Empty Mat, Incomplete Ledger: The Kabaddi Account That Never Got Filed

A July 2026 evening at TransStadia in Ahmedabad. The clock read twenty minutes to six. It was twenty minutes before the first home match of the city's first franchise. The mat was being wiped with a sponge, water splashed at the corners, the public address system had said “one, two, testing” for the third time and gone quiet. In a three-quarters empty stand, a single cant echoed and came back off the concrete. The real story of a home debut was not written in the noise after the first whistle that evening; it was written in the silence before it, and the first page of my notebook still records that silence.

At the other end of the mat, facing no defender at all, twenty-year-old Sachin Tanwar was running his fiftieth empty raid. Coach Manpreet Singh stood at the edge, counting — in how many raids the foot lifted off the mat, in how many the bonus line was touched, in how many the ankle-hold target was missed. Over six days I filled fourteen columns: travel times, practice routines, empty-raid counts, tackle zones. My editor ran it as a 900-word home-leg diary. That season Gujarat reached the final in Chennai and lost 38-55 to Patna Pirates. The scoreline went into the newspaper; the ledger stayed with me.

That ledger gave me a habit which is both my greatest weakness in this profession and my greatest strength: do not file a claim until two separate places confirm it. If a rupee figure came from a federation release but not from a coach's phone call, that figure did not enter the copy. And that habit now leaves me standing in an uncomfortable place, because the biggest story in kabaddi today is not in the record. It is in the part of the ledger left blank.

The economics of kabaddi sits in two halves, and no number in this sport means anything without the gap between them. The first half predates July 2026. A kabaddi player's career was decided not by matches but by employment. Railway recruitment, state police recruitment, the Services teams — those were the real contracts. A raider from a village in Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra first found a place in a district team, then in a state team built on jobs, and if fortune allowed, a clerk's or constable's post in the railways or police. Winning a match was often rewarded not in cash but in promotion or a transfer recommendation.

On the other side, Punjab's circle-style festival circuit ran its own ledger — circular mud enclosures, prize matches village after village, prize money from tens of thousands to lakhs, and crowds sitting on the ground who read the direction of a raid before it happened. That circuit never entered a single central register, which is why no reliable historical figure for it exists in any one place. When someone says kabaddi has no written history, what they are really saying is that they have not read the ledger kept in Punjab's soil.

The second half begins on 26 July 2026, when the first season of the Pro Kabaddi League began — eight teams, television prime time, and a contract structure in which a player's value was set at an auction. From that day kabaddi became the first Indian sport in which a village boy sat directly at a table where his price was being written. The change was so large that within a decade the coverage of this sport became the most data-literate after cricket — raid success rate, Super-10 rate, tackle points, do-or-die raid percentage, every number floating on every screen.

By 2026 the league had twelve teams. Gujarat Fortunegiants, UP Yoddhas and Tamil Thalaivas were the three new ones, and Ahmedabad had its first franchise. That was also my first year on the job. The desk wanted star quotes; I spent six days between TransStadia and the training ground. Looking back, those fourteen columns were worth more than any match report, because they recorded what the scoreboard never shows.

The auction ledger: a rupee figure does not become an argument until every component of it is filed.

The most quoted number in this sport is the highest bid at an auction. According to the ledger, Pardeep Narwal went for ₹1.65 crore in the 2026 auction, Pawan Sehrawat was bought for ₹2.005 crore in 2026, Iranian defender Mohammadreza Shadloui Chiyaneh reached ₹2.35 crore in 2026, and in the 2026 auction Sachin Tanwar was bought for ₹2.65 crore, becoming the most expensive player in the sport.

Read alone, that number shows a business worth crores. Place beside it the other page of the same ledger — what a raider earned before the auction era. A state police constable's starting salary and allowances from before 2026 works out to roughly four to five lakh a year. Sachin Tanwar's 2026 bid is therefore many decades of that old annual income stacked together.

I find this ratio difficult to write because it forces me to write the accompanying lines too: an auction price comes with contract length, age, injury record and that season's team strategy. To treat ₹2.65 crore as proof that “kabaddi is a big sport now” is like judging tackle quality from a scoreline. The ledger needs both columns: the bid amount, and that player's per-match tackle deficit that season. Without the second column, the first is a market, not a valuation.

One more thing usually drops out of this ledger. The league's twelve franchise owners have a quota rule, a contract ceiling and a payment calendar, and a shared jurisdiction. A player usually has one auction, one agent and a four-to-six week season. The spreadsheet I built in 2026 showed this asymmetry most clearly. I will come back to it.

