Kabaddi's Real Scoreline: Payroll, Press Box, and the Unravelling Ritual of 'Guaranteed Gold'

Balewadi, August 2026

The press box at Balewadi that night held fourteen people, and one woman. Me. Puneri Paltan beat Bengaluru Bulls 34-31. Forty minutes past the final whistle the crowd outside the gate was still arguing — over Deepak Hooda's eleven raid points, over Girish Ernak's four tackle points. I wrote twenty-three of their questions into my notebook. In the mixed zone I put two of them to Hooda. He took the one about the third raid, not the one about the table.

That reply was my first lesson. A man on the mat answers from the mathematics of the mat. A man outside the gate shouts about the table. My job is to build a bridge between the two, and after twenty-two years on this beat I am convinced the most honest kabaddi reporting is the kind that can hold the table and the third raid in the same paragraph.

The press box had a rhythm before I ever had a byline. I did not inherit that rhythm. I built it — out of morning practice sessions, out of the Haryana and Punjab regional dailies, out of women's international fixtures nobody sends a photographer to. Sit inside one camp for seventeen days and you learn which player is hiding an injury and which player has gone quiet because his contract expires next month. That information does not arrive at a press conference. It arrives in the canteen queue.

Wages, Before and After 2026

Tell kabaddi's story through one thing and it should not be medals. It should be the salary. Before 2026 the sport's greatest attraction was that it fed you. Indian Railways, the police, the Services — three institutions a mud-court player could reach, and past them a job for life. That mattered enormously. If a boy from a Haryana village was good at kabaddi, his father did not have to be told what the future held. The answer already existed: a clerk's desk, a constable's uniform, a Services jersey.

The Pro Kabaddi League arrived in 2026 and that entire economy turned over. Suddenly players became crorepatis who had not yet played a single international. The auction stage became a market where one night could change a life. None of that was wrong. Much of it was necessary. But it also opened a fracture that gets written about far too little.

The fracture is this: the league made the player rich, not the sport. Twelve franchises are not a sport. Kabaddi outside the league — district level, state level, university, the women's domestic circuit — kept running on the old economy. No auction there, no retention list, no public record of match fees. A player the league does not pick — and every year it does not pick hundreds — returns to exactly where he was in 2026.

I put a standard paragraph about this into every profile. What do you do in the off-season, what is the family income, do you have gym access — those questions should come before the question about form. Form is a season. Livelihood is a life.

Every Bid at the Auction Is a Lifeline

I never read an auction as sports news. I read it as wage news. Behind every bid there is a household. When a defender is bought, I look at what his previous contract was worth. If he played last year for two lakh and goes this year for twenty, that is not market fluctuation. That is a family's decade turning over.

Here is a number no ticker shows: the bulk of auction money flows to established raiders, while the tacklers — the men who win matches — are consistently the cheap buys. It is kabaddi's oldest inequality and no different from any other sport. The run-scorer gets paid, the run-stopper gets applause. For four or five seasons of the Pro Kabaddi League, that held.

The effect shows on the mat. Teach a thirteen-year-old that raiding brings crores and tackling brings incentives, and you are pushing him toward the route where the individual statistic glitters. The team structure breaks first; the scoreboard breaks after. That was clearest at Jakarta in 2026, where I was present.

Jakarta, 31 August 2026 — The Ritual Ends

India lost the men's semifinal to Iran 18-27. In the group, South Korea had already beaten India 23-24. The women lost the final to Iran 24-27. Outside GBK, sixty Indian fans stayed on after the bronze, and I stayed with them. In that crowd were people who three hours earlier had been saying the gold was certain, and were now trying to work out what had happened.

In the mixed zone Fazel Atrachali gave me the sentence I have since used hundreds of times. Iran, he said, had prepared for India's third-raid pattern. The third raid. This was not a miracle. It was not bad luck. It was preparation.

That night the ritual stopped ringing. After it I added a section to every preview — how India loses. And I built an Iran file, carrying Atrachali's tackle numbers. That was not revenge. That was physics. When a team keeps winning, the part of the coverage where it might lose quietly disappears. A reporter's job is to bring that part back.

Calling Iran a "spoiler" is dishonest to that team. Iran is a co-favourite, and has been at every tournament since 2026. Believing that takes no generosity, only numbers. Iran learned to read India's raiding line, broke the speed of India's defensive cover, and did what our domestic structures could not — it bound its players into a system.

And after that defeat, the most honest question in Indian kabaddi went unasked. Was our preparation calendar wrong? When did the camp start, how long did it run, who was not called? Nobody asks the player who was cut. I learned this in my own trade: keep a written record of federation circulars and selection disputes, and always quote the player who was dropped, not only the official who dropped him.

Women's Kabaddi: One Tournament, Then Silence

This is where I get angriest, and I have to write that anger is also a reporting tool if there is a number behind it.

In 2026 there was a Women's Kabaddi Challenge — a small three-team event sandwiched inside the league. After that? Nothing. Twelve franchises, and not one permanent slot for women. The women's international calendar holds fixtures no Indian camera crew attends. I have gone, and I can tell you what happens there — two paragraphs in the paper, no sponsor boards, and the players on a train home the next morning.

Write the league's story without mentioning the women's game and you have not written the sport's story — you have written one tournament's publicity. I made this a rule for myself: a standing paragraph on women's kabaddi and non-league domestic kabaddi in every league piece. Every time. Even when the paragraph bores somebody.

I remember an Asian Games cycle where the women did exactly what the men did — won the final, took the medal. In the next morning's paper the men's team was on the front page and the women's team was a single column wide inside. Nobody made a mistake. This is the default we all grew up inside. Changing a default takes more than complaint. It takes writing it daily.

