India will bid for the 2030 Summer Youth Olympics and aspires to host the 2036 main event, announced youth affairs and sports minister Mansukh Mandaviya a couple of months ago. But in spite of a rising focus on games, sports and fitness, the country’s sports ecosystem struggles to produce global medalists. Although we have seen improvements in urban areas, rural and semi-urban regions remain vastly underserved.
The outcome could be alarming. According to a 2023 survey by PUMA India and analytics firm Nielsen Sports, Indian kids spent 86 minutes per week on sports and fitness-related activities against WHO’s recommendation of 420 minutes or more. It was even less than the Indian adults who spent 101 minutes in these activities per week, the survey said.
Globally, the scenario is quite different. In the US, the EU, Australia and similar countries, well-established funnels guide sports development from the age of three to the professional level. But India’s transformation to a true sporting nation through disruptive changes in youth sports is still a far cry. Of course, random sports academies have popped up. However, a well-structured and tech-driven pan-India initiative in the private sector is not happening at scale.
Set up by former DealShare cofounder Sourjyendu Medda and former Cartesian employee Armaan Tandon, Sports For Life (SFL) wants to change India’s youth sports culture and bring forth potential talent who may excel in different sports streams. The mission is to nurture young people’s passion for various sports and create a roll-up model for private sports academies to ensure long-term viability. For context, a roll-up strategy is about acquiring smaller entities within a specific sector and turning them into a consolidated business to reduce operational costs and maximize revenue.
SFL is Medda’s second entrepreneurial venture, the fruit of a long-standing connection with Tandon. The two had been acquainted for years, frequently sharing their views on various subjects, and recognized their shared vision for youth sports development. After stepping away from the day-to-day operations at DealShare (where he still retains a 7% stake), Medda began exploring new opportunities and eventually joined forces with Tandon.
Sports For Life has initially identified six core sports streams based on their popularity, high participation levels and sound commercial viability in the Indian context. These include cricket, soccer, badminton, lawn tennis, table tennis and basketball. The startup may also add swimming and martial arts to its portfolio to attract a broader audience.
Although headquartered in Bengaluru, SFL has strategically chosen Mumbai as its launch city, with plans to expand to Bengaluru and Delhi NCR in the next phase. It has already acquired a stake in a soccer academy and is finalizing documents to part-own a lawn tennis coaching centre. Discussions are also under way regarding investments in a cricket and a basketball academy.
The 10-month-old sportstech startup recently raised $1.5 Mn from a clutch of investors, including Blume Ventures, Roots Ventures and Kunal Shah’s QED Innovations Lab. It also received backing from Tandon Group chairman Manohar Lal Tandon’s family office and others.
What’s Missing In India’s Youth Sports Training
According to Medda, while professional sports leagues like the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the India Super League (ISL) have attracted the country’s largest conglomerates such as the Reliance and the Jindal groups, the youth sports segment remains unorganized and lacks adequate funding. The funnel creation for the formative years, between three to four years and 16–18, is where the real gap lies.
“Take the fitness industry as an example. About eight years ago, gyms were largely unorganized. Today, we see something very similar in youth sports. There are a lot of small, unorganized academies doing good work, but there isn’t a single branded player operating at the national level. No one is offering top-tier facilities, services and technology even to the upwardly mobile urban takers who love sports and are ready to pay for a premium experience,” said Medda.
“Parents today are looking for the right coaching and related expertise for their kids. The market for youth sports training and associated services is huge. In the US, it’s a $30 Bn market per annum. As for India, it currently stands at $1 Bn and is growing exponentially. I believe this market will grow to anywhere between $3–5 Bn in the next five years,” he added.
How Sports For Life Aims To Transform Mid-Tier Academies, Enhance Coaching
India is home to around 30K sports academies for children and youth. At the top of the rung are 100–150 academies run by world-famous sports personalities such as Prakash Padukone, Pullela Gopichand and Dibyendu Barua. These academies cater to professional sportspersons performing at the district, state, or national level. However, this creamy layer only contributes 5–10% of the existing market. The long tail of this segment is the other end of the spectrum, around 25–27K smaller setups, each run by one or two coaches and training 10–50 young people.
Sports For Life does not target either of these segments and only explores the mid-tier, a group of 2–3K well-established centers operating nationwide. Run by 15-30 coaches, usually former state or national players passionate about sports training but not celebrities, these academies have been well-recognized brands in their micro-catchments for the past five to 10 years. They operate two to three centers in a city and typically train 300–500 at any given time in the sports they specialize in.
These mid-tier academies also generate an annual turnover of INR 2–4 Cr, contributing up to 50% of the current market.
