From Kabaddi to Football, and the Britain They Reveal
The West Midlands, once the industrial heart of Britain, now finds itself the unlikely epicentre of a different kind of contest: the 2025 Kabaddi World Cup. It is a curious setting for a sport that, until relatively recently, remained largely confined to the Indian subcontinent, yet its arrival in Britain is both inevitable and instructive. Kabaddi, with its peculiar mix of balletic aggression and schoolyard simplicity, is the kind of game that should never have disappeared from the British sporting consciousness in the first place.
For those of a certain age, kabaddi is a half-remembered fragment of early morning television. Channel 4, in its anarchic late-80s and early-90s phase, sandwiched the game between other imports of niche appeal, and for a brief moment, kabaddi flickered in the British imagination. A feverish, breathless reimagining of British bulldog, but with a set of rules as alien as they were enthralling. The raider, his breath held, body taut, muttered a near-hypnotic “kabaddi, kabaddi” as he darted through the opposing ranks, a figure at once predator and prey. For viewers accustomed to the rigid stratifications of British sport, kabaddi had a kind of lawless beauty, a ritualistic intensity that belied its simplicity.
And for one hot summer, our local rec was filled with the sound of kids playing kabaddi. A pitch—court?—marked out by the seesaw at one end, the swings for the little ones at the other. The breath-holding rule understood, if not always enforced, the pursuit and counter-pursuit played out between the outlines of football goals long abandoned to overgrown grass. For weeks, it was the only game that mattered. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, it was gone, replaced by the familiar rhythms of football and cricket, as if it had never been there at all.
“For one hot summer, our local rec was filled with the sound of kids playing kabaddi, breath held, bodies darting between the swings and the seesaw. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, it was gone, replaced by the familiar rhythms of football and cricket, as if it had never been there at all.”
Kabaddi is an old game, far older than the imperial constructs that would later carry sport across continents. It predates cricket, football, even polo, its origins lost somewhere in the dust of South Asia’s prehistory. It is a game of land and body, of territory and endurance. Unlike so many sports rebranded and codified by Victorian administrators, kabaddi resisted assimilation. It remained an outlier, a game of the fields, played barefoot in village squares, passed down through generations with little need for reinvention. Yet, as with so many cultural exports, modernity has given kabaddi a makeover: indoor arenas, brightly coloured mats, corporate sponsors, and a premier league. The primal breath-holding struggle remains, but the edges are sharper now, the spectacle more polished.
That kabaddi should find a new home in Britain, and in the West Midlands in particular, is a story of migration as much as sport. The region, home to one of Britain’s largest South Asian communities, has long been a crucible of cultural adaptation. Birmingham, Coventry, Walsall, and Wolverhampton, names that once evoked the smoke and clang of industry, now speak to a different kind of making and remaking. In hosting the Kabaddi World Cup, Britain is not so much welcoming a foreign game as recognising something already embedded within its sporting landscape. Over seven days, these cities will see 16 men’s and 8 women’s teams compete, their movements streamed across platforms from BBC iPlayer to talkSPORT’s YouTube channel, an incongruous yet entirely fitting collision of old and new media.
Britain’s involvement is not merely logistical; England and Scotland have fielded teams, further proof that kabaddi has, in some small way, been domesticated. England’s captain, Hardeep ‘Harry’ Singh, a Wolverhampton native, juggles his career in medical sales with the tactical nous required of a kabaddi raider. He is, in many ways, emblematic of the sport’s odd duality: professional yet instinctual, a modern game that still pulses with the rhythms of its ancient past.
Cricket has long dominated the sporting lexicon of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. Its metaphors, straight bats, sticky wickets, long innings, have provided a framework for understanding both migration and belonging. But kabaddi offers something different: a rawer, more elemental confrontation, a test of speed and physical cunning, of the ability to draw breath at the right moment and, crucially, to escape. It is not the slow absorption of place that cricket represents, but something more urgent, more precarious. If cricket was the game that eased itself into the schoolyards of colonial Britain, kabaddi is the game that arrives on its own terms, without translation.
Football, once the industrial game of the masses, now reflects something else entirely. Newcastle United, after seven decades of longing, finally lifted a trophy, but it was not the working men of Tyneside who brought the club back to prominence. Instead, it was the wealth of Saudi Arabia, a new kind of footballing power, one that speaks less to local identity than to global capital. Elsewhere, in Manchester, another transformation is underway. Jim Ratcliffe, British billionaire, petrochemical magnate, custodian of old money, has taken the reins at Manchester United, his corporate instincts clashing with the club’s identity as a behemoth built on memory, myth, and momentum. Cuts to staff, slashed budgets, a proposed £2 billion stadium that would tower over a team that seems ever more diminished, it is football as restructuring plan, the beautiful game swallowed by the language of efficiency.
“Newcastle, in Saudi white and green, and Manchester United, run like a hedge fund, no longer resemble the games that once bound city to people, people to history. Meanwhile, kabaddi arrives in the West Midlands not as a curiosity, but as a fixture, a game that does not ask to be translated.”
Perhaps this is Britain now, caught between its borrowed past and its uncertain future. The old structures of sport, like those of work, of class, of politics, are breaking apart. The games of empire, cricket, football, were once tools of assimilation, methods of control, languages that could be learned and spoken fluently. But now? Newcastle, in Saudi white and green, and Manchester United, run like a hedge fund, no longer resemble the games that once bound city to people, people to history. Meanwhile, kabaddi arrives in the West Midlands not as a curiosity, but as a fixture, a game that does not ask to be translated. In this, there is something almost radical, a reminder that not everything must be repackaged, that some things endure on their own terms. The games change, but the battle remains the same.
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