Numbers are not neutral — they must be filed with their code, era and sample, or they become fuel for bad argument.

A single action in kabaddi has at least four different contexts, and its measurement differs in each. On a circle-style or mud court, a raider must exit a circular enclosure, and the duration of the cant, the number of defenders and the law of the tackle are all different. In standard style, three-quarters of the rules look alike, but Asian Games rules do not always match league rules — the bonus line and do-or-die conditions, the value of a super tackle, the position of the two-man raid, the thirty-second raid law — the difference between league and international play is enough to make any single number meaningless.

So when someone says a raider's success rate is 62 per cent, my first question is: which code, which era, how many raids in the sample, and are do-or-die raids included. The Super-10 rate is an especially dangerous measure, because it does not tell you total match time, or number of raids, or the type of defence faced. A Super-10 against a weak defence and a Super-10 against an Iranian corner are two entirely different events, and on the scoresheet they look identical.

League coverage made this the country's most data-rich sport, that is true. It also instilled a habit — dropping the bother of writing code and sample under a column. I keep one rule in my notebook: no number enters a sentence until it carries its code (circle or standard), its era (season number) and its sample (how many raids or tackles). This rule makes my copy slow, and I find that convenient.

Jakarta 2026 must stop being read as a failure of character. It was the victory of a system, and the system's name is Iran.

On 19 August 2026, the Indian men's team lost a group match to South Korea 23-24. Three days later they lost the semifinal to Iran 18-27. After seven straight golds, India's hands were empty in men's kabaddi for the first time. In the women's final, Iran beat India 27-24 as well.

That season I was sitting in Ahmedabad, the desk was chasing the football World Cup, and I kept one corner for kabaddi. Over three weeks I re-watched six matches late into the night, with timestamped notes. One thing was clear in those notes: India had a plan, Iran had a system. Iran's defence came from a wrestling and local pehalwani tradition — bringing the body low, gripping the waist, three defenders closing one after another in a chain tackle, and a player like Fazel Atrachali at the corner who simply does not let a raider go in his preferred direction.

India's real problem that day was not the speed of its defence; it was the logic of selection. The team appeared to be built on reputation more than form — the same names, the same experience, the same old record — while for years Iranian defenders had been playing against Indian raiders every week in the league and breaking their habits. When your opponent has been reading your raiders inside your own domestic tournament for four years, exploiting that on the international stage is a matter of logistics, not character.

After 2026 I removed the phrase “guaranteed gold” from my copy for good. Every preview I now write in this order: first the opponent's defensive structure, then India's selection precedent, and last of all the medal history. Jakarta's real legacy is that it turned “India will win” into a claim that now requires a receipt.

One more thing I wrote in that year's notes and never heard in any debate: after the defeat, the Iranian team mingled with the Indian players on the mat, and the language of tackle zones their defence coach used on that tour was more precise than that of Indian assistant coaches in the league. That is not a statistic, it is an observation — but a ledger needs a column for observations too.

The blank page of 2026: when an entire season collapses, the record shows what the system rests on.

The league was suspended in March 2026, and Season 8 was played about a year and a half later, in December 2026, inside a bubble in Bengaluru. In the months between, I did the work that never makes it into a match report: I built a spreadsheet of twelve franchises and 147 contracted players, and recorded who had returned to an old police or railway job, whose contract had stalled, and whose payment was in limbo.

Over three months I spoke to 23 players and five franchise officials. Thirty-one contract renegotiations were confirmed only after being matched across two sources — a player's account and an official's confirmation, or an agent's word and a payment record.

Haryana Steelers raider Vikash Kandola was training alone in Sonipat. He told me returning from injury was easy, returning from silence was hard. That sentence named the series — “The Empty Mat.”

This whole exercise changed the root of my reporting. I understood that match-day access is not enough to understand a sport. My contact list now includes payroll clerks, franchise accountants and player agents, because contract news comes from a table, not a field. That same list is the base of my auction and retention coverage today.

And the most important lesson was this: an absence is also an event. The record of the year in which no matches happened is the best evidence of what this sport rests on — a television date and a franchise's cash. If either one moves, 147 families go onto a waiting list.

The women's ledger: four medals, zero leagues, and the page left most blank of all.

Women's kabaddi entered the Asian Games in 2026. India won gold in Guangzhou 2026 and Incheon 2026, took silver in Jakarta 2026 after losing the final 27-24 to Iran, and won gold again in Hangzhou 2026. On the international stage, the Indian women's team's medal ratio is in no way weaker than the men's.

