Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Sudhakar Ghag remembers a time when kabaddi’s selection system was broken. This was about 4-5 years ago, and more often than not, it would come down to lack of data. Despite kabaddi gaining popularity as a television sport over the last decade, there was no consensus on how a player was selected. It boiled down to the selector’s judgement, or in some cases, corruption—an issue that has often plagued Indian sport.

Especially at the grassroots.

Ghag is a well-known figure in Mumbai’s once-formidable kabaddi circles and is chairman of the Mumbai Upanagar (Suburban) Kabaddi Association, a body that administers the sport in the city’s suburbs. “There were no records or statistics at the grassroots level. We didn’t have the infrastructure,” he tells The Playbook in a telephone conversation. “It has started only now, with the advent of commercial tournaments such as Pro Kabaddi League (PKL). Which is why you won’t find statistics of national kabaddi legends such as Madhu Patil and the late Shantaram Jadhav,” he adds.

It begs the question as to how an indigenous sport can be organised and effectively formalised at the grassroots level, given the infrastructure and costs involved. We’re talking internet connection, video footage, consistent scoring standards, and most importantly, capturing all of these in one place. Add to that the need to keep up with the times, i.e. streaming or broadcasting ground-level tournaments in the boondocks of Maharashtra or Haryana while also trying to monetise them through sponsorships.

It’s a problem six-year-old sports tech startup SportVot is trying to solve. The Mumbai-based company, which works with district and state associations, is building a playbook that involves scouting, streaming, and sponsorships at the player-level too. This includes exclusive streaming rights to the 70th Senior National Kabaddi Championship, which starts next week.

Last month, SportVot raised ~Rs 9.4 crore ($1.1 million) in a pre-Series A round led by Omidyar Network India, which also saw the participation of existing investors such as Capital A. 

The unseen layer

A network of high-quality talent scouts—or the lack thereof—can make or break team and player fortunes at the grassroots level.

Think back to how Mumbai Indians scouts, led by former India coach John Wright, discovered Jasprit Bumrah in 2013. Then a prodigious fast bowler plying his trade for Gujarat in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, Bumrah’s blazing yorkers nine-pinned Mumbai batsmen. A phone call after the match ensured his entry into the Indian Premier League (IPL). But such stories are few and far between, more so in sports like kabaddi.

This is where SportVot sees an opportunity. 

“Kabaddi is the only sport where I see at least 10-12 selectors sitting there and watching the game, giving their different opinions. Till date, we get calls from selectors because someone else has been selected despite what data from streamed matches clearly shows us. A lot of scouting happens via word of mouth, references, and politics. It is all over the place,” Shubhangi Gupta, SportVot co-founder and chief marketing officer, tells The Playbook. SportVot’s involvement with district and state tournaments in Maharashtra is addressing this issue, she adds.

“In Maharashtra kabaddi events, instead of 10-12 selectors being present, we now have two selectors who sit after streaming. When the team sheet is out, if there’s a player from a district who represents the state, there’s instantly a screenshot of their profile indicating whether they’ve chosen the right player or not,” she adds.

Digitising kabaddi statistics involves metrics such as “raids” (empty, unsuccessful, successful), “covers”, and “outs”. Each of these assesses player performance. Ghag, the Mumbai-based kabaddi administrator, says scouting data transparency has “minimised the element of corruption” in selection.

“The process is much more streamlined in a way where we can match a selector’s observations with what the data reveals. If anyone says X is playing well, and the data says something else, the selector can make a more objective decision,” he says. 

While that shift is more gradual, it isn’t without pushback from associations still accustomed to traditional scouting and selection. “The backlash is more around, “Aapne kyon inko sach bola” (“Why did you tell them the truth?”). Unfortunately, that isn’t controllable, but it also highlights the need we are serving,” Gupta says.

That adds a second challenge in scouting, which would concern sponsors: getting to know who the participating players in a tournament are only at the last minute.

