What began in 2014 on the lines of a uniquely designed 'caravan' format featuring eight city-based franchises in a sport that is surely more reliable than any other to source last-mile connectivity, the
Vivo Pro Kabaddi
is shifting into top gear right now.
Four more teams have been introduced this year and Star India - the broadcaster, but more importantly the brains trust behind this endeavour - is ready with plans to hike the number of franchises to 18, possibly in the next few years if not 2018 itself.
This highway-to-hinterland journey has moved at breathtaking speed these last four years. Such has been the natural progression in recent times that even the Kabaddi World Cup that India hosted in Ahmedabad last year, and won, turned out to be a phenomenal success. The edition, in fact, featured a live virtual reality stream after broadcasters tied up with Voke VR, an Intel subsidiary with a sports technology vertical.
Big money came in too. Among other things that worked to boost kabaddi, Star signed a record Rs 300 crore title sponsorship deal with Chinese smartphone company Vivo in May this year.
Here's how the 2017 edition is placed: With 12 teams coming up with a little more than 130 matches to be played over a period of 13 weeks, all on prime time - customized for the sport as well as the entertainment segment, streamed live on Hotstar, and packaged for regional viewership, this caravan is only getting glitzier. It's come a long way from that evening in May 2010, when
Anand Mahindra, the chairman and managing director of the Mahindra Group, asked
Heidi Ueberroth
, then international commissioner of the NBA, if she had ever heard of a sport called kabaddi.
Heidi, daughter of Peter Ueberroth, the former commissioner at Major League Baseball in the '80s, and once considered the most powerful woman in the global sports industry, said: "Yes, I have." "She said she had seen it while surfing Indian TV channels and had had been struck by how television-friendly a game it was. Small courts, high speed and big men in a contact sport - she wondered why no one in India had tried to commercialize it," Mahindra recalls.
Mahindra, working on a germ of an idea conveyed to him by his brother-in-law
Charu Sharma
, took the idea to
Uday Shankar, then CEO at Star India, and the chairman of the board since 2016.
"Uday met with me and underscored his belief in the potential of the game to draw a very large viewership. However, he believed we needed to stage it 'first time right' and spend appropriately to give it scale up front. And yes, he did step up to bat and spend considerably more resources on it, both in terms of money and people, than originally envisaged," says Mahindra.
In stark contrast to the immensely popular WWE, a sport scripted for a dedicated audience, or in much similarity to most other mixed martial art sports that are growing rapidly on television these days, kabaddi is now truly in the zone, not scripted for the viewer, but delivered from a standpoint of great planning and execution.
Where pro-kabaddi stands out from other leagues that have sprouted across the globe post the advent of Indian Premier League (IPL) is in the manner in which it has been conceptualised.
PKL is a rarity because the property has been a broadcaster's initiative in the first place as against other properties that are struggling to innovate in the highly competitive TV ratings industry. In that, and in looking to seek newer audiences going forward, Star can raise a toast simply because pro-kabaddi in its present form was the broadcast giant's own brainchild.
Star now owns close to 74% stake in the league, and rightly so, having made the property its baby and taken good care of it. To give the sport its due, pro-kabaddi will stand out as a property as unique as any global contemporary for having carved a niche of its own.
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