Kabaddi records from different seasons are not comparable and we keep comparing them

The rules moved several times, scoring moved with them, and the all time lists pretend none of that happened.

An all time raid points table looks authoritative. Names in order, numbers beside them, a leader at the top who gets called the greatest of his generation. It is close to worthless as a comparison and the reason is not sample size.

The sport has changed its scoring environment repeatedly. Raid clocks were introduced and tightened. Super tackle thresholds arrived. Do or die conditions were adjusted. Mat dimensions and substitution rules were revised. Each of those changes moves the number of scoring events per match, which means a raider from an earlier season and a raider from a later one were playing a game with a different points supply.

Cricket learned this lesson slowly and painfully. A batting average from an uncovered pitch era does not mean what the same figure means now, and the honest analysts stopped pretending otherwise. Kabaddi is younger as a televised professional sport and has not developed the same habit of caution. So the graphics keep going up with raw totals and no adjustment at all.

What would fix it is not complicated. Express a raider's output relative to the league average for the same season and the same number of raids. A raider who scored well in a low scoring year is doing something different from one who scored the same total when every team was leaking points. That single normalisation would reshuffle a fair number of reputations, which is probably why nobody is in a hurry to publish it.

There is a defence of raw totals that I have some sympathy with. Longevity is real. A player who kept turning up and kept scoring across many seasons has done something that a rate statistic will not capture, and adjustment can flatten out genuine durability into a shrug.

Fine. Publish both, clearly labelled, and let people argue.

What should stop immediately is the comparison of a current player's tally against a figure from a season played under materially different conditions, delivered on air as though it settles something. It settles nothing. It is two different sports wearing the same jersey.