This, Gupta believes, comes from a lack of awareness about organising a professional tournament. “If they give us their squads five days before or even let us know about the fixtures 10 days before, we aren’t far away from achieving global proficiency in sport,” she says.

“Things are much better than they were four years ago, at least in the western belt—Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Rajasthan, to some extent.”

The seen layer

Streaming a sporting event that isn’t a marquee property is a wildcard, often the remit of YouTube channels or even platforms that have limited but dedicated viewership. While interest in sports-watching has surged—and you can thank the pandemic for that—domestic sport is still adjusting to the new normal. This is evident with CricHeroes, a cricket-scoring and streaming company that veteran sportswriter Sharda Ugra profiled for our sister publication The Intersection last year. SportVot operates in a similar space, streaming grassroots tournaments in cricket, hockey, basketball, football, volleyball, and kabaddi.

Unlike local or domestic cricket and hockey tournaments, which Gupta says have limited viewership on SportVot—restricted to those invested in the “ecosystem” such as coaches, association members, and friends and families of those playing—kabaddi and volleyball are eyeball grabbers. For an average state-level championship, the platform gets a viewership of about 15 lakhs in just four days.

“Because it is not just the ecosystem that is watching, but also viewers who follow those sports. A Maharashtra state-level match is something everyone from Haryana to Telangana watches,” adds Gupta. Ditto for volleyball, which she says garners cross-country viewership. The multi-sport platform gets about 1.5 million views every month, with over 750,000 unique monthly users predominantly from Maharashtra, Telangana, Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.

And supply (of tournaments to broadcast) exists. On average, a state-level kabaddi association would conduct 30-35 tournaments (senior, junior, and sub-junior) a year, while district-level tournaments are more in number. Maharashtra is organised with 34 districts for kabaddi, while Mumbai is split into two, with 560 registered clubs in its suburbs (categorised by traditional public transport boundaries), and around 300-315 in the city (South Mumbai).

But here’s the icing on the cake according to Gupta: kabaddi is one of the few sports with a growing viewership among women. This also translates into participation. For instance, SportVot’s scouts discovered Harjeet Singh Sandhu in 2019, when she was just 14. Because its scouts believed Sandhu stood out, every match she participated in was streamed. That helped with sponsorships. At age 17, Sandhu made it into the national seniors' side and was also part of the India squad in the Asian Games.

The monetisation question

This brings us to the third and most critical part of the SportVot story: its monetisation matrix, which spans streaming and brand partnerships to organising tournaments and shaping players’ careers. A bulk of grassroots monetisation happens through real money gaming (RMG) companies—a mix of fantasy sports companies and betting information providers—because they solve the inventory problem i.e the tournaments these RMG companies need to engage their users, and nudge them to create teams..  But beyond RMG companies, Sportvot has also partnered with large sports retail outlets such as Decathlon.

Since its last funding infusion, revenue has become a key priority. “In India, you can earn money through streaming only to some extent. Because let’s face it, sports isn’t a money-spinner otherwise. Mai agar 500 Rupees bhi bolungi na streaming karne ke liye, utna bhi paisa nahin hai unke paas. (Even if I ask associations for 500 Rupees to stream these matches, they don’t have even that),” she says, before adding that SportVot monetises at least 50-60 matches every month with RMG companies through a combination of kabaddi and cricket. This creates value not just for the company, but also for tournament organisers because money from brands can be used to incentivise organisers to set up more ambitious professional tournaments.

This would also involve creating that shift, similar to SportVot’s efforts in scouting, about how grassroots sport is perceived beyond the lens of sponsorship, charity, or donation. There is a certain level of education required there, Gupta admits. “We tell them to see it as more of a marketing budget deployment. For instance, we’re telling a smartphone brand in Maharashtra that besides branding, we will invite your distributors etcetera for award felicitation at local events. That gives them great value.”