2026: What the Empty Year Asked

When Season 8 was postponed for a full year, I had no matches. I had players. I tracked fourteen Puneri Paltan players across eighty-seven days. Nine had gone back to family farms in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Only three had gym access. I did forty-seven phone interviews and one ninety-minute video call with defender Girish Ernak, who was skipping rope on a terrace.

On that call I did not ask about form. I asked how many people were in the house, who cooked, and what happens if no contract comes for six months. He answered, and the answer was worth more than any match report I have filed.

Since Jakarta I do not trust medal-table ritual, so the 2026 story was never "empty stadiums" — it became unpaid off-season labour. The difference is large. An empty stadium is an image. Unpaid labour is an economic fact.

That year I started a shared spreadsheet of thirty players' conditions, updated by fans and former teammates. The aim was explicit — not to show one hero's sacrifice, but to show the group's support network. Kabaddi has no shortage of individual valour stories; it has very few accounts of collective livelihood. I choose to write the second side.

The Biggest Lie in the Data: Metres Run

One thing has become fashionable in modern sports coverage — how many kilometres a player ran, how many high-intensity sprints, how much energy expended. These numbers have been turned into certificates of effort.

I look at this through kabaddi and find it incomplete. Pointless running also produces pretty numbers. Kabaddi's most valuable work is the work that does not run — the man who stops, who lays a trap, who stands in the corner until the raider makes the wrong choice. That work has no distance-covered figure.

So whenever I see an effort metric, I ask three questions. One: which system was that running part of? Two: how many points did that running save? Three: which player covered for that running, whose name never reached the ticker?

A number that cannot tell you what it gave the team is not part of the sport; it is part of the media kit. This is why my copy always carries tackle points, super tackles, High 5s and raid efficiency side by side. One number is a witness to another. A single number alone is never the whole truth.

The Review Room: Where the Argument Now Lives

A referee's call used to be the centre of debate — the match was on camera, the crowd saw it, the argument was immediate and forgotten by morning. With the review system, the argument left the mat. It now sits in a closed room where three people watch monitors while a hazy page of the rulebook decides when "contact" began.

Review did not end controversy; it moved its address. You used to shout at the referee. Now you shout at an interpretation of a rule, and shouting at an interpretation is harder because it has no face. I have watched near-identical tackles produce opposite rulings, with the review room declared correct both times. That is not corruption. It is the limit of the rulebook's language.

My method as a reporter is not to write the verdict immediately. I ask for the draft of the decision, the video timestamp, and the line of the rulebook it rests on. Until I have that line I do not write the phrase "controversial decision" — because the controversy should exist inside the ruling, not be manufactured by me.

One thing has to be added here, especially for a first-time viewer. Kabaddi has three foundational terms that every report should open once. Out (a raider failing to return after a touch, or a defender crossing the boundary), lona (the entire opposing team being dismissed, worth two points and a revival), and the bonus line (a raider crossing into the opponent's half to earn one point). Without these three words no scoreline can be read at all. I define them once in every long piece, because the person watching for the first time is our largest audience, and we keep forgetting them.

What It Looks Like From Outside

Now the section I am least comfortable with, because it is about my own colleagues.

Three sentences return to Indian kabaddi coverage every four years, and all three are wrong. The first: "kabaddi is India's national game." That sentence is emotion, not fact. Hockey long held that association, and no government notification has ever declared kabaddi the national game. I write this because when you do not give the sport its actual status, you do not get the budget, the stadiums or the scholarships either. Sentiment does not pay bills.

The second: "gold is certain." Before 2026 that sentence was a ritual. It came back after 31 August 2026 too, with only the date changed. For any team that is not a guaranteed gold contender, the coverage must always say how it can lose. That is not negativity; that is reporting the preparation.

The third: "kabaddi will reach the Olympics." That is a long march, not a date. The Olympic movement has conditions — numbers, gender balance, global participation, an anti-doping system. A sport without strong domestic structures on three continents must repair its house before it enters the ring. Saying so is not an insult to kabaddi. It is kabaddi's most honest sentence.

The biggest failure of our coverage is that we "discover" the sport every four years and abandon it every year in between. Kabaddi is not an event; it is a routine — camp, auction, league, regional tournaments, women's fixtures, retirements, second jobs. Whoever does not cover it daily must ask for a new context every four years.

What the Next Heartbeat Inside Will Be

People ask me every year what kabaddi's future holds. I always answer that I cannot see the future, I see the day. And in the daily arithmetic, three things will decide the next decade.

First, minimum contract value and the defenders' market. If a tackler keeps earning under half a raider's price, the standard of tackling on the mat will fall. That will be the sport's loss, not the market's.

Second, a women's league. A permanent slot, broadcast time, contracts, and a calendar nobody builds to "fill a gap." The day a twelve-franchise women's league exists, the sport's spreadsheet gains new rows.

Third, a written record of selection. When the camp began, for how long, on what criteria, and the name and account of the man who was cut. Until that is public, the word "conspiracy" will return after every defeat — and that word has never helped a single player.

Kabaddi won a big fight in 2026. It took a necessary defeat in 2026. It survived its longest night in 2026. In all three, the heaviest cost fell on the player whose name never appeared on any ticker — bought once, then unsold, then home. Until we write that player's wage, we will not write this sport's true scoreline.

Even now, passing Balewadi, I stop for a minute outside the gate. The crowd is gone. The notebook with those twenty-three questions is not. The next time a player waves his hand on the third raid, I will ask him: which system taught you that hand, and what does that system give you?