Key Highlights
- The average attention span of digital consumers has declined 33% since 2015 — from 12.1 seconds per social media post to 8.25 seconds by 2025. Gen Z, which constitutes roughly 27% of India’s population and represents the fastest-growing spending demographic of the next decade, averages 6.5 seconds of focused attention per social media post and watches nearly 80% less television than older generations. Only 31% of sports fans aged 18–24 globally watch live full-length matches. The other 69% are watching highlights, clips, and replays. Sport that cannot be experienced in compressed form is, for this demographic, increasingly irrelevant.
- This is not a crisis for Indian sports. It is a design brief. Every major Indian league is already responding — the IPL added the Impact Player rule to manufacture more tactical drama per over, PKL Season 12 eliminated ties, introduced the Golden Raid shootout, and reduced the league from 132 to 108 matches specifically because of “lacklustre fan engagement” in Season 11. The Indian Street Premier League (ISPL) launched as a T10 tennis-ball cricket league in 2024 with ₹4.91 Crore spent on its inaugural player auction, targeting the vast ecosystem of street cricket players who exist completely outside the professional cricket pipeline. Cricket at the Olympics returns in 2028 in T20 format — and two ICC members are already pushing for T10 to be considered as well.
- The compression of sports formats is not just a media consumption story. It is a league design story, a sponsorship story, and an infrastructure story. A 90-minute T10 match creates different ad inventory than a three-hour T20 match. A format that eliminates drawn outcomes restructures the betting and fantasy engagement layer. A street-level format that uses tennis balls and can be played in a parking lot creates an entirely different academy-to-professional pipeline than one that requires turf pitches and first-class facilities. Format innovation changes everything downstream: who sponsors, what they pay, how fans engage, and what infrastructure you need to build.
- This blog is GSK’s analysis of the attention economy reshaping Indian sports — what formats are winning, why they are winning, what the implications are for league designers and brand managers, and what the next wave of format innovation in India’s non-cricket sports might look like. The short version: sport that fits inside a commute will outlast sport that requires an evening. Build accordingly.
Table of Contents
- The Data: What Shrinking Attention Spans Actually Mean for Indian Sport
- Cricket’s Format Ladder: From Tests to T10 and What Each Rung Delivers
- PKL’s Season 12 Overhaul — The Most Honest Format Reckoning in Indian Sports
- The Street Sports Revolution: ISPL, Box Cricket, and the Democratisation of Competition
- Beyond Cricket and Kabaddi: Format Innovation in India’s Other Leagues
- What Format Innovation Means for Sponsorship
- What Format Innovation Means for League Designers
- The Formats That Haven’t Been Built Yet
- FAQ: Sports Format Innovation India Fan Engagement
- Conclusion: Compression Is the Product
There is a thought experiment worth running before diving into the data.
Imagine you are designing a sport from scratch in 2026. You know that your target audience checks their phone 150 times a day, consumes most of their video content in clips under sixty seconds, watches 80% less television than their parents, toggles between apps every forty-four seconds, and will, on average, direct 6.5 seconds of focused attention at any given piece of content before deciding whether to keep watching or scroll away.
Would you design Test cricket? Would you design a football match with two forty-five minute halves and regular stoppages? Would you design a hockey tournament spread across seventeen matches over thirteen days?
Of course you wouldn’t. You would design something much shorter, much denser with decisive moments, and much easier to consume in fragments without losing the thread of the narrative. You would design something that fits inside a commute, can be explained to a newcomer in two minutes, produces a shareable climactic moment every few minutes, and generates a result rather than a draw.
You would, more or less, design the T10 cricket format. Or the PKL’s new Golden Raid shootout. Or the Shooting League of India’s 25-minute franchise format. Or the twenty-five minute Ultimate Kho Kho match.
The point is not that traditional sports are dying. Test cricket still commands enormous cultural reverence, and the twenty-eight hour Border-Gavaskar Trophy series set viewership records in 2024–25. The point is that the formats which attract new audiences — the 18-to-28-year-olds who will determine Indian sports’ commercial trajectory for the next thirty years — are the ones that have been designed with the attention economy in mind. And the leagues and brands that understand this structural shift will systematically outperform those that don’t.
The Data: What Shrinking Attention Spans Actually Mean for Indian Sport {#data}
Let’s be precise about what the attention economy data actually shows, because the popular version (“Gen Z has an eight-second attention span”) is both true and misleading.
