IPL chairman Arun Dhumal: Strong talent pool will improve franchise-based leagues in India

At Sportstar’s Business of Sports Summit at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on Friday, the spotlight fell on how India’s vast talent pool has shaped the country’s leagues, with cricket leading the way and other sports seeking to catch up.

Arun Dhumal, chairman of the Indian Premier League, set the tone by tracing the tournament’s roots back to India’s seminal cricketing moment. “We think of the IPL starting in 2008. I think that the 1983 World Cup win was the transforming event that led to the forward integration of players. We had Kapil Dev, then Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli and now Shubman Gill. That flow continued, and the kind of leadership that the BCCI had allowed that to happen,” he said during a panel discussion titled India in a League of Its Own – How India Shapes Global Sport, moderated by K.C. Vijaya Kumar, Sports Editor, The Hindu.

For Dhumal, the IPL’s strength lies in the conveyor belt of domestic talent. “The BCCI organises more than 2,000 games a year, which leads to the strong pool. That is what other sports need to do, create that talent pool,” he noted.

Anupam Goswami, Business Head of Mashal Sport and League Commissioner of the Pro Kabaddi League, underlined that the challenge for other sports is to scale up competitive structures. “The amount of competition, when you go into leagues as a business, the challenge will be to scale up on the ground. My sport has to be less than one-tenth in terms of competition at the ground level; that’s the same with almost every other sport,” he said. “The scale needs to go up. The fans have to be focused on. The level of competition, it has to be the best that the sport offers. And then it has to come together in terms of administration.”

For the NBA in India, the focus is firmly on nurturing the grassroots. Rajah Chaudhary, Head of Strategy, Asia Pac & Country Head, India at NBA, pointed out that while basketball is popular in schools, the absence of a professional pathway has been a hurdle. “We are in a very different situation than most other sports. The NBA is niche, but basketball is not, at least in India. It is popular at the school level. Unfortunately, we’ve not had a sustainable league in the country. Grassroots is crucial, hence. That is our focus. We want 13-14 year olds to pick up a basketball,” he said.

Offering a complementary perspective, Vita Dani, Chairperson of Ultimate Table Tennis, stressed that the growth of Indian sport depends on collective strength rather than competition between disciplines. “For us to be successful, multiple sports have to co-exist. We need not compete. The new generation has to be involved in a sport, any sport. That is the only way we can create talent. It is not only a top-down approach that the leagues bring to the table. Cricket is a success because it is rooted in the community. If we can do that with other sports, we will become a sporting nation.”

Published on Sep 12, 2025