Kabaddi Champions League Expands to 10 Teams and a Rs 5 Crore Purse, But Under the Shadow of the PKL Crisis

Rohtak/New Delhi: The Haryana-based Kabaddi Champions League has announced a major expansion for its second season. The league will grow from 8 to 10 teams, and each franchise will receive a purse of Rs 5 crore for the player auction. Organisers say this will give teams greater scope to assemble their squads and create more employment opportunities for new players. On the surface, this is a positive piece of sports-business news: a move from fewer teams to more, a higher auction budget, and the participation of thousands of rural athletes. But read against the wider Indian kabaddi ecosystem, the picture is not nearly so clean. The expansion arrives at a time when the country's flagship professional competition, the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL), is dealing with a broadcast-rights crisis, and its next season may slip to the summer of 2027. First, the purse figure needs to be understood properly. Rs 5 crore is roughly US$600,000. It is not prize money; it is the total squad-building budget available to a franchise for bidding at the auction. By PKL standards this is a small number, where a single team's auction outlay has historically run several times higher. Second, and more importantly, the available information does not clarify whether the Rs 5 crore is per franchise or for the entire league. That ambiguity matters because the two readings imply very different outcomes. The highest bid at the auction went to Ayan Lochab, signed for Rs 17.4 lakh. That is the league's top price, but it sits well below the PKL level, where star raiders command upwards of Rs 1 crore. Sunil Malik was signed for Rs 10 lakh and is described in the report as 'India's Asian Games captain.' There is an internal contradiction here: if a player really has captained the national team, why is his value below the top bid? There are three possible explanations: the label is stale or decorative, it refers to a different edition or a different rule variant, or it is a reporting error. Absent independent confirmation, this claim should not be treated as fact. On the supply side, the numbers are striking. The league's trials drew around 6,400 registrations, and more than 300 players made it into the auction pool. That says a great deal about the depth of grassroots kabaddi in Haryana and the surrounding region. But treating it as proof of the league's popularity would be a mistake. It is a supply-side number, not evidence of demand. Rural youth are chasing scarce sporting opportunity; a heavy turnout at trials signals that alternatives are limited, not that audiences are growing. The league's geography also clarifies its identity. The ten franchise cities, Bhiwani, Rohtak, Karnal, Gurugram, Sonipat, Panipat, Faridabad, Hisar, Jhajjar and Kurukshetra, are all in Haryana. The state has traditionally been India's wrestling and kabaddi heartland, producing athletes who came out of mud akhadas and reached national and international level. In that sense this is fundamentally a regional league carrying a name, 'Champions League,' that evokes a global scale it does not have. There is no indication of any meaningful presence in Maharashtra, Punjab or South India, so describing it as a national competition would be premature. Now the part that matters most and that stayed out of the headlines. According to the report, the PKL has been unable to secure a new broadcast partner, and its 13th season may consequently be pushed to June-July 2027. Launched in 2026, the PKL is the commercial anchor of Indian kabaddi: player incomes, sponsorship, television audiences and the national-team pipeline all rest substantially on it. Kabaddi is a broadcast-dependent sport; its appeal is built on a highly compressed, television-friendly format. A vacant media-rights slot is therefore not merely a scheduling issue but a structural shock to the entire ecosystem. Against that backdrop, the Champions League's expansion looks less like strength and more like opportunism. With the top league stalled and hundreds of trained players idle, a regional league can pick them up cheaply. That may be a smart tactical move, but it should not be read as evidence of the sport's growing power. On the administrative side, a major question is unanswered. It is not clear who sanctions the league: is it recognised by the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India (AKFI) or the International Kabaddi Federation (IKF), or is it an independent event run by a private promoter? This matters because playing in an unsanctioned league can affect a player's eligibility for national-team selection. Similarly, there is no information on player contract terms, anti-doping arrangements or refereeing standards. For a fast-growing but thinly institutionalised league, those silences are a cause for concern. Commercially it is even murkier. The available information contains no data on broadcast rights, sponsorship, ticket sales, attendance or revenue. In other words, the claims of going from 8 to 10 teams and increasing the purse come without any revenue-side evidence. The history of India's non-cricket leagues suggests that franchise owners or promoters carry the costs in the early years; if broadcast and sponsorship revenue do not follow, the model does not last. As a rough estimate, if Rs 5 crore is spread across a squad of 15 to 20 players, the average salary works out to Rs 25-33 lakh, yet the top bid is only Rs 17.4 lakh. That implies either large squads or budgets that are not fully spent, and both raise questions about how the auction is structured. Putting the risks together clarifies the picture. The competitive risk is that a regional footprint is being presented under a national-sounding name. The professional risk is that top talent will not stay long in a league paying well below PKL levels. The commercial risk is that no broadcast or revenue data has been disclosed. The governance risk is that sanctioning and eligibility remain undefined. And the largest risk of all is ecosystem-wide: the PKL broadcast crisis, which affects the sport's entire revenue chain. Taken together, the overall risk level is high, and not because of the Champions League's own modest scale but because of the context in which the news has arrived. The conclusion is that this is essentially a story about the expansion of a regional, semi-professional development league in Haryana, presented while the country's flagship league is stalled. Its real strength lies in the more than 6,400 trial registrations, a genuine talent reservoir for the country. But before accepting the 'expansion plus bigger purse' headline as proof of achievement, three things should be awaited: a new PKL broadcast deal, federation sanction for the Champions League, and a broadcast or revenue deal of the league's own. Until then, it is more reasonable to read the expansion as growth dressed up as progress.