Sonipat, Panipat, Faridabad, Hisar, Jhajjar, Kurukshetra. All are in Haryana. Haryana has long been India's traditional nursery of wrestlers and kabaddi players. But anyone hearing the name 'Champions League' will look for teams from Maharashtra, Punjab or South India — and find none. The name borrows from UEFA's Champions League, but the footprint is clearly regional.

This is not a criticism. Kabaddi's roots in Haryana are deep, and a regional league has its own value. I have watched boys who train on mud in the morning and fill out forms at trials in the evening. Government and Railway jobs are their safety net. The whole economics here is semi-professional. The top bid of Rs 17.4 lakh proves it. In the Pro Kabaddi League, a top raider goes for over Rs 1 crore. Here, the top price is not even a sixth of that.

Sunil Malik and the 'Asian Games captain' question

One name in the auction is Sunil Malik, described in the report as 'India's Asian Games captain.' He went for Rs 10 lakh. That figure jolted me. If a player genuinely captained India at the Asian Games, how could his bid stay at just Rs 10 lakh? That suggests one of two things. Either the title is stale, from a past edition, or it refers to Circle Style, which the Pro Kabaddi League and standard international kabaddi treat differently. Or the market is not paying for international pedigree at the expected rate. I have not independently verified this label. But in a report with 19 factual claims of which only two have traceable sources, writing such a title without a check is misleading the reader.

I learned one lesson in my career: I counted the passes before I counted the points. Here the biggest data gap is that no player's raid points, tackle points or success rate is mentioned. Five players are named, with prices, but no performance record. So player quality can only be measured by market price — and market price here is modest.

Is expansion courage or compulsion?

The news of the Pro Kabaddi League stalling and the news of the Champions League expanding should be read together. They are not separate stories. They are two states of the same ecosystem. When the national league stands in an empty field, a window opens for a regional league. Haryana's players who would wait for the PKL auction now have another option this year. That is the Champions League's real strength — giving new players a platform. But calling it 'momentum' or 'expansion drive' creates an illusion. It is opportunism, seizing on a need, and there is no shame in that. The shame is that the report has not a single figure on broadcast, sponsorship, attendance or revenue. There is an expansion announcement, the purse has grown, but where the money will come from is nowhere written.

What to watch next

I am not reaching a verdict here. I am only pointing to the direction my signals point. The first signal: when does the Pro Kabaddi League's new media rights deal happen. If no broadcaster emerges by mid-2027, this crisis will affect the development pipeline of the entire sport. Second: whether the Kabaddi Champions League gets sanction from the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India or the International Kabaddi Federation. Playing in an unsanctioned league can raise questions over players' national-team eligibility. Third: confirmation of Sunil Malik's title. And fourth: whether this league gets any television or digital rights, or remains confined to the ground.

When people ask me what kabaddi's future is, I ask them a question: if the country's biggest kabaddi league has no TV channel, where will the next generation of raiders watch the sport? That question matters more than the Champions League's expansion, and nobody has an answer yet.