Roll up for the Kabaddi World Cup: How a 5,000-year-old sport is breaking new ground in the West Midlands
Chances are you may not even have heard of Kabaddi.
Even if you have - and actually seen it played - the memories may be hazy. Vague snippets of a sport played far away, watched on Saturday mornings in front of the television more than 30 years ago, while waiting for the Italian football highlights to be shown.
Yet over the next week, Kabaddi is about to announce itself to a new generation and will do so right here in the West Midlands.
The 2025 Kabaddi World Cup, which starts in Wolverhampton on Monday, is being hailed a milestone moment, the point one of the oldest sports on the planet, with a history dating back 5,000 years, moves into the mainstream.
Over the course of seven days, 16 teams from four continents will do battle across the region, in front of several thousand spectators and a global TV audience of around half a billion.
It is the first time the World Cup has ever been staged outside the sport's heartland of Asia and there is also a major sponsor in terms of one of the UK’s biggest gambling brands to boot.
“This is our launchpad. It is a dream coming true,” says Ashok Das, president of World Kabaddi.
Das is nicknamed the “Kabaddi Daddy” and it is entirely appropriate. No-one has done more to promote the sport outside of Asia over the past three decades.
Born in Punjab, Das played Kabaddi at a national level in India before moving to the UK and Birmingham in the early 1990s.
From struggling to put a team together back then, the sport now has 12 clubs playing in the British Kabaddi League in which Das, much like everything else, has been a driving force.
After first introducing the sport to the British Army, he founded the England Kabaddi Association in 2004 and set-up the first England women’s team five years later. To be frank, there is not enough space here to list all of the titles he has held but it is his enthusiasm and willingness, on more than one occasion, to put his own money where his mouth is which has kept the sport on the rise, reaching a point where the World Cup has moved outside of Asia for the first time.
