Opinion | Indian sport remains a great enigma: a Bollywood-style epic yet to be shown to the world
- Popular and powerful at home, India’s sport has minimal reach or impact overseas. They are world-beaters at cricket but fail to set the world on fire at Olympics
- The exception is the appearance of City Football Group, which could be an important moment for sport’s development, and for India and its turn outwards
India does not do things by halves. Bollywood movies, for instance, are often lavish affairs, funded by huge budgets and populated by casts of thousands. Although a hugely popular staple of everyday life in India, Bollywood movies can be complicated and confusing, with many elements heavily influenced by entertainment elsewhere.
Such observations seem resonant in the context of Indian sport, as well as cinema: the country’s biggest game, cricket, is a remnant of a previous, colonial era which is deeply embedded in Indian life – epic in scale and awash with money. Cricket is India at its high performance best, swashbuckling and world-beating on the pitch, often a commercial behemoth off it.
It is no coincidence then that Indian sport’s biggest commercial phenomenon, the Indian Premier League (IPL), brings together two of the country’s great passions: cricket and entertainment.
The Twenty20 cricket format has revolutionised the sport, not just across the subcontinent but across the world, and the IPL is at its forefront. Similar competition formats can now be found in many other cricketing countries, with each trying to replicate its formula and in turn revolutionise a game deemed by some as somewhat in decline.
Having been deeply in love with cricket for centuries, India nevertheless seems to now be falling in love with football. Although football has long been popular, the recent formation of the Indian Super League has brought both a new focus upon, and an impetus for, the development of the country’s football product.