“The academy owners are often well-educated and ambitious. They understand the importance of technology and scaling but lack the resources to build it themselves,” said Medda. “So, here is SFL’s opportunity to provide advanced technology, branding and the infrastructure these academies need to expand and scale their operations on one unified platform.”
As the startup provides multisport training within a city, users need not hunt for different academies for different streams. In today’s market, no single brand offers access to high-quality coaching across multiple sports in the same catchment area. Sports For Life helps cope with this issue by collaborating with leading academies in each sport and offering users a unified option for all training needs.
Another key challenge the startup addresses is the lack of a digital ecosystem in existing academies. Most operate solely in physical spaces and feature no digital scheduling, communication, or feedback system. In contrast, the SFL app provides a comprehensive digital platform streamlining parent-coach interactions, class scheduling, performance tracking and financial transactions.
It has also introduced value-added services from nutritionists, physiotherapists, mental health specialists and others to ensure well-rounded training sessions. Modern sports science supports an interdisciplinary approach, making these services essential for sports success. However, individual academies cannot always provide these due to budget constraints. SFL makes these accessible through its integrated platform and brings global expertise to curriculum development by collaborating with overseas sports clubs.
Besides regular coaching, SFL arranges high-quality, tech-enabled tournaments, setting new standards for competition. These events will attract top teams, ensuring a high level of participation and incorporating live streaming, performance scorecards and highlight reels powered by AI.
SFL’s Cutting-Edge Strategies To Manage The ‘Business Of Sports’
Sports For Life’s business model revolves around a roll-up strategy for sports academies, similar to how Cult.fit consolidated unorganized gyms into a single, branded platform. Cult.fit brought existing gyms under one umbrella, offering standardized experiences, a standard technology platform and a unified curriculum. SFL seeks to replicate this success in the youth sports training segment by consolidating mid-tier academies that are already delivering high-quality sports training.
Simply put, the startup follows a strategic investment model, initially acquiring minority stakes in sports academies and gradually moving to controlling stakes within one to two years. This business strategy enables SFL to transform all partnering academies into fully integrated SFL Academies.
For its portfolio academies, Sports For Life provides growth capital to help them achieve scale and stay in the black. Most organizations struggle to expand beyond two or three centers that have opened over the years. However, SFL’s investment enables them to open multiple centers within a brief period, facilitating citywide and statewide growth, claimed Medda.
“The academies under SFL’s portfolio are inherently profitable, boasting 50% or more gross margins. To achieve EBITDA-level profitability, they need to scale their revenues by 1.5–2x, a milestone we plan to achieve within the first year of operational collaboration with academy founders. Beyond that, we aim to grow each academy by 7–10x its current scale in five years,” he added.
Meanwhile, the startup has a manifold revenue stream in place. It earns a part of the coaching and value-added service fees from its portfolio academies and generates revenue from its digital management platform and merchandise sales.
Additionally, it earns participation and hospitality fees from the tournaments it arranges. SFL designs these tournaments as high-quality and tech-enabled popular sports meets, which can attract top-tier teams and lucrative corporate sponsors as these culminate into state- and national-level events.
The startup also partners with educational institutions and corporations to offer sports training and recreational activities, earning fees from these affiliations. In addition, it collaborates with housing societies and live-stream programs for a fee.
India Has Talent; Can Sports For Life Create A Generation Ingrained In Sports?
Sports For Life has ambitious plans and is keen to meet success halfway to ensure quick culmination and growth. Although the founders would not comment on this, the startup’s strategy to explore mid-tier academies underscores tapping into talent without delay and gaining financial leverage at the earliest. Understandably, sports coaching at the grassroots level will be out of bounds for a single private sector organization.
To make the best of the available facilities, SFL plans to acquire at least one high-quality academy for each sport in Mumbai, providing young users easy access to trusted and well-managed academies in their city. It will expand its operations to the top 30 Indian cities in the next five years, democratizing access to excellent coaching/sports training.
The growing market for sports training will be an added fillip to SFL and its ilk, leading to a substantial opportunity for sports academy roll-up in India. Although the India market projections for the next decade are not immediately available, globally, the sports training market is estimated to reach $50.7 Bn by 2035, from $27.8 Bn in 2023.
Plus, there will be further scope for growth. A significant portion of India’s sports fan base is Gen Z, who engage in soccer and hockey or traditional games like kabaddi and kho-kho. This shift in fandom also underscores a large, untapped market for new and emerging sports leagues. It means more discipline, increasing coaching opportunities and better monetization across multiple sports streams. Whether Sports For Life can rise to the occasion and utilize an evolving market remains to be seen.
[Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal]