Three Leagues Kicked Off in October. Nobody in India Can Tell You How Many Watched Any of Them.

The Indian Super League, Super League Kerala and the Indrajit Namchoom Arunachal League are all running at once. Real talent, real crowds, broadcast production that works. We read all three league websites and could not find out how many people are watching any of them.

Say the good news first, because it is true. After years in which Indian football's top division went dark for seven months and its media rights collapsed by 97%, there is professional football running simultaneously in Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala and nationally. Real talent. Real crowds in Kerala. Broadcast production that works. Brands on the boards.

And almost nothing about what any of it is doing for the sport can be measured.

The MG Indian Super League (ISL) and the Indrajit Namchoom Arunachal League (INAL) both kicked off on 10 October. Super League Kerala (SLK) began on 25 September.

What exists

An INAL franchise costs about INR 3.3 lakh a season. An SLK franchise cost INR 1.5 crore. Forty-five times more.

The sponsors — we read all three league websites

ISL: seven partners at league level, for a 13-club national top division. MG (title), Sony and SonyLIV (broadcast), YouTube (streaming), Nivia — listed on the league's own homepage as both "Kitting Partner" and "Official Paint Partner" — Sportradar (data and integrity, to 2029-30), EA Sports (licensing), and e-ISL. No beverage, ticketing, insurance, merchandise, airline, telecom or banking partner at league level. The league site has no partners page; `/partners` returns an error. The AIFF's own "Our Sponsors" block carries two logos.

The club picture is thinner than the league's. Of thirteen principal shirt positions: two are state tourism boards — Meghalaya Tourism on NorthEast United, Odisha Tourism on Odisha FC — which is public money, not a brand buying football. Two different clubs carry the identical sponsor (ISGL.in, on Chennaiyin and FC Goa). One club sponsors itself (Churchill Brothers). Four of thirteen are not filled by a third-party commercial buyer.

Super League Kerala: around 14 partners at league level and roughly 30 across its six clubs — more than four times the national top division's league roster. Presenting partner Sports.com; associates Eastern and Dafa News; then PeeKay, Sunidra, Eastea, Greeny Rewards, Bare Brown, KTDC and PlaySpots. The league's own sponsors page renders its tier list twice, with three straight contradictions between the two versions. And the roster has almost completely turned over: of 13 sponsors in 2024, three survive. Title sponsor Mahindra is gone and has not been replaced.

INAL: seven partners, and one of them should have been a story on its own. JioHotstar, Coca-Cola, Slot Allot (ticketing), Sports Spectrum (merchandise), Wish and Key Gigs, Yokmo Interactive, and StepOut (no role stated). Coca-Cola is sponsoring a state football league in Arunachal Pradesh and not one Indian trade publication has written it up. No club-level sponsor is published for any of the ten clubs.

Of 27 named league-level partners across the three competitions, exactly three have any value attached. MG — reported, and in three different amounts between INR 22 cr and INR 30 cr. Sportradar — reported at ~INR 57 cr over four years. And Sports.com, the only buyer-disclosed figure in the story: over USD 11.6m (INR 100+ cr) over five years, in a Nasdaq-listed company's own release.

Not one of the roughly 49 club-level sponsorships across all 29 clubs has a disclosed value.

And that USD 11.6m deal was a five-year exclusive signed in July 2025. Season 3 is on Zee5 and Unite8. Season 2 was on Sony. Three broadcasters in three seasons, and no public explanation.

Who is advertising on the broadcasts

We could not establish a single advertiser on any of the three broadcast feeds. Not one brand, on any platform, for any of the three competitions.

The production and the people — the part nobody counts

The ISL's 2025-26 operation is the one properly documented example. KPS Studios of Kolkata, led by Rajiv Mehra, won the world-feed rights at a reported INR 5.22 cr and produced 91 matches with a 75-person daily operation, a 15-member travelling ground team, a minimum of 10 cameras rising to 14, six to eight super-slow-motion cameras for the Kolkata derby, hardware owned outright, and a self-built "VAR-Lite" waiting for the AIFF to ask.

Who produces the 2026-27 feed is not named anywhere. Production details, in the sport's own trade press, "have not been revealed."

Officials: 52 match officials attended the ISL workshop in Delhi on 7–8 October — 19 referees, 21 assistant referees, 12 assessors.

SLK production — company, crew, cameras, commentators, languages: NOT FOUND. Third season, national streaming platform, nothing published about who makes the pictures. INAL: the same, for every season.

And the national base only exists because somebody filed a Right to Information (RTI) request. The AIFF's registration data — 341,862 registered players, 16,295 coaches, 3,347 referees across 2015–2025 — reached the public through the Central Information Commission. In the same response, the federation said ISL club injury data could not be produced.

The crowds

Super League Kerala publishes attendance. It is the only one of the three that does. Its average is 15,023 — but that is the mean of the five matches it has published out of roughly twenty played, and three of those five are rounded approximations. Peak around 31,800. Season 2 totalled 400,709 across its published match rows, an average of 12,416, against the league's own release claiming 547,693 — a gap of about 147,000 with no match-by-match basis. The 2024 final drew 35,672 at Kozhikode, 732 more than that season's Kerala Blasters v Bengaluru ISL fixture.

The ISL has not published an attendance figure for a single match this season. Twelve matchdays in, the 2026-27 attendance table is blank. What is published is the long decline: average 24,711 in 2014 to 11,870 in 2024-25, a 52% fall across eleven seasons, while total attendance rose on 2.7 times the fixtures.

INAL publishes no attendance figure for any season. Its ticketing partner's site publishes no prices, and its "Book Tickets" buttons point at placeholder addresses — three weeks into the season.

Ticket prices: NOT FOUND for all three.

Viewership — every number issued by the seller

The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) has published no television ratings in any genre, sport included, since July 2026, pending licence renewal under the Television Ratings Policy 2026. There is no resumption date. India has no independent audience currency.

So the ISL's opening week — 65m YouTube views, 52m reach, 16.8m engaged views, 349,073 peak concurrent viewers on one match, 120,000 new subscribers — was issued by the league. Four different units describing one week. SLK's "nearly 13 million viewers" came from the rights-holder's press release. Neither can be checked against anything.

And the sharpest fact in this story: ISL clubs will receive all broadcast and streaming data, including overall and state-wise reach. The clubs will have the measurement nobody outside the room will ever see.

What it is doing for football — one traceable case

Muhammad Ajsal. Kerala Blasters youth, loans to Inter Kashi and Gokulam, then Calicut FC on loan for Super League Kerala 2025: seven goals in eleven games, Player of the Tournament. India U23 squad in March 2026, two caps and a goal. Signed by Mumbai City FC on a two-year ISL deal, 1 August 2026.

The honest caveat: he was already a contracted ISL-club player, so the state league was a showcase rather than a discovery. It is still the only pathway we could trace.

Everything else is blank. The full SLK 2026 transfer round-up records not one player moving to a higher tier — all movement is lateral. No INAL player has ever been traced to a higher tier. The only quantified pathway output any of the three publishes is SLK's "Project Game Changer": about 50 players across centres, nine of whom reached SLK.

Jobs: NOT FOUND, all three. The Kerala Cricket League — a state franchise competition in the same state — publishes over 700 direct and 2,500 indirect jobs, 40% of support staff women, and a INR 30 crore first-season economic contribution. Three simultaneous professional football competitions publish none of it.

The unasked question

Twelve matchdays into a 163-match season, the ISL has not published attendance for a single match, and the only national count of how many Indians play, coach or referee football had to be extracted by RTI. Who is supposed to know whether any of this is working?