Next up is building players as monetisable assets. This typically involves them talking about a brand and SportVot on social media. Then, Gupta says, the company is looking at a broader B2B corporate partnership with a leading multi-franchise sporting giant to provide scouting services across sports. This builds on its previous work with Reliance Foundation Youth Sports, where SportVot offered end-to-end services—from its tech stack and streaming services to data capturing to scouting for over 100 football matches last year.

But SportVot’s most interesting, monetisation-based play involves a Playo or CultSport-like offering: SportVot Play. The company essentially invests in infrastructure by taking over carefully-curated turfs (casual playing venues) for 200 hours every month. It deploys its streaming infrastructure at the venue, while also organising pick-up games, and has a community of 1,500-2,000 players in Mumbai. “They just come, pay, play, get their live stream, and leave,” Gupta says.

To this effect, it has partnered with Decathlon. “Their biggest pain point is community access. And we have that. So now, I am telling them to come to the turfs and set up stalls or branding or whatever,” she concludes.

How it scales these promising offerings is likely going to be SportVot’s near-term challenge. But that is a story for another day.

⚡️Quick Singles

4️⃣2️⃣🏆: Mumbai clinched the Ranji Trophy for the 42nd time, defeating state rivals Vidarbha. Mumbai’s victory came after a long wait of 2,938 days, and a season after they missed out on the knockouts by one run. The Ajinkya Rahane-led side dominated throughout the game despite a below-par first innings total of 224. Its bowlers delivered, knocking Vidarbha out for 105. A gritty second-innings knock of 136 by India Under-19 international Musheer Khan, and handy contributions by Rahane (73) and under-fire Shreyas Iyer (95) helped Mumbai set a daunting 538-run target. Vidarbha fought valiantly for the last two days through skipper Akshay Wadkar’s 102 and Karun Nair (71) before succumbing.

🇮🇳🛒🏏: French sports retail giant Decathlon has identified India as one of its top markets in the next five years. The company also plans to expand its local store network—to add 10 every year—while also increasing its local sourcing to over 90% from 60% currently. The company earned Rs 3,995 crore in revenue in the financial year that ended on March 31, 2023, registering 37% year-on-year growth. Decathlon currently has around 100 stores in India across formats.

🟥⚽🚪: Italian Serie A club Lecce sacked manager Roberto D’Aversa after he headbutted Hellas Verona striker Thomas Henry after his side’s 1-0 defeat. Both D’Aversa and Henry were red-carded following the incident, which also involved Lecce defender Marin Pongracic. D’Aversa initially apologised, but later denied having headbutted Verona. He, however, admitted to it being “physical contact and a bad example” while apologising again.

↩️🔙: US sportswear company Under Armour (UA) will reinstate founder Kevin Plank as president and CEO from April 1. Plank left UA in 2020 after a newspaper report highlighted a toxic company culture that encouraged inappropriate behaviour towards women. Plank was replaced by Stephanie Linnartz, formerly a senior executive at Marriott. During her stint, Linnartz put together a three-year turnaround plan that would revive the sportswear company’s fortunes.

🇨🇳🏸🔒: Li Ning, the eponymous billionaire founder of Chinese sportswear company, is reportedly mulling taking the company private. Li Ning has traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2004 and currently has a market capitalisation of $6.8 billion. Reuters reported that Li Ning had approached several private equity majors including TPG and Hillhouse to see if they’d invest in the company. Li Ning was founded in 1988 after Ning’s illustrious career, including a haul of six gymnastics medals in the 1984 Olympics.   

🇸🇦🎮💰: Saudi Arabia’s National Development Fund has launched two gaming and e-sports focused funds with a combined corpus of $120 million. The first by Merak Capital is an $80 million fund that aims to create a gaming accelerator to “help Saudi companies become leaders in the esports field”. The other, a $40 million fund by Impact46, will be used to attract further investments in Saudi Arabia’s gaming and esports industry. 

📖 Weekend Reading

Dissecting Haaland vs van Dijk: When the league’s best striker took on its best defender [The Athletic]

Michael Edwards – The Liverpool visionary FSG simply cannot live without [The Athletic]

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at venkat@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!