There may be no Indian-kind of delectable pickle in pickleball, a niche sport that combines bits of tennis, badminton and ping pong, but worldwide promoters and sponsors can taste the spicy edge, combined with a bit of sweetness. The reason: A huge surge in popularity of the niche sport, with three “official circuits” only in America. According to a market analysis firm, Global Growth Insights, the global pickleball market is expected to rise by more than three times to nearly $5.5 billion by 2029, which implies a CAGR (Compounded Annual growth Rate) of almost 22 per cent.

As companies, sponsors and investors grow their presence in pickleball, specific product lines have taken off, with equipment giants like Adidas and Nike leading the way. In the US, the annual expenditure on pickleball-related products (equipment, apparel and so on) is $3.5 billion, according to Global Growth Insights. There are more than 14 million players in the US, which reflects a more than 200 per cent increase over the past few years.

Although North America remains the largest and fastest-growing market for the sport, Asia-Pacific is catching up, and Europe is joining in, with rising popularity in the UK and Spain. There is a growing traction in Australia. In India, the following is growing, and a renowned TV network, with several broadcast channels, has backed pickleball through tournaments and promotions. However, pickleball is not the only niche sport that is gaining ground.

There is spikeball, padel, cornhole, ultimate frisbee (which is not that new) and roller derby. Suddenly, they have become greenbacks-earning sports. One of the main reasons is that these sports are within the grasp of the masses, and can generate huge audiences. For example, pickleball is easy to learn, conversions of existing grass courts to suit the game is cheap, and it has a strong social media click bait-ability. The same is true about padel, which is spectator-friendly, sponsorable, and easy to adapt to existing stadiums and club-infrastructure. It is spiking in Europe and Latin America.

Earlier this month, The Economist did an article, which delved into a pertinent question: “Why (global) investors are piling into niche sports?” In a short and crisp summary, the piece claimed, “Streaming and festival-like spectacles are helping smaller leagues win young audiences.” It added that the ongoing boom “owes much to the Covid-19 pandemic. When mainstream leagues shut, locked-down audiences devoured whatever competitions remained. After Covid, pent-up demand for in-person entertainment swelled crowds….”

Today, potential and actual investors see the niche sports as high-growth entertainment, which entail lower costs of media rights and sponsorships, and can become profitable due to modern live streaming, ability to transform into large events, and the pull to engage targeted fans. Returns, therefore, are lucrative, although they require careful scaling up, and durable commercial deals. The fact remains that like mainstream sports, the niche ones can build intensely-loyal, and demographically-attractive fan bases.

Unlike the mainstream sports, the niche counterparts are easier to monetise on a per-head basis compared to large mass audiences. Thus, customer acquisition costs are cheaper, and more justifiable, which make media rights and sponsorships more effective. Hence, investors like private-equity firms treat niche-sport assets as scalable businesses, rather than trophies, and apply playbooks from other sectors to improve operations, rights sales and brand partnerships.

Apart from genuinely-niche games, investors are eyeing innovative variations of the mainstream sports. According to a blog on LinkedIn, “Whereas established sports like tennis and golf are grappling with ageing fan bases, upstarts can design their products to suit digital natives with short attention spans. TGL, a golf league founded by Tiger Woods and Rory Mcllroy that stages contests indoors, with computer simulators, and a live putting green, draws audiences 12 years younger than the PGA Tour, golf’s main circuit.”

Similarly, the variants of mainstream sports like volleyball, and other emerging women’s leagues, have attracted sizable investments, which are generating visible returns through TV deals, allied events, and spectators’ participation. Some variants of volleyball, like footvolley, teq-ball, sepak takraw-like games, and beach volley have engineered compact formats that work in city spaces, are prone to broadcast, and provide short, intense spectacles. Sports that are popular too have resorted to shorter variations to make the game faster, and expand the audiences in both the existing nations, and new countries. For example, as opposed to T20, neighbourhood cricket is a shorter-format competition structured for TV and digital audiences. Tournaments are organised at the city level, in six-a-side or T10 (10 overs) formats, and branded as “community” leagues. The new form of cricket, which is an already-popular and growing sport, package local talent, compact schedules, and high-action plays to suit the broadcast windows.

Basketball has experimented with a 3x3 format (three players on each side). “The King’s League, a five-a-side football tournament funded in Spain in 2022, keeps fans engaged by letting them vote for rule changes. Many of these contests feel more like festivals than fixtures,” states a recent article on niche sports. In the Indian cities like Delhi and Calcutta, such smaller-sides football tournaments are common, with most being held during the Durga Puja (Dussehra) festival season, with a carnival-like atmosphere.

Other mainstream sports, especially those that have been in existence for decades but failed to attract audiences, or lost them for some reason or the other over the years, are being shaped and influenced by the private equity players. Take the case of volleyball. CVC Capital, a private-equity giant, invested $300 million to “create Volleyball World, a joint venture with the International Volleyball Federation that manages the sport’s commercial operations.” According to the LinkedIn blog, which mentions the above aspect, “The deal helped lift audiences of the Volleyball Nations League by 42 per cent last year, to two billion views.”

Following the success of the Indian Premier League (cricket), STAR Sports launched the Hockey India League and Indian Badminton League. Both turned out to be reasonable successes. When the same sports network bought the rights to the Pro-Kabaddi League in 2014, most experts shook their heads in disbelief. There was a market for hockey and badminton. But kabaddi? How can this humble, grassroot and street game grab eyeballs, and generate revenues and profits. Surprisingly, it did. Today, it may be more popular than the hockey and badminton leagues. In the three cases, one can contend that the rest, to tweak a clichéd saying, was broadcast history.

(The writer is a senior journalist with over three decades experience across print, TV and digital media)