Gaming
S8UL to compete across 13 titles at Esports World Cup 2026 in Riyadh
The Mumbai-based outfit’s largest-ever global campaign comes with a $75m prize pool on the line
MUMBAI: India’s biggest esports organisation is going all in. S8UL, the Mumbai-headquartered esports and gaming content group, has announced it will enter qualification pathways across 13 titles at the Esports World Cup (EWC) 2026, the highest number of titles ever attempted by an Indian organisation at a global esports tournament.
The titles span the full breadth of competitive gaming: Apex Legends, Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), Call of Duty: Warzone, Chess, EA Sports FC, Fatal Fury, Fortnite, Honor of Kings, MOBA Legends 5v5, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and Trackmania. Together, they cover PC, console, and mobile ecosystems across genres including FPS, battle royale, fighting games, sports simulation, strategy, and racing.
The announcement follows S8UL’s selection as a club partner by the Esports Foundation for the second consecutive year, placing it among an elite cohort of 40 leading esports organisations worldwide.
The EWC 2026 will be held in Riyadh from July 6 to August 23, featuring a record prize pool of $75m (approximately Rs 700 crore). More than 2,000 players and 200 clubs from over 100 countries will compete across 24 titles. At the heart of the competition is the Club Championship, which carries a $30m (approximately Rs 280 crore) prize pool, rewarding consistent performance across multiple games.
Animesh Agarwal, co-founder and chief executive of S8UL, said the scale of this year’s campaign was the product of hard lessons learned. “Our experience in Riyadh last year gave us a clear understanding of what it takes to compete consistently at the global level. Since then, we have been deliberate in refining our approach, strengthening our foundation, investing in the right talent, and expanding into titles with long-term potential. The focus now is on execution: delivering consistent performances and establishing S8UL as a credible contender across every title we enter.”
At EWC 2025, S8UL competed across nine titles, reaching the Grand Finals in Apex Legends and securing top-eight finishes in Chess and EA Sports FC. This year’s campaign adds five new titles: Fortnite, Honor of Kings, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Street Fighter 6, and Trackmania.
The organisation has arrived at EWC 2026 in sharp form. Its BGMI roster won the BGMI India Series 2026, India’s premier mobile esports tournament. Its MOBA Legends 5v5 team claimed the Rai Star x Gyan Gaming Cup. Grandmaster Nihal Sarin won the Menorca Open. The VALORANT roster took the VCSA Split 1. The Honor of Kings team won the Kings Arise India City Tour in Mumbai. And on the global stage, the Apex Legends roster delivered a historic top-five finish at the ALGS 2026 Championship, the best-ever result by an Indian organisation in that title.
For Indian esports, the direction of travel is unmistakable. S8UL is no longer just showing up at the world’s biggest gaming tournament. It is arriving with intent.
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