It is true that the average digital consumer’s focused attention per social media post has declined from 12.1 seconds in 2015 to 8.25 seconds in 2025 — a 33% decline in a decade. It is true that Gen Z averages 6.5 seconds of focused attention per post and that teen users toggle between apps every forty-four seconds, compared to two and a half minutes a decade ago. These are documented behavioural shifts, not anecdotes.
What the data does not show is that Gen Z cannot sustain attention for long periods. What it shows is that Gen Z will not sustain attention for long periods unless the content earns it. Gen Z consumers use short-form content as a research mechanism: 85% of Gen Z respondents in a Google study said they use short-form content to find long-form content they will watch later. They are not incapable of watching a three-hour Test match. They just need a short-form hook — a sixty-second reel of Jasprit Bumrah’s spell, a fifteen-second clip of a diving catch — to decide whether the full match is worth their time.
This distinction matters enormously for Indian sports. It means that a three-hour IPL match is not intrinsically incompatible with Gen Z consumption — IPL 2025 achieved digital viewership (652 million) that overtook linear TV (537 million) for the first time. It means that a three-hour match whose digital companion content — clips, highlights, real-time social integration, second-screen engagement — is poorly designed is incompatible with Gen Z consumption. The format of the sport and the format of the content ecosystem around the sport are equally important.
The harder data point for Indian sport is this: a PwC survey found that only 19% of younger fans (18–34) say they watch an entire match when they tune in at home — and when they do, they are almost always doing something else simultaneously. More than two-thirds used social media during an event. Only 1% said they did nothing but watch. Younger fans were 3.5 times more likely than older fans to cite game length as a negative experience factor, and 46% more likely to cite downtime as a negative.
Game length and downtime. Those two variables are the most actionable design inputs for any Indian league building for the next decade. Not broadcast quality, not star player investment, not venue aesthetics — game length and downtime. Reduce both, and you have addressed the two primary objections younger audiences have to watching live sport.
Every significant format innovation in Indian sports over the last five years is, at its core, an intervention on game length or downtime. The PKL’s Golden Raid shootout eliminates the drawn outcome (downtime is the tie-breaking result no one wanted). The IPL’s Impact Player rule creates additional tactical moments (reduces the perceptual downtime of a passive innings). T10 cricket compresses the entire match to ninety minutes (attacks game length directly). The Shooting League of India’s 25-minute format attacks both simultaneously.
Cricket’s Format Ladder: From Tests to T10 and What Each Rung Delivers {#cricket-ladder}
Cricket is the only sport in India — and possibly the world — that operates a coherent, commercially active format ladder spanning five days (Tests) to ninety minutes (T10). Understanding what each rung of that ladder does commercially is the most useful framework for understanding where format innovation pressure in Indian sport is actually coming from.
| Format | Match Duration | Primary Audience | Primary Value | Commercial Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test Cricket | 5 days | 35+ purists; diaspora | Cultural prestige; narrative depth | Premium broadcast; tourism |
| ODI Cricket | 8 hours | 25–45 weekend fans | Balanced spectacle; occasion event | National broadcast; stadium attendance |
| T20 (IPL) | ~3.5 hours | 18–45 mass market | Entertainment spectacle; franchise loyalty | Mass broadcast; sponsorship; fantasy |
| The Hundred | ~2.5 hours | 18–35 casual fans | Simplicity; accessibility | Broadcast + stadium; family audience |
| T10 | ~90 minutes | 15–30 mobile-first | Pure entertainment; shareable moments | Digital-first; short ad slots |
| Street/Tennis Ball (ISPL) | ~90 minutes | 15–28 participatory | Inclusion; identity; community | Grassroots; participatory sponsorship |
The critical commercial insight in this table is that each format serves a different audience and a different commercial model — and they are not cannabilising each other. Test cricket viewers are not being converted to T10 and lost to the longer format. New audiences are being acquired at the T10 and street level who would never have entered the cricket ecosystem through the Test or ODI entry points.
The Indian Street Premier League, launched in 2024, made this explicit. The ISPL was inspired by a cricket talent hunt in Dharavi’s slums in 2021, and is specifically designed to bring the 100+ million street cricket players who exist completely outside the professional game into a structured competition. Its inaugural season in 2024 saw ₹4.91 Crore spent across 96 players in the auction — numbers that are tiny compared to IPL but gigantic relative to the population they represent. Salman Khan signed as brand ambassador and franchise owner. Ravi Shastri became chief mentor. Sachin Tendulkar joined the core committee. These are not small commitments from small names.
