Key Highlights
- India has produced Olympic gold medalists, World Champions, and global sporting icons but the coaching pipeline that creates them is dangerously thin, geographically concentrated, and structurally unattractive as a career.
- NIS Patiala, Asia’s largest sports institute and India’s primary coaching certification body, has produced approximately 258 M.Sc. graduates in sports coaching in over 40 years roughly 6 per year for a country of 1.45 billion people.
- The average sports coach in India earns approximately ₹5.32 Lakhs per year (Glassdoor, 2026); an IPL head coach earns ₹3–5 Crore. This ₹50x compensation gap between elite and grassroots is not an anomaly it is the structural signal that tells talented people coaching is not a viable career.
- India’s government launched its “largest-ever” coach recruitment drive in late 2025 an implicit admission of how critically short the country is on certified, qualified coaches across all sports.
Table of Contents
- The Paradox at the Heart of Indian Sport
- The Scale of the Deficit: How Few Coaches India Actually Has
- The Certification Bottleneck: One Institute for a Billion Athletes
- The Economics Problem: Why No One Wants to Be a Coach
- The Prestige Problem: Athletes Are Celebrated, Coaches Are Footnotes
- The Geography Problem: All the Coaches Are in the Same Five Cities
- The Foreign Coach Dependence: Importing What We Should Be Building
- The Systemic Effects: What a Broken Coaching Ecosystem Costs India
- What a Working Coaching Ecosystem Actually Looks Like
- FAQ: Sports Coaching Development in India
- The Problem Is Solvable — But Only If We Name It Clearly
The Paradox at the Heart of Indian Sport {#paradox}
Neeraj Chopra. PV Sindhu. Mirabai Chanu. Lovlina Borgohain. India’s list of world-class athletes has grown impressively over the past decade — a Paris 2024 Olympics contingent that won 6 medals, a Paris Paralympics contingent that won 29, and a domestic professional sports sector producing world-class performers across cricket, badminton, wrestling, and hockey.
Behind every single one of these athletes is a coach. Usually one specific coach — often one who invested years, sometimes decades, in a single athlete’s development with limited institutional support, below-market compensation, and no guarantee of recognition. Pullela Gopichand built PV Sindhu and Saina Nehwal. Mahavir Singh Phogat built Geeta and Babita Phogat in a wrestling pit in rural Haryana. O.M. Nambiar shaped PT Usha during the 1980s on a government salary that would not buy a metro city apartment today.
These coaches are extraordinary individuals. That is precisely the problem.
When a country’s world-class athletes all have extraordinary individual coaches behind them — people who succeeded through exceptional personal commitment rather than because the system supported them — it means the system is producing elite performance despite itself. India’s sports coaching ecosystem is not a functioning pipeline. It is a series of extraordinary personal stories layered on top of a structural vacuum.
The numbers make this uncomfortably clear. India has 1.45 billion people. It has tens of millions of children who play sport at some level. It has 108 professional sports teams and a sports industry valued at nearly $2 Bn. And yet its primary national sports coaching certification body has graduated roughly 258 Master’s-level coaches over more than four decades. Its highest honour for coaches — the Dronacharya Award — has been given to approximately 140 coaches in 40 years, at a maximum rate of five per year.
You cannot build a national sports development system on five exceptional coaches per year. The gap between India’s ambition and its coaching reality is one of the most important structural problems in Indian sport — and one of the least discussed.
The Scale of the Deficit: How Few Coaches India Actually Has {#deficit}
Defining the full scale of India’s coaching deficit requires distinguishing between three levels: elite national coaches, state-level development coaches, and community-level grassroots coaches.
At the elite level, India’s coaching corps is small but visible. Sports Authority of India (SAI) runs National Centres of Excellence with specialist coaches. Franchise leagues — IPL, PKL, ISL, Hockey India League — employ head coaches and specialist staff at professional rates. These numbers are in the hundreds, perhaps the low thousands across all sports. By international standards for a country of India’s ambition, this is thin. But it is not the most critical layer.
At the state development level — the coaches who run district academies, state sports hostels, university sports programmes, and the feeder systems for professional leagues — the deficit is severe. A recruitment announcement in January 2026 for just 323 SAI Assistant Coach positions across all sports generated significant coverage precisely because it represented the most visible government coaching recruitment in years. The entry-level salary band of ₹35,400–₹1,12,400 per month (Level-6 government pay scale) is adequate for a government job. It is not competitive with private sector alternatives, and it represents a ceiling, not a floor — most coaches at district level earn far less.
