Haryana's Kabaddi Champions League: Ten Teams, a Five-Crore Purse, and an Emptying Stadium

The first thing you notice at a training ground is who arrives before the lights. Last month, at a ground in Bhiwani, there were four boys at 5:30 a.m. — no coach, no camera, just a line of bricks that had become the baulk line. One of them told me he was among the 6,400 who registered for the Kabaddi Champions League trials. When 300 names were picked for ten teams, his wasn't on the list. He was there the next morning too. That is the most honest picture of this league's expansion — and it is nothing like the mainstream version.

The news that has come out is that the league has grown from eight teams to ten, and each franchise has been handed a purse of Rs 5 crore to build its squad. That number sounds large and is not. Five crore rupees is roughly US$600,000 — well below what a single Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) franchise has historically spent on an auction. The ten franchise cities — Bhiwani, Rohtak, Karnal, Gurugram, Sonipat, Panipat, Faridabad, Hisar, Jhajjar and Kurukshetra — are all in Haryana. The name sounds national; the reality is a state-level, semi-professional competition.

One clarification matters here, because it is the single biggest creative dependency in the coverage: the Rs 5 crore figure is repeatedly written as if it were prize money when it is each team's total purchase budget. The highest bid went to Ayan Lochab at Rs 17.4 lakh. And Sunil Malik, described in the report as 'India's Asian Games captain,' was signed for Rs 10 lakh. A player labelled the national team's captain going cheaper than his own team's most expensive buy is the one signal about this league's value system that no headline carries. My notebook has kept the same yardstick since 2026: when an institution does not pay international pedigree its due, either the pedigree is stale or the market does not know how to price the medal. One of the two is true here, and I cannot say which — but the record is clear that both cannot be.

On the tactical side, the league says nothing. No raid points, no tackle points, no success rates. Three hundred players were picked, but in what positions, for what system, is not recorded anywhere. Whether Standard Style 7v7 rules apply or the six-man Circle Style tradition is also unstated. Without gameplay rules and performance data, auction prices only tell you who was bought; they do not tell you who wins.

The real question in this story, though, is not the league. There is a sentence in the fourth paragraph that matters far more than the expansion to ten teams: PKL's thirteenth season, due this year, has been pushed to June-July 2027 because its broadcast-partnership agreement is stuck. The commercial spine of Indian kabaddi — the only league that turns the sport into television money — is currently sitting without a channel, and no replacement broadcaster has been named. That is not a calendar manoeuvre; it is a question about the entire professional layer of the sport. If a PKL season is skipped, the tier of the player economy that rests on advertising, TV ratings and sponsor expectation loses its floor.

That is why the expansion needs a different lens. Growing from eight to ten is not proof of the league's strength; it is the room opened by PKL going dark. When the national stage is stalled, a regional body gets an opportunity it would not normally have. The 6,400-plus trial registrations confirm this — it is not a measure of public demand but of the scarcity of opportunity in the rural sports economy. In Haryana, the old link between sport and a government job is still alive; kabaddi remains a route into the railways, police and army. Reports that read 6,400 trialists as 'huge popularity' forget the boy standing alone on the ground on a Friday morning.

Here is where outside observers misread. They assume this league is a smaller rival to PKL. It is not. When I was the only woman in the press enclosure at the Senior National Championship, the notebook was already teaching the same thing — know the hierarchy, write down institutional limits. This league is not a place to challenge PKL's salaries; it is a route where an uncontracted Haryana player can find his next contract. Its expansion will become meaningful when its broadcast deal, sponsors and attendance appear in public. Until then, call it the first step of development, not the display of it.

The signals to track next quarter are these: whether PKL announces a new broadcast deal or delays further; whether the league obtains AKFI or IKF sanction — without it, its players' national-team eligibility can get tangled; and which roster Sunil Malik's 'Asian Games captain' designation is recorded in. I have kept names, dates and postings in my notebook, because if the sport's biggest stage sits still for a year, this small league is the first shelter — and a shelter needs an accounting, not a headline.