Business Standard: A leg-up for Indian hockey

Hockey India League auction raises hope for the sport’s revival

Business Standard Editorial

Compared to the Rs 16 crore that Delhi Daredevils bid for cricketer Yuvraj Singh in the last Indian Premier League auction, the Rs 69 lakh that Hockey India League team Kalinga Lancers paid for former Olympian German Moritz Fuerste may look like pennies. But HIL’s organisers should not be worried by the comparison. The highest bid of $105,000 for Fuerste, represents a healthy 48 per cent jump over the highest bid of $71,000 bid in 2014 for Australia’s Ryan Archibald – also by Kalinga Lancers, owned, interestingly enough, by the public sector consortium of Odisha Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation and Mahanadi Coalfields. The real eye-opener, though, is that bids for 15 Indian players crossed $50,000; in 2014, the highest bid Indian player went for $32,000 and most sold for $11,000 and below.

Again, these sums may not be astronomical when set against the money that pours into cricket with its entrenched fan base. But the steadily rising graph of bid money since the HIL tournament began in 2013 does raise hope for the revival of a sport that tragically lost traction after India descended the Olympian heights in the eighties with the introduction of Astroturf playing surfaces. A previous avatar of HIL, the Premier Hockey League, achieved some popularity but was scrapped after the Indian Hockey Federation, then the apex federation under whose aegis it was played, was derecognised internationally on charges of corruption and mismanagement.

HIL is world class in terms of the talent and technique on display – but it suffers a dearth of marketing. Last year, it attracted a cumulative viewership of 123 million. By contrast, the Indian Super League (ISL) football tournament, with its combination of long-in-the-tooth foreign stars (unlike HIL’s roster of recently retired international players) and subpar local talent, managed to get a cumulative viewership of 410 million even though most matches are agonising viewing for fans with access to channels beaming the best of the European leagues. But the large sums of money that are bid out for ISL – the highest bid for the 2015 season was Rs 1.02 crore – and rising ad revenues are the result of savvy marketing by the promoters, a joint venture between experienced sports promoters IMG and India’s largest private sector company Reliance Industries Limited.

Still, the HIL and ISL together with the enormous success of a uniquely Indian sport in the pro-Kabaddi league – also privately run, its cumulative viewership of 435 million is second only to the IPL’s 560 million in viewer popularity – suggest an encouraging widening of the market for sporting talent in India beyond cricket. In that context, the steadily larger sums being invested in hockey are of particular significance because it has the potential of pulling into the orbit of professional sports men and women from the traditional catchment areas of hockey talent in central and east India, among the country’s poorest regions. ISL has done little in terms of benefitting Indian football as a whole – the national team stands at 155 in the Fifa world ranking, little changed from 154 when ISL began. HIL, which is run by the official apex body for the sport, should not follow that example; if its administrators could extend the benefits of this tournament to boosting the infrastructure and standard of the sport in general, who knows, India could well consider a ninth Olympic gold soon.