Why Indian hockey’s crisis starts at the grassroots and bleeds to the top

Indian hockey does not have a World Cup crisis; he has a crisis of delusion. Finishing eighth isn’t upset—it’s the exact mathematical reality of a system that’s not just bloated, but crumbling. However, the irony is strongly underlined by the women’s team, who quietly surpassed all small expectations to finish fifth with zero administrative support or hype, proving yet again that grit alone cannot permanently mask a crumbling foundation.

My argument is this: did we really expect anything different? By what logic and reasoning do we claim that the results should have been different? The layman’s argument is that having won back-to-back Olympic medals after breaking an agonizing 41-year medal drought between 1980 and Tokyo 2020, we are a continental powerhouse, so making the last four at the World Championships was a given. First of all, nothing is given in sports.

Whatever little hangover we have from eight Olympic gold medals – they won in an era when we played and the rest of the world was still finding its feet – statistically it looks good and nothing more. History must always be studied in the right perspective, otherwise it loses its relevance. In India, the lack of success in Olympic sports creates false impressions. When a failure occurs, the analysis disappears from the window. The usual pattern of “missing”, “aging”, “not ready” and “overhyped” is becoming the script. India struggled to beat any of the higher ranked teams (Courtesy: Hockey India)

Digging deep, understanding the roots of hockey as a sport and analyzing why we succeeded when we did is never considered. If cricket has seen huge success in the Indian Premier League (IPL) as a commercial engine, every other sport feels compelled to follow the exact same path, regardless of whether they command the same following.

Try to tell a hockey player that their sport is not mass and it will be seen as a betrayal, sparking an argument that can last for hours. In fact, it’s an argument that can’t last longer than it takes to tell the honest truth: Hockey doesn’t have a mass following. It is one of India’s specialty sports.

And that is the core of our failure at the World Cup. Even if we made it to the last four, hockey wouldn’t turn into a mass sport overnight. Nor will it become one in the next fifty years, at least not with the administration currently running it.

We rely heavily on the four-year window of the World Cup, the Olympics or the Asian Games to find some sense of identity in the sport. We are caught in a vicious performance trap: the sport’s commercial survival is entirely dependent on its world-class performance. We believe that if the national team wins a medal, sponsors will flock in and the domestic league will thrive. But we have to get out of this trap.

In a country like India, running a hockey league organically is a huge task because, let’s be brutally honest, sponsors often come because of political pressure, not pure commercial viability. Expecting owners to buy teams and take multi-million dollar losses over five years under a franchise model is economically suicidal. They get nothing back from hockey in the same way that cricket enhances the social standing of a corporate house or provides the ticket to an elite club that IPL ownership guarantees.

This brings us to the Hockey India League (HIL). Hockey India is chasing a shadow when it comes to the expensive franchise model for a sport where there are barely 40 elite players in the entire system. Is a highly commercialized IPL style format suitable for our ecosystem as well? The home and away format is an exceptionally expensive proposition. Even as we struggle to find stable money and franchise owners, we insist on launching in massive metros like Delhi, where a two-hour commute to the stadium at 7pm is a nightmare for the average fan.

The brains behind the sport should be tapped to create a self-sustaining hockey league to be played in Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities. These are the regions where the sport still maintains a cultural pulse and, more importantly, where local fans have truly easy and convenient access to stadiums.

To understand how far behind we are, one only needs to look at Europe, where club ecosystems continue to expand in scale, team density and financial stability. While European club players easily log 20 to 30 high-stakes, competitive games per season, elite competitions like the Dutch Hoofdklasse and the Belgian Hockey League have their doors wide open for global talent.

In the Dutch and Belgian top divisions, dozens of foreign marquee players – representing Australia, Argentina, Germany, Spain and Chinese and Japanese women – are integrated into almost every club’s roster, playing high-stakes matches every week. For example, Argentine penalty corner expert Tomas Dome terrorized defenses as the Belgian league’s top goalscorer simply because the structure allows for world-class cross-pollination.

