🤼 Kabaddi league quietly became one of the most watched things on TV

Was genuinely surprised recently checking some viewership numbers online to see just how popular the professional kabaddi league has actually become over the past several years, rivaling cricket in specific viewership numbers during its own particular season, something that honestly would have seemed genuinely unlikely to me even just a decade ago when the sport barely got any real television coverage at all. Started watching myself purely by accident a couple of seasons back, my brother had it on during a family visit, and I ended up genuinely hooked by how fast paced and surprisingly strategic the whole sport actually turns out to be once you understand the basic specific rules properly, which took me admittedly a few matches to fully properly grasp myself at first. What strikes me most is how the league has managed to genuinely build real, dedicated fan bases around specific city based teams, similar to how cricket leagues work, giving the sport a whole new kind of commercial structure and viewership that traditional kabaddi tournaments genuinely never really had available to them previously in quite the same organized specific way. A friend who actually played kabaddi competitively at a fairly serious level years ago said the professional league has genuinely elevated the sport's actual public profile more in just a few years than decades of more traditional tournament formats ever managed to achieve on their own, mostly through better production values and genuinely smart marketing around specific individual player personalities themselves. My own nephew, eleven years old, now wants to actually join a local kabaddi coaching program himself after watching the league regularly with us, which genuinely would not have happened even just a few years back before this whole specific league format existed and actually took off properly the way it clearly has now. Has anyone else gotten genuinely into watching kabaddi through this specific league format, and did it surprise you too just how strategic and fast paced the actual sport turns out to be once you properly understand what is actually happening on the mat itself?

My mother watches this more closely than regular cricket now, knows player names and team standings better than I ever do despite claiming zero interest in sports her entire life before this particular league started airing on our local channel. Something about the pace and the shorter format clearly works for people who found traditional formats far too slow to properly hold their attention for long.