The T10 format’s most persuasive commercial argument is the one that advocates like Virender Sehwag have made for years: at ninety minutes, T10 is a direct competitor to a football match in terms of viewer time commitment. The approximately 90-minute duration of the T10 format may make it a good competitor against other sports of similar time durations, such as association football. This matters not just for viewership but for broadcast slot positioning: a ninety-minute T10 match fits into an evening primetime slot without displacing the rest of the schedule. A T20 match — which routinely runs past midnight in Indian time zones — cannot.
England’s The Hundred provides the most instructive international case study for what a deliberately simplified, time-compressed cricket format can achieve in audience acquisition. The Hundred has been particularly effective at attracting new audiences, with over 200,000 people buying tickets to their first-ever cricket game since its launch. These are not cricket converts from another sport. They are people who were never engaged with cricket at all, for whom the complexity of T20 (overs, powerplays, DRS, LBW, wide interpretations) was a barrier to entry that The Hundred’s simplified 100-ball format removed.
India has not yet built its equivalent of The Hundred. The ISPL is closest in spirit — a simplified, accessible format built around a version of cricket (tennis ball) that hundreds of millions of Indians already play in streets, parks, and vacant lots. The franchise structure, the celebrity ownership, and the televised format give that participatory culture an aspirational ceiling. That is the design logic every new format in Indian sports should be studying.
PKL’s Season 12 Overhaul — The Most Honest Format Reckoning in Indian Sports
The Pro Kabaddi League’s Season 12 changes deserve extended attention because they represent the most transparent and comprehensive format reckoning in recent Indian sports history. Unlike most league format changes, which are presented as enhancements and improvements, PKL Season 12’s changes came with an explicit acknowledgment of the problem they were solving: after lacklustre fan engagement in the previous edition, the number of games has been reduced from 132 to 108.
That sentence “lacklustre fan engagement” is the most honest diagnosis in Indian sports administration. PKL 11 ran too long. The league was 132 matches. Fans checked out before the playoffs. The season lost momentum because it had too much of itself. The fix was to make it shorter.
The other changes are equally grounded in attention economy logic:
Elimination of ties. The drawn result in kabaddi served no one. Ties are the format equivalent of a shrug they generate no shareable moment, no decisive narrative, no clear social media hook. The Golden Raid shootout a five-raid alternating format where only points scored count gives every game a conclusive result. It is, essentially, a penalty shootout for kabaddi: high drama, compressed time, clear winner. This is the same logic that drove the IPL’s Super Over, FIFA’s penalty shootout, and the NBA’s overtime rules. Decisive outcomes are not just aesthetically satisfying. They are commercially essential in an attention economy where the shareable moment is the product.
Simplified points system. PKL 11 used a five-level points system (5 for win / 3 for tie / 1 for bonus point / 0 for loss) that confused casual fans and made the standings table harder to read at a glance. PKL 12 uses two points for win, zero for loss. That is it. The simplification is not cosmetic — it directly reduces the cognitive barrier to entry for a new fan trying to understand where their team stands. Accessibility is a format feature, not an afterthought.
Expanded playoff structure. Eight teams now qualify for playoffs instead of four. This is the formula for sustained late-season engagement that the IPL perfected: keep more teams mathematically alive longer, so more fanbases have a reason to watch deeper into the season. The NBA does this. The NFL does this. The IPL does this. PKL now does this. The compressed competition at the top of the table is a design feature that manufactures drama.
The combined effect of these changes is a league that has 24 fewer matches, zero draws, simpler standings, and more teams competing in the knockout phase. Every single change moves in the same direction: reduce the things that make fans disengage, increase the things that make fans stay. This is format innovation as fan retention engineering.
The Street Sports Revolution: ISPL, Box Cricket, and the Democratisation of Competition
There is a version of the format innovation story that is purely about making elite sports shorter. But there is a more interesting version — and a more commercially significant one — about what happens when format innovation removes the infrastructure barrier to participation entirely.
Box cricket, tennis ball cricket, gully cricket, street kabaddi, street football — these are not informal warm-ups to the professional game. They are, in participation terms, the primary version of these sports for the majority of Indians who play them. The number of people who have played a game of gully cricket in India is several orders of magnitude larger than the number who have played on a turf pitch. The number who have played kabaddi in a village or schoolyard dwarfs the professional player population by a factor of millions.
