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Can non-cricket team sports truly grow in India?
India's sporting landscape is dominated by Bollywood and cricket, creating a nation of pundits rather than players. While kabaddi and football have seen fleeting success, a lack of institutional support and consistent narratives hinders growth. True progress requires investment in grassroots, better governance, and media storytelling beyond cricket's shadow.
Every social observer worth their moth-eaten notepad keeps a sepia-tinted document with two axioms scribbled on top: Bollywood and cricket. These are not simply entertainment forms. They are parallel mythologies that have grown into each other like two intertwined banyan roots. Cinema borrows cricket's swagger. Cricket borrows cinema's stardust. One gives drama. The other gives storyline.
Together they have built India's only two dependable mass spectacles. Everything else—hockey, football, kabaddi, kho-kho, athletics—has existed at the edges of this light, basking in the reflected glow of the marquee.
NATION OF PUNDITS, NOT PLAYERS
We are not, if we are honest, a nation of sportsmen. We are a nation of sports-discussing pundits. A billion selectors, fluent in strike rates and field placements, armed with post-factum wisdom. Cricket is built for this temperament. Its pauses invite pontification. Its statistics seduce the amateur analyst. Its rivalries keep conversations alive in living rooms, offices and WhatsApp groups.
Try sustaining the same national chatter around the tactical angles of kho-kho or the shape of a badminton rally.
Even football, the global language of sport, cannot match the conversational churn that cricket generates in India.
Ours is a civilisation that experiences sport through commentary rather than participation.
INTERNATIONAL MIRAGE
This inclination shows up in the record books. Across 26 Olympic Games, India has managed 41 medals. The Tokyo haul—seven medals and one golden Neeraj—was a bright comet against a dark sky. We celebrate individual brilliance, but rarely build the scaffolding beneath it. Our sporting system remains ornamental, not institutional. We produce moments but never machines.
KABADDI'S FLICKER
Kabaddi was the unexpected insurgent. When the Pro Kabaddi League arrived on television, it did not simply broadcast a rural sport. It turned it into spectacle. Floodlights, pounding music, dramatic camera angles. Raids became theatre. At its peak, the league crossed 220 million viewers and became the only non-cricket property to breach that number more than once.
Spectacle, however, builds curiosity, not community. Community needs school competitions, coaching pipelines and patient investment. Kabaddi's television success is real. Whether it can grow deep roots is still unclear.
FOOTBALL'S RISE AND RETREAT
Football had its moment of borrowed IPL optimism. The Indian Super League entered with glamour owners, imported stars and noisy stadiums. In its first season, the league claimed more than 400 million viewers. A decade later that figure has fallen to about 130 million. Attendance in Kerala has dipped. Goa's stands have thinned out. Bengal's passion has aged into nostalgia. The decline is not of feeling. It is of faith. Supporters did not abandon football. Football failed to give them a product worth their loyalty.
POWER, POLITICS AND THE PITCH
The political class understood this landscape early. Cricket offers cultural capital that no other sport can match. BCCI has long been home to politicians from across the spectrum. Stadium inaugurations give camera time. IPL auctions offer proximity to power. Victory podiums deliver reflected glory. Other federations remain side portfolios. They are praised when medals come but ignored when budgets are drawn.
IA'S ONE-TRACK MIND
The media has rarely found a non-cricket story that can feed its engines. Cricket is not just a sport. It is an ecosystem. The IPL keeps newsrooms busy for months with auctions, previews, gossip, buildups and mid-innings chatter. Kabaddi arrives for a season. Volleyball flickers briefly. Hockey revivals falter. Without reliable calendars and compelling narratives, advertisers drift away. When media does not tell a story, fandom does not form.
GLIMMERS OF POSSIBILITY
Look closely and there are cracks of light. Kabaddi has shown that an indigenous sport can be modernised without losing its soul. Khokho's reboot is modest but meaningful. Badminton, boxing and wrestling have delivered podiums because of patient investment, not slogans. Women's sport, especially women's cricket, has proved that visible pathways and serious structures create compounding effects.
The ingredients are not a mystery. Governance must come before glamour. Calendars before campaigns. Local rivalries before imported allegiances. Media storytelling before media hype. Above all, political and corporate incentives must look beyond the boundary rope.
ROAD BEYOND THE BOUNDARY
Non-cricket sports can grow in India. The change will not come from another season launch or celebrity endorsement. It will come from schools that treat sport as serious work. From federations that behave like adults. From media that stays for the long game.
From fans willing to look beyond the familiar green oval. Cricket is not the villain here. It is the elder sibling who learned early to speak the language of television. For the younger ones to grow, they need parents who invest, coaches who persist and storytellers who care. Until then, every new league will remain a bright meteor in the cricketing night sky. Dazzling for a moment, then quietly fading into the dark.Add as a Reliable and Trusted News Source Add Now!
Source: EconomicTimes
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