'India has talent. Now it needs the system'

A former American football coach who now scouts startups thinks India's sports tech moment is real — if it can connect the grassroots to the grid

It was neither a crepe nor a burrito. What was it again? The flaky thing stuffed with cheese and onions that he had eaten in Delhi?

"Paratha?" someone suggested.


"Oh yes. Paratha. That's the one."

On the last day of his first trip to India, David Steele seemed to be carrying home a lot more than just memories of street food and handcrafted pots picked up from a local exhibition in Mumbai for his wife.

The blue-eyed Texan — a former football coach who still answers to the nickname "Coach" — was also taking back a business lesson: how India is using technology, scale and grassroots networks to build sporting ecosystems from the ground up.

Steele is founding director of the sports-tech vertical at Plug and Play Tech Center in Frisco, Texas — a city that has earned the label Sports City USA by clustering the Dallas Cowboys headquarters, FC Dallas, the National Soccer Hall of Fame, PGA of America and the Dallas Stars under one civic identity. He spent the week moving between startup conversations, sports meetings and industry discussions in Mumbai and Delhi.

His larger interest was not simply cricket, although that remained a recurring theme. It was the question of what happens when a sports-mad nation with deep grassroots participation collides with a rapidly growing technology ecosystem.

India's sports technology market has been growing steadily alongside the rise of analytics, fan engagement platforms, athlete performance tracking and AI-driven coaching tools. The sector is being driven by increasing smartphone penetration, wearable devices, fantasy gaming, broadcast innovation and the digitisation of training infrastructure — with startups like BanyanBoard, SportVot, Stepout AI, FanCode and Sportz Village among those building across scouting, fan engagement and performance verticals.

For Steele, who comes from a part of Texas where high school football is treated almost like religion, the parallels were impossible to miss. "In Texas, towns shut down for football," he said during a conversation in Mumbai. "In India, you see that emotional connection with cricket."

The US, he pointed out, is still trying to create its cricket ecosystem from scratch. Interest has grown after the ICC Men's T20 World Cup and the rise of Major League Cricket. But the challenge is no longer visibility. It is access. "How do you create coaching pathways? How do you identify talent early? How do you make training scalable?" he said.

That is where India's grassroots ecosystem caught his attention. Unlike the US, where organised youth sports can often become expensive and heavily structured, India's cricket culture still flows through gullies, maidans and informal coaching networks. Technology is serving as a multiplier for that existing passion. Platforms like ai.io's Aid Out, for instance, let athletes use a phone to complete drills and receive AI-powered feedback — shifting scouting from who can afford a showcase to who can demonstrate ability at scale.


Yet Steele appeared most fascinated not by billion-dollar valuations or celebrity-backed franchises but by what happens before professional sport: the messy, fragmented process of discovering and developing talent. For him, sports tech is not simply about gadgets or apps. It is about removing friction. Can a child in a smaller town access quality coaching remotely? Can data reduce injuries? Can analytics help coaches manage larger groups without losing personal attention?

During his Mumbai visit, Steele joked that he was amazed to see "dented cars but no accidents" on the roads. That rhythm of functional chaos may also explain why Indian startups often become adept at advancing under imperfect conditions.

The India-US sports-tech relationship is still at a relatively early stage. But both sides appear to have something the other wants. The US offers mature investment ecosystems, sports commercialisation expertise and established collegiate structures. India offers scale, frugal innovation and a massive young population increasingly consuming sports digitally.

He left not entirely unlike the way he arrived — still learning the names of things, still figuring out what he was looking at. The paratha had taken a moment to place. The opportunity had not. "In the US, we build for optimisation — better data for athletes already in a system," he said. "In India, founders are trying to build the system itself."