At the grassroots community level — coaches in schools, in district clubs, in village-level programmes — the picture is bleakest of all. Qualified, certified coaches at this level are vanishingly rare. Most physical education teachers in Indian schools are not certified coaches in any specific sport. Most informal coaches in district-level sports programmes have no formal certification of any kind. The Khelo India E-Khel Pathshala programme, which SAI launched to develop competencies of grassroots and community coaches through online and offline training, is an attempt to address this — but it is in early stages and nowhere near the scale the problem demands.
Germany, to use the benchmark from our previous analysis, runs over 600 different educational curricula for coaches, exercise leaders, and club managers through its Olympic Sports Confederation. It has built a formalised, funded, nationally coordinated coaching education system that produces qualified coaches for 91,000 clubs. India has one primary coaching institute, three subcentres, and a six-week certificate course that processes approximately 3,600–3,700 candidates per session — across a country with 640,000 villages.
The Certification Bottleneck: One Institute for a Billion Athletes {#certification}
The Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports (NSNIS) in Patiala is genuinely impressive as an institution. Established in 1961, it is Asia’s largest sports institute — its campus encompasses a gymnasium, swimming pool, indoor halls, a cycling velodrome, synthetic hockey fields, an athletic track, and one of the continent’s most comprehensive sports science facilities. It offers diploma and certificate programmes in sports coaching, M.Sc. and Ph.D. in sports coaching science, post-graduate diplomas in sports medicine, sports nutrition, sports psychology, and strength and conditioning.
The problem is not the quality of NSNIS Patiala. It is the scale — and the structure.
NSNIS’s flagship coaching qualification, the Diploma in Sports Coaching, is a two-year programme. In over forty years of running the M.Sc. in Sports Coaching (started in 1979), the institute has produced 258 graduates — an average of approximately 6 per year. The six-week certificate course processes larger numbers — roughly 3,600–3,700 per session, twice annually — but a six-week certificate, while valuable, does not produce a fully qualified coach capable of running a structured development programme for young athletes across a multi-year pathway.
The SAI has three academic subcentres: in Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Thiruvananthapuram. That is four locations total — for a country of 1.45 billion people across 28 states, covering 29 different sports in Olympic programmes alone, and a professional league system now spanning cricket, football, kabaddi, hockey, badminton, wrestling, and more.
The geography of certification matters because coaching is a practical profession. A coach cannot be trained at a distance from athletes, facilities, and competition. A certification system concentrated in four cities, all in the north or south of the country, structurally excludes coaches from the northeast, from central India, from rural states where sports talent is abundant but institutional access is minimal. The aspiring hockey coach from Chhattisgarh or the young athletics coach from Manipur must travel to Patiala, Bengaluru, Kolkata, or Thiruvananthapuram to receive formal coaching education. The barriers — financial, geographic, cultural — mean that most simply do not.
The Diploma in Sports Coaching at NSNIS Patiala costs ₹63,800 for Indian candidates. For a young person from a lower-income background considering a career in sports coaching — a career that may pay ₹3–5 Lakhs per year in its early years — this fee is a meaningful deterrent. The system charges people to enter a low-paid profession and then wonders why the pipeline is thin.
The Economics Problem: Why No One Wants to Be a Coach {#economics}
Coaching is a calling. But it is also a career. And in India, the career economics of sports coaching are deeply unattractive at every level except the very top.
Consider the numbers side by side. An IPL head coach earns ₹3–5 Crore per year. Rahul Dravid, during his tenure as India’s national cricket team coach, reportedly earned ₹9.5–10 Crore annually — making him one of the highest-paid cricket coaches in the world. These numbers are visible, celebrated, and occasionally cited as evidence that coaching has become a serious profession in India.
They are also completely misleading when used to describe the profession as a whole. There are ten IPL franchises and one Indian national cricket team. The coaching positions that pay ₹3 Crore and above number in the dozens, perhaps the low hundreds if you include every professional league across all sports. India’s sports coaching profession has maybe 200–300 genuinely well-paid positions at its apex.
Beneath that apex, the drop is precipitous. The average sports coach salary in India, across all levels, is approximately ₹5.32 Lakhs per year (Glassdoor, 2026). SAI’s newly recruited assistant coaches start at ₹35,400 per month — ₹4.25 Lakhs per year at entry level. A school physical education teacher in a government school may earn ₹3–6 Lakhs per year. A community-level grassroots coach working with a district sports programme may earn significantly less, often in informal arrangements without employment security, benefits, or career progression.