On the contrary, India’s domestic structure is shrinking. While the European leagues thrive on organic club loyalty, our national team trains in complete isolation, locked away in an 8 or 9 month camp in Bengaluru. This centralized, closed approach has cost Indian hockey dearly, effectively destroying its organic fan base. Even if we look at Australia, their domestic structure – the Hockey One League – effectively operates with only 7-8 regional teams that focus on high-performance routes without pretending to be a multi-billion dollar IPL clone.

Legendary Australian coach Ric Charlesworth has long observed the untapped structural potential of our region and noted that he would like to see a league in the Indian Ocean or the Southern Hemisphere, noting that India could potentially be an economic engine for the game much like cricket if structured properly.

After independence, the sport was a thriving six-month festival across the country. Institutional teams played in front of packed stadiums in Punjab, UP, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Delhi, Maharashtra and Haryana. The players were seen, there was constant competition for places and the youngsters fought national officials in front of the selectors.

But over the past decade and a half, tournaments organized under HI and the erstwhile IHF have lost ground. In the race to create a franchise league, we dismantled the only foundation we had. Iconic venues like the Shivaji Stadium in central Delhi, which hosted the Junior Asia Cup, Asia Cup and was the regular home of the prestigious Nehru Cup, are now barren. Today, office-goers from the surrounding buildings just come to sit in the sun-drenched gallery, smoke and drink tea while the stadium awaits demolition for an office complex.

Hockey India General Secretary Shri Bhola Nath Singh presented mementos to legendary former Indian cricket captain Shri Rahul Dravid and Bollywood star Shri Abhishek Bachchan who were special guests at the FIH Hockey World Cup in Amstelveen on Saturday when the Indian men pic.twitter.com/n8oj12itwz— Hockey India (@TheHockeyIndia) August 23, 2026

This systematic destruction started with KPS Gill, continued under Narinder Batra and continues today under Dilip Tirkey. Batra focused on becoming FIH president and promoting HIL, forgetting that deep roots require domestic patronage. For a real revival, you need a visionary Hockey India administration – not the one currently running things.

We have a president in Dilip Tirkey who is mostly based in Bhubaneswar, a secretary driven by self-importance who flies to irrelevant meetings and a managing director in RK Srivastava who accompanies him and racks up the miles. Even though the President specifically ordered the HI officials to stay in India and work on the domestic league, they enjoyed paid leave during the World Cup in Holland and Belgium.

On behalf of Hockey India, Secretary General Shri Bhola Nath Singh received a special recognition at the National Association Summit in Wavre, Belgium today – where he was felicitated by FIH Vice President Mr. Alberto ‘Coco’ Budeisky.

This award celebrates India pic.twitter.com/nGb191ltWb— Hockey India (@TheHockeyIndia) August 26, 2026

When administrators ignore directives to enjoy European benefits while the sport bleeds at home, accountability is dead. Instead of clicking embarrassing selfies with Bollywood stars and cricketers, HI officials should have met European club owners to learn how to organically revive the sport at home.

India’s problems lie at the very bottom of the pyramid – schools, colleges and universities. If the bottom does not produce and feed players, the top cannot survive. The way forward requires Hockey India to decentralize its training program and end the extended Bengal camps so that players can return to play domestic tournaments for their states and institutions and assemble for national duties only before major tournaments under remote fitness monitoring.

In addition, we need to ensure that our top 8-10 players and juniors are allowed to play in European club leagues, allowing them to compete with the world’s best in Belgium and the Netherlands and return sharper, fitter and more tactically advanced.

Finally, instead of pouring every top dollar into a financially unsustainable 60-player HIL, funding must be redirected to the Tier-1 and Tier-2 city leagues and the National Champions League for the top eight national championship players, giving women’s and men’s hockey the consistent, high-intensity domestic calendar it desperately needs.

Hockey must be based on clubs and institutions. Name any great Indian player from the past – they all made it in domestic tournaments. If we continue to chase the mirage of the IPL while our commoners languish, Indian hockey will not just miss the World Cup semi-finals – it will lock itself into permanent irrelevance. The way forward is not out of reach. It only requires a leadership bold enough to step back into the dusty local grounds, shatter the closed Bengaluru illusion and build a domestic ecosystem where the game truly thrives.

– The end

Published on:

01 Sep 2026 08:01 IST