Importing a few foreign players is not the same as going global

A slot for an overseas defender makes a nice story on debut night, and it does nothing for the sport outside India.

Every season a handful of players arrive from Iran, from Korea, from Kenya, occasionally from further afield, and every season the same line gets used about the sport crossing borders. It is a pleasant story. It is also, structurally, almost meaningless.

Importing players moves talent inward. It does not build anything outward. A Korean defender playing a full season in India improves that defender and improves the league he plays in. What it does for kabaddi in Korea depends entirely on whether there is a domestic competition for him to go home to, and mostly there is not.

Compare it with what actually made other sports travel. Not import quotas. Domestic leagues in the receiving country, playing a schedule, on television, with local players people can name. Cricket did not spread because county sides signed overseas professionals, though they did. It spread because someone set up a competition in the new place and kept it running through the unglamorous years.

Iran is the interesting case and the one that undercuts my own argument slightly, since Iranian kabaddi was strong before the money arrived and produced defenders who could walk into any franchise. That did not come from a slot in an Indian auction. It came from a serious domestic structure and a national programme that treated the sport as its own rather than as a feeder.

So the honest position is uncomfortable for the league. The overseas slot is a marketing device more than a development one. It puts a flag on the team sheet and gives the broadcast a talking point on opening night, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as nobody confuses it with growth.

Real expansion would look duller and cost more. Coaching qualifications translated into other languages. Mats and officials funded in places that cannot afford them. A regional competition somewhere in south east Asia that runs for five years while nobody watches.

Nobody gets a highlight package out of that, which is precisely why it does not happen and why the sport keeps announcing that it has gone worldwide from a stadium in Jaipur.