Accel’s Prashanth Prakash, Foundit’s Sekhar Garisa, Zerodha’s Nithin and Nikhil Kamath, and Curefoods’ Ankit Nagori have one thing in common apart from being part of India’s tech and startup space: they are all owners of teams in the Grand Prix Badminton League (GPBL) and currently at loggerheads with the Badminton Association of India.
The immediate fallout of the clash was the last-minute and indefinite postponement of the second season of GPBL, after foreign players had already reached India. GPBL is the second league of the sport, after the Premier Badminton League (PBL), and the second edition was supposed to scale up the tournament to the national level.
The first edition of GPBL was limited to Karnataka. It featured eight teams with players from the state and was conducted by the state badminton association. Now, when the league was set to go national, eight teams were formed, the player purse was made bigger, and other owners came in.
So far, so good.
However, GPBL ran into trouble with the Badminton Association of India, the entity that governs the sport in the country and has held national-level tournaments since 1936. The association shot off letters to players and others telling them not to participate in “unrecognised tournaments.”
A general notice was issued to players, coaches and technical staff registered with the association not to participate in any tournament without prior approval of BAI.
“If any of such registered personnel are found to have violated this notice, they will be liable for appropriate actions as per the rules of the BAI. Even after such a notice, if anyone intends to participate in such tournaments, it will be at their own risk,” the notice read.
GPBL took the matter to court, which, in an interim order on August 24, allowed the tournament to continue as scheduled because the players had already given consent to participate.
The next day, BAI’s appeal against the interim order was disposed of and the court said that while the matter would be decided, the interest of the sport must ultimately prevail.
However, on the same day, BAI sent out another letter stating that since the matter had not been decided, it would “be at liberty to take appropriate action in terms of the applicable rules and regulations” in case the outcome of the petition was in favour of GPBL.
After this, GPBL said the players withdrew en masse for fear of being blacklisted by BAI. This was just before the tournament start date of August 27.
There are two reasons behind BAI’s attempt to hold back the players: a contract with Sportzlive Entertainment, the parent company of the Premier Badminton League, and disruption of the national badminton calendar, where players could choose to play for the leagues instead of for the country, according to those in the know.
In the matter of Sportzlive, an email sent to GPBL by the BAI, a copy of which Moneycontrol has seen, states that Sportzlive is trying to revive the PBL and at this stage, the BAI cannot legally provide permission for any other league. The first edition of the GPBL was done under the Karnataka Badminton Association with players only from Karnataka, and the BAI said GPBL could continue with that model.
For now, the fate of the GPBL’s second season lies with the court.
According to Prashanth Reddy, League Commissioner and CEO of Bitsport, the promoters of GPBL, while BAI’s interest is in winning an Olympic medal, it can’t come at the cost of the livelihood of 100,000 people — players looking to earn a living from the sport.
“You can give opportunities to people who wouldn’t make it into the national teams. It becomes a place where talent is identified,” said Reddy, formerly an owner of a team in the Premier Badminton League, which has been on hold since before the pandemic.
Degree of suspicion
GPBL says it is open to regulation and wrote to BAI several times to no avail.
Nagori of Curefoods, one of the team owners, wrote in a tweet, “Why should the board/association have exclusive rights over leagues? This is really unfortunate.”
Garisa, the CEO of Foundit (previously Monster) and owner of the Pune Panthers team, said they want BAI to be more collaborative with the league rather than treat it with a certain degree of suspicion.
“We have invested a lot of money into this. For us, this is a good avenue to support sport. We feel like the youngsters in the country will get an opportunity to play with some world-class players that will accelerate their development, connect more with the fans,” he said.
Another disappointment, Garisa added, was the last-minute postponement, which raises questions about the credibility of GPBL.
“We have had players coming in from Ukraine, Austria, Czech Republic, Korea — all of these players landed in the hotel, and then as a country, as a fraternity, we are not really showing the best of ourselves,” he said.
Due to the last-minute postponement, Reddy said the league took a hit of Rs 8.5 crore.
Garisa said GPBL had pulled off a very good event last year, which convinced them to get into it this season. Reddy told Moneycontrol that it’s not easy to win in sport, but they knew how to run the team professionally.
“The way we started this league is to run it as a startup, where every team, every franchise is a business in itself. They will basically grow their team as a business,” he said.
He added that along with this, the league would provide opportunities to players and every single entity in the league would be financially viable. Reddy likened the model to a franchise of a chain restaurant.
“We did that at the Karnataka level first and we made it extremely attractive for people to come on a team. We sold a team for Rs 10 lakh. Compare that with Premier Badminton League, where a team was sold for Rs 8 crore. Instead of inflating the player purse by bringing all the top players in the world, we got the top players from India to be mentors and even offered them a 10 percent equity in each team and got budding players in India to come and participate,” he said.
Attempts to reach the General Secretary of the BAI for comment over email and phone were unsuccessful, and this story will be updated if the association responds.
How leagues work
In a league, teams incur three primary costs — licence fees paid to the league for the right to own a team, player fees, and expenses such as travel and coaching. Teams earn revenue from media rights and sponsorships.
In a cricket-crazy nation that is looking to commercialise other sports, Reddy said such leagues are a way for private companies to come in and grow the sport beyond mere sponsorships. This model worked for team owners and allowed players to earn lakhs of rupees in a few weeks when they otherwise may not have had the opportunity to do so.
Reddy said 450 players from 15 countries registered to play in the second edition, of which 150 were shortlisted and 80 were finally picked in an auction by the eight teams — Bengaluru, Chennai, Kerala, Pune, Gujarat, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Northeast. The league, which had a player purse of Rs 3 crore, had 65 Indian and 15 foreign players.
According to Garisa, most of the costs went towards the players and conduct of the event — and it put players at the centre of it.
“He [Reddy] was giving us five-year, eight-year projections about how the league would evolve, this is where costs would go, how other revenue would come. Somebody giving you a business plan of owning a franchise – I think the quality of the owners that he has put together was also people for whom the love of the sport was a primary motivating factor,” he said.
He added that there was a product-market fit that they saw after the league’s first edition.
“For us, a product-market fit is if every badminton athlete in the country should aspire to play and they should go out and spread the word themselves. Today, so many people have come to play because they all have heard such great things about the league from a player perspective,” Garisa said.
Reddy said changes were made to the game to make it more interesting to watch.
“We then make this economically and commercially viable because we create the product and see how the product’s stickiness is on television. You see the ratings, then bring in sponsors at a certain level. Then next year, sponsors believe in the product they see, they look at things that can be tweaked and make it entertaining. You can’t start at the very top in a sport that does not have media or sponsor acceptance or advertiser acceptance yet,” he says.
Now, with the court battle ahead, Reddy said if the league is to move forward, they’ll have to redraft and start over, depending on the outcome of the case.