The format innovation question for Indian sports is not just “how do we make professional formats shorter and faster?” It is “how do we build a commercial and competitive structure on top of the participation formats that already exist at enormous scale?”
The ISPL is the most complete answer to that question in Indian sport right now. Its design is essentially: take the most common version of cricket in India (tennis ball, in a modified format), give it a professional league structure, bring in celebrity owners and broadcasters, and run it on television. The addressable market is not cricket fans who already watch the IPL. It is the 100+ million street players who have never had a professional competitive pathway connected to the game they actually play.
The implications for sponsorship are significant and underexplored. A brand that sponsors the ISPL is not reaching the same audience as a brand that sponsors the IPL. It is reaching a younger, less affluent, more participatory, more geographically distributed audience — exactly the demographic that FMCG, telecom, and fintech brands need to reach in Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets where the IPL’s audience skew toward already-loyal brand consumers. The participatory nature of street sports sponsorship is qualitatively different: fans of the ISPL are not just watching a sport they admire, they are watching a professionalised version of the game they played yesterday in their street. The emotional identification is of a different order.
This is the commercial opportunity that has not yet been fully articulated in Indian sports: street format sports create participatory audiences, and participatory audiences are the most commercially valuable audience category for mass-market brands. Not because they have more money, but because the brand association is embedded in their own sporting practice rather than in aspirational spectatorship.
Beyond Cricket and Kabaddi: Format Innovation in India’s Other Leagues
Format compression is not only happening in cricket. Every major Indian league is iterating on its structure in response to the same audience behaviour data.
The Shooting League of India (SLI) launched in February 2026 with a format that is essentially purpose-built for the attention economy: three franchise teams, twenty-five minute matches, a sixteen-point scoring structure, 6M+6W rosters per franchise. A shooting match has historically been one of the least television-friendly formats in sport — individual, slow, technically complex, with results that require expert interpretation. The SLI resolved this by designing the format as a team competition with alternating shots, a points-based scoring structure that generates momentum shifts, and a compressed time window that fits comfortably in a thirty-minute broadcast slot. This is format innovation at the structural level: not making an existing format faster, but designing a new competitive format that puts an existing sport into a broadcasting-friendly container it never had before.
Hockey India League Season 2 (2024–25) expanded to eight teams and added a women’s tournament — not just an expansion but a recognition that a parallel women’s competition can double the content library and fan engagement touchpoints without proportionally increasing production costs. The women’s HIL was, in audience acquisition terms, the equivalent of adding a new format: it reached a demographic (women fans, and fans specifically interested in women’s hockey) that the men’s-only league was not capturing.
Ultimate Kho Kho, launched in 2022, designed its format explicitly for the television and digital audience: thirty-five minute matches (fifteen minutes per side with a tie-breaker if needed), franchise structure, a points-based system that generates lead changes, and a match pace calibrated to keep the action density high enough for clip generation. The sport itself — Kho Kho — is one of India’s most ancient traditional games, played in schoolyards across the country. Ultimate Kho Kho is essentially the ISPL model applied to a non-cricket sport: take a widely played traditional game, design a professional franchise format around it, and build a commercial ecosystem on top of the cultural foundation.
What Format Innovation Means for Sponsorship
Format changes are not just product decisions. They are commercial architecture decisions that restructure the sponsorship market in ways that most brand managers have not yet fully mapped.
Shorter formats create different ad inventory. A ninety-minute T10 match has fewer natural breaks than a three-and-a-half hour T20, which means broadcast ad slots are fewer but potentially more valuable because audience attention is higher and the match narrative is more compressed. Brands that sponsor shorter formats need different activation strategies: less dependence on thirty-second mid-innings commercials, more dependence on integrated broadcast elements (on-screen graphics, branded format names like the “Duckworth-Lewis” equivalent), and faster on-ground activations calibrated to the format duration.
Decisive formats change the fantasy and betting engagement profile. PKL’s elimination of ties directly expands the betting and fantasy sports engagement layer: every match has a winner and a loser, every match produces scoreable outcomes in the fantasy league, and every match generates a result that fantasy participants have a financial stake in. This is not incidental — it is one of the commercial reasons that leagues push toward decisive outcomes. Formats that produce ties or draws generate lower fantasy engagement than formats that produce winners. Higher fantasy engagement means higher co-branded fantasy partnership revenue for the league and for co-sponsors.