The gap between the apex and the base is not just large. It is structural. In most professions, career progression means moving up a visible ladder — from junior to senior, from local to national, from ₹5 Lakhs to ₹25 Lakhs to ₹75 Lakhs over a career. In Indian sports coaching, the ladder has two rungs: the bottom, where most coaches spend their entire careers, and the top, where a handful of individuals earn extraordinary salaries in high-profile professional environments. The middle — the experienced, well-compensated, state-level development coach who runs a serious academy programme and earns ₹15–25 Lakhs per year — barely exists in India.
This is not an accident. It reflects the overall underdevelopment of the state-level sports ecosystem — the middle layer we explored in our blog on club development. Without a dense, funded, competitive state-level sports structure, there is no market for mid-career coaches. Without a market, there is no salary signal. Without a salary signal, talented people do not enter the profession. Without talented people, the development ecosystem does not produce athletes. And without athletes, there is no political pressure to fund the structure. The circle is perfectly, brutally closed.
The Prestige Problem: Athletes Are Celebrated, Coaches Are Footnotes {#prestige}
The economic problem is compounded by a prestige problem that is equally structural and harder to fix.
In India’s sports culture, athletes are celebrated. Coaches are footnotes. This is not true in every case — Gopichand’s role in India’s badminton revolution is widely acknowledged; Nambiar’s contribution to PT Usha is documented; Phogat’s story was made into a Bollywood film. But these are exceptions, and they are exceptions because they are acknowledged at all. In most cases, when an Indian athlete wins a medal, their coaches are mentioned in the final paragraph of the news story, if at all.
The Dronacharya Award — India’s highest honour for sports coaches — has been given to approximately 140 coaches in 40 years of its existence, at a maximum of five per year. Compare that to the 881 individuals who have received the Arjuna Award for outstanding athletic performance. India’s national sports recognition architecture reflects, with mathematical precision, the ratio in which it values athletes versus the people who make them.
This prestige gap is not merely a social observation. It has real-world consequences for career choice. When parents in India consider whether their child should become a sports coach or pursue engineering, medicine, civil services, or even a professional athletic career, the social status signal attached to coaching is unambiguously negative. Sports coaches in India do not have a professional identity that society visibly respects. They have no professional body, no licensing framework that confers prestige, no public registry that distinguishes a two-year NIS-trained diploma holder from someone who simply played the sport for a few years and calls themselves a coach.
Coaching is not regulated in India. Anyone can call themselves a sports coach. This is, in one sense, a trivial observation — but its consequences are serious. In the absence of regulation, quality signals are weak, parents cannot evaluate the coaches they entrust their children to, qualified coaches cannot differentiate themselves in the market, and the profession defaults to the lowest denominator of informal, uncertified practice.
Germany’s coaches must be licensed through the DOSB’s certification framework — 600+ curricula covering every level from community sports leader to elite performance coach. UK coaching operates through UK Coaching’s tiered licensing system. Australia has a coaching pathway programme that connects qualifications to job markets. India has one primary institute, a six-week certificate course, and no national coaching licence framework. The profession is structurally unformed.
The Geography Problem: All the Coaches Are in the Same Five Cities {#geography}
India’s talent is distributed across 640,000 villages. Its certified coaches are concentrated in Patiala, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, and a handful of other metros.
This geographic mismatch is one of the most practically damaging features of the coaching deficit. It means that talent developed in district-level programmes in Jharkhand, Odisha’s tribal regions, Manipur’s football hotbeds, or Chhattisgarh’s hockey-rich communities — talent that often has the raw athletic ability to reach national and international levels — is being trained by uncertified or minimally qualified coaches, using improvised methodology, without sports science support, and without a clear path to professional development.
The exceptions prove the rule. Gopichand built his academy in Hyderabad — a major city with the infrastructure to attract elite athletes from across India. Mahavir Singh Phogat’s rural Haryana wrestling system worked because wrestling is deeply embedded in Haryana’s community culture, so the cultural infrastructure compensated for the absence of formal coaching education. These are not replicable templates. They are personal feats of determination layered on top of geographic accident.
When Khelo India talent identification scouts fan out across districts and identify a 13-year-old athlete with exceptional potential in, say, Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, the question that follows identification is: who develops this athlete? The scout goes home. There is no district-level certified coach to receive and develop the identified talent. The athlete either migrates to a city academy (possible for a few, not for most) or returns to informal community sport where their development stalls. The identification programme found the diamond. There was no cutter.
