Gaming
Penta Esports partners with Loco to announce pan-India esports league for colleges and universities
Mumbai: A gaming and esports company Penta Esports has announced the launch of its latest IP, the ‘Penta Collegiate League’ presented by Loco, for colleges and universities throughout India. This league’s tournaments will stream exclusively on Loco’s app and website. This league’s other partners include ‘Leverage Edu’ as a study abroad partner and ‘GOQii’ as a healthcare partner.
With Rs 30,00,000 as an annual scholarship award, the first year of the ‘Penta Collegiate League’ will feature two esports titles — Valorant on PC and Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) on mobile — and will have two qualifiers each for both games. The registration for the first qualifiers has already begun and will continue until 19 June 2022. The matches of the first qualifiers will start on 21 June 2022. The dates for the second qualifier will be announced soon.
Both the playoff matches of the qualifiers and the final match of the first season will be broadcast live exclusively on Penta Esports. Students can complete the registration process for the tournament by visiting ‘www.pentaesports.com’. The league’s complete information, including match schedules, match results, VODs of tournaments and leagues, content, news, announcements, and much more, can be found at the company’s official website.
Speaking about the idea behind this new esports league, Penta Esports founder and CEO Anurag Khurana said, “Our major focus is to provide opportunities to the budding esports athletes at the grass-root level. Esports is rapidly gaining popularity as a viable path for many and we want to provide a platform similar to conventional sports to aspiring esports athletes. The scholarship aims to help esports athletes in their endeavours.”
Commenting on the partnership, Loco founder Ashwin Suresh, said, “Game streaming is no longer looked upon as just a casual hobby. As more gamers become creators and start streaming, and new tournament organisers create more events, newer audiences are drawn to watch this content. The increased viewership will eventually lead to an increase in revenue for the overall ecosystem. As a pioneer of this industry, we’re excited to see it expand and we’re playing an active role in helping it grow. With our association with the ‘Penta Collegiate League’, we aim to support budding streamers and kickstart their esports careers.”
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.