Street formats reach different audiences for different categories. A brand targeting mass-market consumers in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities should be mapping the ISPL and Ultimate Kho Kho audiences as primary targets, not the IPL audience where they compete for attention with India’s most premium brands. The sponsorship CPM for reaching a Tier-3 consumer through ISPL is a fraction of the CPM for reaching an equivalent consumer through IPL — not because the ISPL audience is less valuable, but because it is less contested. The participatory nature of street format sports creates higher brand recall: fans who play the same game they are watching remember the sponsor who made that game possible more clearly than fans who watch from a purely spectator position.
Format names are the most underpriced sponsorship inventory in Indian sport. The “Duckworth-Lewis method” is known globally as a cricket concept rather than as a brand — primarily because Duckworth and Lewis were statisticians, not sponsors. “The Golden Raid” in PKL Season 12 is called the Golden Raid, not the “[Brand] Golden Raid.” The IPL Super Over is the Super Over, not the “[Telecom Brand] Super Over.” Indian leagues have consistently underpriced format-naming rights, which in a shorter, more format-name-driven league are mentioned in every single broadcast description of the decisive moment. In a 90-minute T10 match, if the format is decided by a “Super Over,” the sponsor of that Super Over is mentioned at the climax of every single match. That is inventory that no stadium hoarding or jersey placement replicates.
GSK’s sponsorship consulting practice specifically advises league clients on format-linked sponsorship inventory: the structural integration of brand into the competitive format rather than purely the broadcast environment. The most durable sponsorship positions in the next decade of Indian sport will be built at the format level, not the logo level. Brands that understand this will systematically outperform brands that don’t.
What Format Innovation Means for League Designers
If you are designing a sports league in India in 2026 — whether it is a franchise hockey league, a state-level wrestling competition, or a new format for an Olympic sport — the attention economy data provides five non-negotiable design constraints.
Constraint 1: Match duration ceiling. No new professional league format should require more than two hours of continuous audience attention. The ninety-minute window is optimal. The two-hour window is viable. Anything beyond three hours requires a pre-existing cultural investment (Test cricket, an IPL final) that new leagues do not have. The CHL 2026’s hockey matches are calibrated to the standard 60-minute FIH international format, which is exactly the right duration for a new league trying to build audience — shorter than cricket, longer than kabaddi, fitting cleanly into an evening primetime window.
Constraint 2: No drawn outcomes in the professional format. Every new Indian league should have a tie-breaking mechanism that produces a decisive result before the audience leaves the arena or closes the app. The Super Over, the Golden Raid, the penalty shootout, the five-raid format — the specific mechanism is less important than the principle. Drawn outcomes are not acceptable user experiences for a first-time fan. The story a fan tells after the match (“we won” or “we lost”) is the primary shareable content the league depends on. Draws generate no story.
Constraint 3: One-sentence explainability. A casual fan arriving at a match should be able to understand the scoring system in the time it takes to buy a samosa. PKL’s switch from five-level points to two-level points (win = 2, loss = 0) is precisely this principle applied. The Hundred’s one hundred balls per side is exactly this — a child can understand it. If your format requires a four-minute explanation before someone can follow the score, you have a format problem, not a marketing problem.
Constraint 4: Multiple climactic moments per match. The shareable clip is the unit of engagement in the attention economy. A league format should be designed to produce multiple clearly defined peak moments — a Golden Raid, a Super Over, a penalty shootout sequence, a final five minutes of regulation — that are both internally thrilling and externally clippable. These are the moments that reach the non-fan audience through Instagram and YouTube Shorts and convert passive scrollers into potential ticket buyers.
Constraint 5: Street-format connection. Every professional league should have a visible connection to a grassroots participatory format that the target audience already plays. PKL’s connection to village kabaddi. ISPL’s connection to street cricket. Ultimate Kho Kho’s connection to school Kho Kho. The CHL 2026’s tribal hockey pipeline from all 33 districts of Chhattisgarh. This connection is not just a development argument — it is a commercial argument. Participatory audiences are the most emotionally committed fan base a league can build, and they are built by demonstrating that the professional league is the aspirational ceiling of the game that already exists in the community.
Our sports event management and sports brand development capabilities are both grounded in this format-first design philosophy. A league that gets its format right before its brand, its sponsor pitch, and its broadcast deal — in that order — will consistently outperform a league that builds the brand first and retrofits the format to the commercial requirements.