The Foreign Coach Dependence: Importing What We Should Be Building {#foreign}
One of the most consistent patterns in Indian sports administration is the importation of foreign coaches for national teams when domestic expertise is unavailable or insufficient. This practice is not wrong in itself — exposure to global coaching methodologies is valuable. But the scale and persistence of India’s reliance on foreign coaches is a symptom of the domestic coaching deficit, not a solution to it.
The Indian men’s football team has had a continuous succession of foreign coaches for decades — the technical level of domestic coaching expertise for football has not yet scaled to meet national team requirements. Indian hockey’s recent successes were built partly on the foundation of foreign High Performance Directors and analytical coaches brought in to complement domestic expertise. Tennis, swimming, boxing, and shooting all have foreign coaches embedded in national programmes.
This is expensive. Foreign coaches command significantly higher salaries than their domestic equivalents — rates that reflect international market standards rather than Indian career economics. More importantly, it represents a failure of knowledge transfer. When a foreign coach leaves India after a contracted tenure, the expertise they brought largely leaves with them. If that expertise is not embedded in a domestic coaching education system — creating Indian coaches trained in those methodologies, credentialled in those frameworks, and capable of passing them on to the next generation — the cycle simply repeats.
Cuba’s Blas Iglesias Fernandez is, as of the available record, the only foreign coach to have won the Dronacharya Award. He earned it after over a decade in India, training Olympic and Asian Games medallist boxers. His tenure represents an example of successful knowledge transfer. He stayed long enough, coached deep enough, and contributed to the Indian system in ways that left a genuine legacy. Most foreign coaching tenures in India do not reach that depth. They are procurement solutions for immediate national team needs, not investments in the domestic coaching ecosystem.
The goal should not be to replace foreign coaches. It should be to build a domestic coaching ecosystem strong enough that India needs far fewer of them — and to structure the foreign coaches India does bring in as knowledge transfer agents rather than simple performance contractors.
The Systemic Effects: What a Broken Coaching Ecosystem Costs India {#cost}
The consequences of India’s coaching deficit compound through the entire sports development system.
On athlete development: The most direct cost is the raw number of talented athletes who are never properly developed. India’s talent identification programmes — Khelo India, KIRTI, state-level talent hunts — consistently surface raw talent in significant numbers. But talent identification without quality coaching development is an incomplete system. Identified athletes who don’t receive qualified, consistent coaching for 8–12 years after identification will not reach international competitive standards, regardless of their natural gifts. India’s Olympic medal haul consistently underperforms its population size partly because the development pipeline between identification and international competition is staffed by too few qualified coaches.
On the professional leagues: Professional sports leagues — IPL, PKL, ISL, Hockey India League — all depend on a domestic supply of talented athletes who have been properly developed before reaching the professional stage. Where that domestic supply is thin, leagues compensate by importing foreign talent or by selecting from an increasingly narrow pool of athletes produced by the handful of high-quality academies that do exist. This creates a concentration of talent in a small number of elite academies and a hollowness in the broader professional talent market. India’s non-cricket leagues particularly struggle with domestic talent depth in their lower draft rounds.
On the sports economy broadly: The sports analytics and technology sector — one of India’s fastest growing areas — depends on coaches who understand data, can use performance tracking tools, and integrate sports science into their training methodology. A coaching workforce that is primarily informally trained, uncertified, and cut off from modern sports science education cannot effectively adopt the technology layer that the Indian sports industry is rapidly building. The analytics and digital insights infrastructure that sophisticated sports properties need is only as good as the coaches who use it.
On the 2036 Olympic aspiration: India’s stated goal is to be a top-10 sporting nation by 2036. Top-10 sporting nations all share one common feature that India currently lacks at scale: a dense, well-funded, professionally respected domestic coaching education system. The UK’s UK Coaching framework, Germany’s DOSB certification system, Australia’s coach development pathway, China’s state-run coaching academies — all are embedded, multi-decade systems that produce thousands of qualified coaches annually at every level. India will not reach top-10 status without an equivalent system.
What a Working Coaching Ecosystem Actually Looks Like {#working}
The benchmarks exist. What India needs is not invention — it is structured adoption of models that demonstrably work.