Now lift the other page of the same ledger — against those four medals, India has no women's franchise league. In twelve years since 2026, men got an auction, a three-month television calendar, a salary cap, a players' association. Women got some national camps, some international tours and some state-level tournaments over the same period. Most women players' income is still that same old railway-police job, which men had made an option rather than a necessity after 2026.

I remember talking on the phone to a woman raider in 2026 and asking what it would mean for her name to appear in an auction. She said — it would mean not having to convince my father about what this sport will give me. That sentence will not be found in any policy document, but it is the most important column in the ledger.

Those who say the league saved kabaddi must also write down whom it left out. Those who say the league ruined the sport must also say what better option a woman raider had before 2026. Both sides leave the same page blank.

The circle-style circuit: no central register, and the most misreported thing in the sport.

In Punjab's villages the form of kabaddi still played has seven-a-side or eight-a-side, a circular enclosure, and a condition of returning in a single breath. Many prize matches pay the winning team lakhs, funded by local donors or migrant families. By money, this circuit is alive; by record, it is almost invisible.

The turf war between this circuit and the standard-style administration is a fight over rules and affiliation — which code belongs to whom, which gets international recognition, and whose calendar is built over whose. I have watched this debate closely many times. Its clearest sentence is this: the circle-style calendar runs roughly towards the villages after Diwali, and the mainstream team calendar runs towards national camps. Two calendars, two audiences, two economies.

I must also record that the hero-stories of this circuit are often built on names that appear in no official record. When an elderly fan told me that “real kabaddi is the circular kind,” I asked him whether that circle had a written dateline. The silence I got in reply is also a fact.

The outsider's mistake: we read this sport's biggest story as an “issue,” when it is a “blank page.”

In recent years three kinds of kabaddi reporting have been common, and all three share one flaw. The first style says the league saved the sport; the second says the league sold its soul; the third only counts numbers and leaves the job of connecting them to meaning to the reader. All three are the same impatience. The first two bring the matter into the realm of character — the league is good or bad. The third treats the number as neutral, when a number's code must be written down.

The truth is that this sport runs three separate records, each with its own rulebook. The standard-style league's record is in a vault, insured, watched by twenty officials. Women's international kabaddi's record is patchy — four medals, but no league table. The record of Punjab's circular enclosure is oral, and an oral record loses one name with every generation.

On Jakarta 2026, too, outsider thinking ran in one direction: India lost because India was careless. The truth is India lost because Iran had institutionalised a form of this sport that India treated as playing culture rather than as a training method. The Iranian defender's core work, the concept of the chain tackle, the grip at the corner — all of it came from that country's wrestling tradition. The answer to it is not a debate about carelessness, it is a change in the practice sequence.

I must write this too, because this column in the ledger cannot stay empty. The bulk of this sport's money is in the league's vault, and that vault's door rests on television dates. Women's professional kabaddi is thin, and I have no hesitation in saying so. Domestic kabaddi outside the league is largely invisible outside the Haryana-Punjab belt, and that is true as well. Having written those three sentences, I do not stop being an advocate for this sport; I am simply writing as the reporter who has to hold its long document, and that document is useful only when loss and profit are both filed.

Two more popular beliefs about this sport demand an audit. Calling kabaddi India's national game sounds very sweet — but no sport in India has ever been officially declared the national game, and several RTI replies have recorded exactly this position. The claim of a demonstration at the 2026 Berlin Olympics belongs in the same category: the thing most repeated in school speeches is often the least verifiable by date. My argument is not that tradition is false; my argument is that this sport's genuine record is strong enough that it does not need a prop from an old story.

Outsiders have one more habit — treating one number as proof of the entire sport. The ₹2.65 crore bid, the 55-38 final, or the 62 per cent raid success rate. Each is fine on its own. Each is incomplete alone. The full pleasure of the ledger comes on the evening when two separate columns match, and that match never arrives quickly. This is why I am considered the slowest man in this profession.

What to watch next

Do not read the next auction's top bid as a standalone figure. Write its ratio — against that sum, how many hours of tackling, how many raids of responsibility, and how many matches of contract the player is being asked for. The day that ratio appears in a column, kabaddi coverage will have taken a step from market towards sport.

Three pages of my ledger are still blank. The first — any franchise calendar for women's kabaddi. The second — a central, dated register of the circle-style circuit, recording the result and prize money of every prize match. The third — the next time a season stops, the same spreadsheet accounting that was built in 2026.

Until these three pages are filled, every headline saying “kabaddi has become a big sport” will be only half true. And that evening on the mat is still filed — twenty minutes to six, the sponge, the empty stand, and a boy running his fiftieth raid against no defender, hoping that someone's ledger will have a page for him too.