The Formats That Haven’t Been Built Yet
The most interesting analysis in format innovation is not what has already been built but what the attention economy logic suggests should exist and doesn’t yet.
State-level franchise wrestling. Haryana produces Olympic wrestling champions from a deep cultural base. There is no professional franchise wrestling league with a television format in India. The Pro Wrestling League exists but has faced sustainability issues. A redesigned franchise wrestling format — short matches, clear points-based scoring, state-based franchises, ninety-minute match windows — has the cultural base in Haryana, Maharashtra, and Punjab to attract both grassroots participation and television audiences. It doesn’t exist in a commercially sustainable form yet.
Urban street football. India has dozens of five-a-side urban football leagues operating informally in metros. None has been formalised into a national franchise structure with television broadcast and brand investment. The audience is young, urban, participatory, and in the demographic that brand managers most want to reach. The format — five-a-side, thirty-minute matches on urban pitches — is already being played by millions. The professional structure is not there yet.
An archery franchise league. Jharkhand’s tribal archery tradition, combined with India’s Deepika Kumari-powered archery programme, has a cultural base for a franchise archery league that uses a simplified team-vs-team format. Competitive archery in its current format is slow and difficult to follow. A team relay format — alternating shots, points-based team scoring, timed rounds — could create a format-for-television version of the sport that retains the cultural significance while meeting attention economy design constraints.
Digital-native sports league. India has 500 million+ gamers. The Indian Sports Gaming League (ISGL), launched in March 2026, is the first franchise-based national esports competition — but the broader category of sports that exist primarily in a digital-native format (competitive gaming, AR/VR sport, drone racing, sim sports) has barely been explored commercially in India. The audience is exactly the Gen Z demographic that is least reached by traditional sports formats. The format innovation opportunity is the largest in Indian sports and the most underbuilt.
FAQ: Sports Format Innovation India Fan Engagement
Q: Why are shorter sports formats commercially more attractive than longer ones?
The commercial logic of shorter formats runs through three channels. First, audience fit: the primary new fan acquisition demographic (18–28 year olds) demonstrates documented preference for content that fits within ninety-minute windows and produces decisive outcomes. A format that doesn’t fit this window cannot acquire this demographic at scale. Second, broadcast efficiency: a ninety-minute T10 match requires fewer broadcast hours to fill a programming slot than a three-hour T20, making it easier for digital platforms to schedule and cheaper for smaller leagues to produce. Third, sponsorship integration: shorter formats with higher action density create sponsorship inventory that is more concentrated, more visible, and more directly integrated into the competitive format — like naming rights on the tie-breaking mechanism — which is more valuable per minute than passive stadium hoarding.
Q: Is the PKL’s Season 12 format overhaul working?
The strategic intent is clearly correct. Reducing from 132 to 108 matches, eliminating ties, simplifying the points system, and expanding playoffs to eight teams all address documented fan engagement problems. The simplification of standings — win equals two points, loss equals zero — directly reduces the cognitive barrier to casual fan participation. The Golden Raid shootout creates a shareable climactic moment that every tied match lacked in Season 11. Whether Season 12 produces measurably better engagement metrics than Season 11 will be the definitive test, but every individual design decision is grounded in attention economy logic rather than in tradition or convenience.
Q: What is the Indian Street Premier League and why does it matter commercially?
The ISPL is a T10 tennis ball cricket league founded in 2024, designed to bring professional structure to the street cricket ecosystem that involves over 100 million casual participants in India. It matters commercially because it creates a sponsorship audience — young, participatory, Tier-2 and Tier-3 city residents — that the IPL does not effectively reach. The participatory nature of the audience is commercially distinctive: fans who play the same game they are watching have higher brand recall and stronger emotional identification with the competition’s sponsors than purely spectator audiences. The ISPL’s inaugural franchise auction saw ₹4.91 Crore spent and attracted Salman Khan as both brand ambassador and franchise owner, signalling a level of celebrity and commercial seriousness that validates the format’s commercial potential.
Q: What does format innovation mean for sports sponsorship strategy?