A functioning coaching ecosystem has five components operating simultaneously, from community to elite level:
A tiered national coaching licence framework. Not just certification at the top, but a coherent ladder: Level 1 (community coach, six weeks), Level 2 (development coach, six months), Level 3 (performance coach, one year diploma), Level 4 (high performance coach, two-year advanced diploma), Level 5 (national team coach, international certification). Each level has defined competencies, enables specific coaching roles, and provides a clear career progression path. Germany’s 600+ curricula are built around exactly this architecture.
Geographically distributed certification centres. Every state, not four cities, should have the capacity to certify coaches at Level 1 and 2. The Khelo India programme’s district infrastructure should include coaching education facilities — not just training halls and tracks, but classrooms, video analysis labs, and coaches who train coaches. Academy development programmes must include coach education as a primary output, not an afterthought.
A coaching career pathway with competitive mid-career economics. The ₹50x salary gap between grassroots and elite coaching must be narrowed. State-level development coaches at Level 3 and above should be able to earn ₹12–25 Lakhs per year in structured positions — within state sports authorities, professional league academies, national federations, and private academies. Without this, the profession will not attract the calibre of talent it needs.
Mandatory coach certification for funded programmes. Any sports programme receiving government funding — Khelo India Centre, state sports hostel, national federation programme — should be required to employ certified coaches at the appropriate level. This creates demand for certification, validates the investment in coach education, and establishes minimum standards for athlete safety and development quality.
A formal transition pathway for retiring elite athletes. Some of India’s best potential coaches are athletes finishing their competitive careers — people who understand the sport at a high level, have navigational experience of elite competition, and are at an age where coaching is the natural next chapter. The SAI’s RESET programme (Retired Sportsperson Empowerment Training, launched in 2024) is a step in this direction. But the pathway from retired athlete to certified professional coach needs to be formalised, funded, and celebrated — not treated as an afterthought to the athlete recognition infrastructure.
This is the architecture that GSK’s academy and grassroots development work is built around. Not simply running coaching camps or designing training curricula, but building the structural components — coach certification programmes, curriculum design, talent pathway frameworks, and data-backed progress tracking systems — that turn ad hoc coaching into a scalable, replicable development system. The Chhattisgarh Hockey League 2026’s talent hunt across all 33 districts is only worth conducting if the coaches who receive identified talent at district level are qualified to develop them. That is the full problem, and the full solution.
FAQ: Sports Coaching Development in India {#faq}
Q: How do you become a certified sports coach in India?
The primary pathway is through the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports (NSNIS), Patiala — Asia’s largest sports institute. NSNIS offers a Six-Week Certificate Course in Sports Coaching (conducted twice annually at four centres: Patiala, Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Thiruvananthapuram), a two-year Diploma in Sports Coaching, and an M.Sc. in Sports Coaching affiliated with Punjabi University, Patiala. Some national federations also run sport-specific coaching courses. India currently has no comprehensive national coaching licence framework equivalent to the UK or German systems — certification is valid but not mandatory for most coaching roles.
Q: How many certified coaches does India have relative to its population?
No comprehensive national data exists on the total number of certified sports coaches in India — which is itself part of the problem. NIS Patiala has produced approximately 258 M.Sc. graduates in sports coaching since the programme started in 1979. The six-week certificate programme processes roughly 3,600–3,700 candidates per session, twice a year. Given India’s population of 1.45 billion and its tens of millions of young sports participants, these numbers represent a profound structural deficit compared to countries like Germany (which has 91,000 registered sports clubs each requiring certified coaches) or the UK (151,000+ community clubs with a formalised coaching workforce).
Q: Why is sports coaching not a popular career in India?
Three compounding reasons: economics, prestige, and career structure. Economically, grassroots coaches earn approximately ₹3–6 Lakhs per year — a fraction of what comparable professionals earn in engineering, finance, or even government administration. Prestige-wise, India’s sports recognition culture celebrates athletes (Arjuna Awards: 881 recipients) far more visibly than coaches (Dronacharya Awards: ~140 recipients in 40 years). Structurally, the coaching career ladder in India has a thin top (well-paid IPL and national team coaches) and a crowded bottom (poorly paid community coaches) with almost no middle — making career progression difficult to visualise or achieve.
Q: What is the Dronacharya Award and how significant is it for coaching recognition?
