A Six-Month-Old Scan, Three Undeclared Tapes and an 11.5-Crore Bid: How the Body Gets Priced at the PKL Auction

On the second night of a home match last season in Mumbai, I was sitting in the medical room, and the sheet in front of me was not a scoresheet. It was a plain ledger — seventeen names, three columns against each: date of last scan, injured limb, minutes played with tape on that limb. The team won that night and nobody in the tribune asked about the tape. I folded the page and put it in my pocket, because I knew that six months later, some people would open that same page on an auction table, and by then nobody would remember what that shoulder had said in July.

This article is not the story of one player. It is the story of the mechanism by which a body gets priced in the Pro Kabaddi League — and the weakest part of that mechanism is that those doing the pricing usually do not have the one document that matters most: a current medical record.

Context: The auction is a health-insurance market, and we insist on reading it as romance

The scale of the kabaddi auction grows every year. Bids in the crores for Grade-A raiders, a separate overseas pool, and every franchise has a 'marquee signing' that goes on a poster before the season begins. Television coverage sells that moment as theatre — the hammer, the crowd, the price.

To me that moment is an actuarial event. A raider bought for four crores is not buying four crores of talent; he is buying four crores of risk, paid out in number of matches, load per match, and the dated injury history of the previous three years. The question is never 'was he worth it'. The question is 'worth it across how many matches, at what load, with what history'.

Which is why the most important document before an auction is not the one the league publishes. What gets published is last season's raid points, tackle points, Super 10 counts and strike rates. What does not get published is the date a player's knee was last scanned, and who saw that scan report.

Across recent seasons, what I have observed is that franchises have their own medical teams, but the person sitting at the auction table is often not that team. At the table sits the coach, a representative of the owner, and an analyst whose laptop has three seasons of data open. The medical report is not on that laptop. It is in a folder, with a physio, and if that folder reaches the table it usually arrives informally — a WhatsApp message, a phone call, a 'bro, this one's fine, right?'

Core: Date, limb and minutes — the three variables that set the price

During the Qatar World Cup I built a load log across 832 players — minutes in the previous 30 days against soft-tissue events. That exercise gave me a template I now apply across sports, kabaddi included. Three variables, three questions:

One — the date of the last scan. If a player's last MRI is six months old and he has since played forty-one matches in four months, that scan is now a historical document, not proof of current health. At an auction table this date is rarely asked for, because the asker often does not know which limb was injured first.

Two — the limb. Load in kabaddi is asymmetrical. A raider's right shoulder, because both the dubki and the hand-touch send it forward first. A corner defender's left knee and ankle, because in the ankle-hold and the dash that limb stops the entire body. A cover's lower back, because that is what twists in a back-hold. When a franchise wants 'a good corner', it rarely asks what that corner's left ankle history looks like.

Three — minutes played with tape. This is the most ignored figure. A player who played the last eight matches of a season strapped will show an upward performance graph, but beneath that graph is another one — the recovery curve of that limb. The two graphs do not speak the same language. The first says 'form is good'. The second says 'time is running out'.

In 2026 I logged all 369 of one Patna raider's raid points, match by match. In the Pune leg he took a knock to his right shoulder and returned strapped. Across the next four matches his do-or-die raid success fell from 61 percent to 43. I wrote 900 words on it; the desk cut it to 200 and asked for the final score. From that week I kept an injury ledger beside every scorecard — who was strapped, which limb, days since return. It made me slower to file, and harder to edit. I accepted that trade.

The shoulder moved through the spreadsheet before the scoreline did. And that is the sentence every coach should hear at an auction table, every season, every time.

Contrarian: 'Fit' is not a word, it is a percentage

Here is the angle I am usually disagreed with on.

In the language of the auction, players are 'fit' or 'unfit' — two boxes, yes or no. My ledger has no box for 'fit'. I have 'fit' — at 100, at 85, at 70 — and every percentage comes with a timeline attached: for how many matches, at what load, and after which point the risk climbs steeply.

At Jakarta 2026, India failed to win Asian Games gold for the first time. The tribune wrote about nerves and selection. I wrote something else at the time, because I had spent the camp weeks with the team physio and still had the Pune ledger: three of India's corners had carried untreated ankle and knee complaints into the Games, and Iran's wrestling-school defence — ankle holds and dashes — was attacking exactly that lead leg. Half of it was cut.

That is the lesson that transfers to the auction. The franchise question is: 'will this player play next season?' The correct question is: 'in how many matches next season, at what percentage of body, and after which point does he break?' The first question returns a yes/no. The second returns a curve — and a curve can be bid on, a box cannot.

The rush-back versus scientific-rehab debate is usually fought in moral language — 'the player should be given time'. For me it is not a moral question, it is a pricing one. A franchise that returns an injured player early is devaluing that same player at the next auction — because his tape log is now visible in the public performance graph. Early return is a short-term win with a bill that arrives two seasons later, and that bill is often paid not by the same team but by the player's next one. This asymmetry is built into kabaddi's auction structure and nobody has fixed it.

Takeaway: Three documents before the next auction

When the next auction table is laid out and the crores start flying, I will not be watching who bought the most. I will be watching whose table had three documents: the date of each player's last scan, the name of the limb that was injured first, and the count of minutes played with tape last season. The table that had all three probably bid less. Its season probably ran longer.

The question is when the league will make that third document mandatory — and whether it will take a player's career being placed on the line to force it, or whether franchises will start putting their medical reports on the table voluntarily.