Format innovation creates sponsorship opportunities that most brands are not yet mapping. The key underpriced category is format-naming rights: the specific competitive mechanism that decides matches (the Golden Raid, the Super Over, the penalty shootout sequence) is mentioned in every broadcast description of every decisive moment in the league. In a ninety-minute T10 match, a brand that owns the tie-breaking mechanism’s name is mentioned at the peak audience attention moment of every single match — which no static hoarding placement can replicate. Shorter formats also create different ad inventory (fewer slots, higher value) and different digital content rhythms (more clippable peak moments per broadcast hour) that reward brands with agile content strategies.
Q: Why do shorter formats favour digital-first distribution over linear broadcast?
A ninety-minute match fits naturally into the on-demand consumption model: a viewer can watch it in a single evening session, start to finish, on a platform that allows them to pause, rewind, and replay key moments. A five-day Test match or a 132-match league season requires the kind of scheduled, passive, habit-based viewing that linear broadcast television was built for — and that Gen Z audiences demonstrably do not engage with. Digital platforms grow their subscriber bases through on-demand completeness: a viewer who watches an entire match on JioHotstar generates platform engagement data, ad revenue, and subscription renewal probability that a viewer who dips in and out of a linear broadcast does not. Shorter formats are, fundamentally, better suited to the economics of digital sports distribution.
Q: How does the CHL 2026 apply format innovation principles?
The Chhattisgarh Hockey League’s format was designed with several attention economy principles embedded. Matches use the standard 60-minute FIH international format — short enough for evening programming, long enough to build match narrative. The 17–18 match tournament runs over 13 days, keeping the competition dense and preventing the viewer fatigue that plagued PKL Season 11. The franchise structure produces a clear team identity for fans to attach to rather than neutral national team spectatorship. The tribal athlete inclusion mandate creates authentic local stories that connect the professional league to the grassroots community — the participatory connection that sustains fan bases across commercial downturns. For details on GSK’s event design and sports format consulting capabilities, visit our events and tournaments page or contact info@globalsportskonnect.com.
Compression Is the Product
The attention economy argument for shorter sports formats is sometimes framed as a surrender to diminishing attention spans — as if format innovation were a concession to a degraded audience rather than a response to a different but equally valid set of consumption preferences. This framing is wrong, and it leads to wrong product decisions.
The fans who watch a PKL match on JioHotstar while simultaneously monitoring their fantasy team on a second screen, posting a Golden Raid clip to Instagram, and participating in a live poll about the most valuable player are not less engaged fans than the fan who sat in front of a single-channel television in 1992 and watched a match without another thought. They are differently engaged — more multi-directional, more participatory, more expressive in their fandom — and they represent the commercial core of Indian sport for the next thirty years.
The design challenge is not to bring these fans back to a consumption model they have rejected. It is to design sports formats and commercial ecosystems that work with their actual behaviour rather than against it. That means shorter matches with decisive outcomes and multiple shareable peak moments. It means format names that are sponsorship inventory. It means street-format connections that bring participatory audiences into the professional ecosystem. It means digital-first content that uses the short-form clip as the primary fan acquisition tool rather than the broadcast match as the primary entry point.
| Format Innovation | What Problem It Solves | Commercial Implication |
|---|---|---|
| T10 Cricket (90 min) | Game length barrier for new fans | Digital primetime slot; format-naming rights |
| PKL Golden Raid (eliminates ties) | No decisive outcome = no shareable moment | Higher fantasy engagement; better bet product |
| PKL shortened to 108 matches | Viewer fatigue from 132-match season | Higher per-match engagement; lower “dead rubber” effect |
| ISPL Street Cricket | Infrastructure barrier to participation | Participatory audience; Tier-2/3 sponsor reach |
| SLI 25-min shooting format | Sport historically not TV-friendly | New broadcast category; format-naming inventory |
| The Hundred’s 100-ball format | T20 complexity as barrier to new fans | First-time cricket ticket buyers; family audience |
The decade ahead in Indian sports will be won by the leagues and brands that understand: the format is not the container that holds the sport. The format is the product. Compress it intelligently, connect it to participatory culture, design every decisive moment as a shareable asset, and the commercial ecosystem follows. Don’t, and you’re designing Test cricket in a TikTok world — technically impressive, culturally significant, and increasingly irrelevant to the audience that will determine whether Indian sport reaches its commercial potential.
To explore how GSK builds sports events and leagues with format innovation built into the design — not added as an afterthought — visit our sports event management, sports marketing, and analytics service pages. Contact us at info@globalsportskonnect.com or book a conversation at calendly.com/globalsportskonnect. Follow GSK on LinkedIn for weekly analysis on the business of Indian sports.