Instituted in 1985, the Dronacharya Award is India’s highest honour for sports coaches, given annually for outstanding coaching that enables athletes to excel at international events over a four-year period. It comprises a bronze statuette, certificate, ceremonial attire, and a cash prize of ₹10–15 Lakhs. A maximum of five awards are given per year — two in the lifetime contribution category. Approximately 140 coaches have received the award in 40 years. While prestigious, the award’s scale (five per year maximum) and cash prize (one-time ₹15 Lakhs for a career of contributions) reflect the structural undervaluation of coaching in India’s sports recognition architecture.
Q: How does India’s foreign coach dependence affect domestic coaching development?
India’s consistent reliance on foreign coaches for national team roles — in football, hockey, boxing, shooting, and other sports — reflects the genuine gaps in domestic expertise at the elite level. This is not inherently problematic: exposure to global coaching methodologies adds value. The risk is in failing to institutionalise that knowledge transfer. When foreign coaches complete their contracts without embedding their expertise in a domestic coaching education system — training Indian coaches in their methodologies, contributing to certification curricula, mentoring domestic coaches — the expertise simply leaves. India’s strategic interest is in treating foreign coaching engagements as knowledge transfer investments with defined legacy deliverables, not just performance contracts for immediate results.
Q: What does the 2025 government coach recruitment drive tell us about the coaching deficit?
In November 2025, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports announced what it called India’s largest-ever coach recruitment drive — an implicit acknowledgement that the country is critically short of qualified coaches across multiple sports. The SAI also opened 323 assistant coach positions in January 2026. These are meaningful steps. They do not, however, address the structural causes of the deficit: the absence of a distributed national coaching education system, the uncompetitive economics of the coaching career, the lack of a national coaching licence framework, and the cultural undervaluation of coaching as a profession. Recruitment fills vacant positions; it does not build a pipeline.
Q: What role should private sports academies and league franchises play in building India’s coaching ecosystem?
Enormously significant — and currently underperforming their potential. Professional league franchises in IPL, PKL, ISL, and hockey leagues should be required or strongly incentivised to maintain certified coaching programmes at their affiliated academies, to employ coaches holding national coaching licences, and to actively run coach education programmes as part of their community development obligations. Private academies like the Gopichand Badminton Academy demonstrate what high-quality private coaching infrastructure looks like. Scaling that model requires franchise investment in coaching education, not just training infrastructure — paying for coaches to get certified, structuring career pathways that retain qualified coaches, and contributing to the national coaching certification ecosystem rather than simply consuming from it.
The Problem Is Solvable — But Only If We Name It Clearly
India’s sports coaching ecosystem is broken. That is the honest summary. The pipeline is thin at entry, poorly compensated in the middle, geographically concentrated in a handful of cities, structurally unattractive as a career, and dependent on importing expertise that should be built at home.
The consequence is paid by every talented athlete whose career stalls not because they lacked ability but because the coach who could have developed them did not exist in their district, could not afford to be there, or was never properly trained in the first place. It is paid by every professional league that struggles to find domestically developed talent in its draft rounds. It is paid by every state government that invests in facilities and talent hunts and then discovers there are no qualified coaches to populate the academies those facilities enable. And it will be paid by India’s 2036 Olympics hosting ambition if the development system that should be producing the athletes for that moment is not built now.
Sports coaching development in India is not a niche technical problem. It is the connective tissue of the entire sports development system — the layer between talent identification and athletic achievement, between grassroots infrastructure and professional performance, between government investment in sport and the outcomes that justify it. You can build a thousand Khelo India Centres. Without qualified coaches inside them, they are expensive rooms.
The solution exists. It is not a secret. It requires a national coaching licence framework, geographically distributed certification infrastructure, a coaching career economics model that competes for talent, a cultural rehabilitation of coaching as a profession worthy of recognition, and a deliberate investment in transitioning India’s retiring elite athletes into the coaching workforce.
This is the problem article. The next one builds the solution.
At GSK, coaching development is not peripheral to what we do — it is foundational. Our academy and grassroots development pillar addresses coach education, certification, and structured pathway design as primary deliverables, not afterthoughts. Building a coaching pipeline is how you convert infrastructure investment into athlete output. Every league we design — every event we manage, every sponsorship structure we build — is only as good as the coaches producing the athletes who compete in it.
If you are a state sports department, a federation, a franchise owner, or a private investor building a sports development programme that depends on coach quality, talk to us. The problem is real. The solutions are operational. And the time to build them is now.
Follow GSK on LinkedIn for the next blog in this series: what a working sports coaching ecosystem for India would actually look like — and how to build it