Haryana's Kabaddi Champions League: The PKL Broadcast Crisis Behind the Expansion

In a franchise office in Sonipat, a young player sits waiting for the biggest bid of his career. A strip of tape on his wrist bears just his name — no club, no sponsor. The bidding begins, the number on screen climbs slowly, and when the auction ends, his name sits not at the top but at ninth — Rs 17.4 lakh. This is the league whose name carries both 'Champions' and 'League,' whose purse is fixed at Rs 5 crore per franchise, and in which a senior player with golden hair — Sunil Malik — described as 'India's Asian Games captain,' slips behind the curtain at just Rs 10 lakh.

The teams of the Kabaddi Champions League are Bhiwani, Rohtak, Karnal, Gurugram, Sonipat, Panipat, Faridabad, Hisar, Jhajjar, and Kurukshetra. All ten cities are in Haryana. This expansion from 8 to 10 teams was announced into the air, while over 6,400 players turned up for trials and 300 names reached the auction pool. For me — someone who has kept a ledger of kabaddi for years — this league stands not on the stage but in the margins. And the money being discussed is not even one-sixth the top price of a single Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) star raider.

Over the past few seasons, I have made many phone calls about raider prices in PKL auctions — to a corner defender posted in Haryana Police and a raider recruited by the Railways — and both repeated the same thing: a franchise budget's real meaning is not just the bid, but the terms of the contract. In this league, those terms are nowhere recorded.

What is a Rs 5 crore purse — a PKL team's floor or ceiling? When I combed through PKL auction numbers, one thing became clear: a PKL team typically spends several crore rupees. A purse of Rs 5 crore per franchise here means this league stands at a developmental, semi-professional tier, and if it is mistaken for a PKL alternative, it will directly create a financial illusion.

But the biggest story of this entire narrative lies buried not on the front page but in the fourth paragraph. Just as this league talks of expansion, the PKL — kabaddi's commercial pillar — is grappling with a broadcast-rights crisis. Season 13 has been pushed to June-July 2027, and no new media partner is named anywhere. This is not merely a scheduling delay; it is a question mark over the entire pipeline that has given kabaddi its television heat since 2026.

Whenever I hear a claim of a league's 'strength,' my first question is — where is the broadcast? Where are the viewers? Where are the tickets? Here, not one of these three data points exists. Yes, 6,400 names turned up at trials, but that is a supply-side number, not demand. A young man from a Haryana village enters kabaddi because there is a path to a government job and a sports quota, not because he wants to watch a league on TV. That is why the sale of a player like Sunil Malik — an 'Asian Games captain' — for Rs 10 lakh rings a warning bell for me: either that designation is stale, or the market is not pricing international experience. Either way, it shows the limits of this league's prestige.

Treating expansion as progress is an old mistake — and this time it could prove costly. This league reminds me of 2026, when PKL was suspended and I built a list of forty players' phone numbers. The question then was the same — where does a player's career go when the league shuts down? This league could be a partial answer to that question, but only if it is understood not as a PKL competitor but as a bridge. And building a bridge requires clarity on its autonomy — is it recognised by the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India (AKFI)? What framework exists for player contracts, doping control, and refereeing standards? Without these answers, this league carries the risk of becoming a 'shadow federation' that can entangle national-team eligibility.

I have another figure before me. Imagine, if a Rs 5 crore purse builds a team of 15 players, the average salary lands around Rs 33 lakh — but the top price is only Rs 17.4 lakh. This means either teams are not spending the full budget, or the squad size is large. Either way, this league is not yet showing any means of earning back its expenditure.

As a financial journalist, I would call this 'opportunism' more than 'progress.' Announcing expansion right in the middle of PKL's stall may be a sensible move — the crowd at trials says as much — but this move will only be meaningful if money comes in from outside, if viewers come. I have not heard any broadcast deal announcement, read any sponsor's name, or seen a crowd count in any stadium. All of this recalls the 'perfect storm' in which many Indian non-cricket leagues have drowned.

So can this league replace PKL? My answer is no. And I think the league's organisers know this too. This league is a new platform for kabaddi talent emerging from Haryana's villages, and that is valuable in itself. But if it is billed on a large scale as 'national,' it will be far from the reality in which there are six thousand trialists but not a single television viewer.

And the biggest question no one is asking: if PKL returns by 2027, will this league be able to preserve its identity? I called three people to find an answer — a coach, a fan, and a former player — and all three said the same thing: 'Right now this league is in the news because of trials and auctions, not because of the sport.' That is its biggest challenge.

If this league cannot secure any television or digital broadcast of its matches next season, its expansion will remain only on paper. I will wait until then — until a broadcaster emerges, until crowds fill stadiums, and until the price of a player like Sunil Malik matches his experience. Until then, I will view this league the way an old live-blogger's habit dictates — a thread of doubt, and a window of hope.

Because kabaddi's real question was never how many teams joined, but how many people watched them. And right now, the answer lies only in a list of 6,400 people, not on the thousands of screens still waiting for PKL's next season.