Gaming
S8ul levels up with historic Top Five finish at global Apex Legends finals
MUMBAI: India didn’t just drop into the arena, it survived, scored and stood tall. S8ul Esports delivered a watershed moment for Indian esports by finishing among the top five teams globally at the Apex Legends Global Series Championship in Sapporo, Japan, held from January 15 to 18. The result marks the strongest-ever performance by an Indian organisation in Apex Legends at the highest level of international competition.
The ALGS Championship, the pinnacle of the Apex Legends calendar, featured 40 of the world’s most consistent teams from a year-long global circuit. S8UL emerged as the only South Asian team to break into the Top Five. Its all-Australian roster Rick “Sharky” Wirth, Benjamin “Jesko” Spaseski and Tom “Legacy” Canty guided by head coach Harrison “Rogers” Rogers, earned $120,000 (around Rs 1 crore) from a total prize pool of &2 million (approximately Rs 18.14 crore).
S8UL began in Group B, navigating a gruelling round-robin stage before securing a Top 20 finish and progressing to the Winners Bracket. The run culminated in a place in the Grand Finals, where the remaining 20 teams battled it out under the high-stakes Match Point format requiring teams to hit 50 points and then win a match to seal the title.
Across nine intense final matches, S8UL amassed 64 points to finish fifth overall, missing fourth place by just a single point behind Grow Gaming, a reminder of how razor-thin the margins were at the elite end of the competition.
Reacting to the milestone, S8ul co-founder and CEO Animesh Agarwal said the result validated the organisation’s recent push into global esports investments. Over the past 18 months, S8UL has expanded beyond content and creators into world-class competitive rosters, with the ambition of consistently contending and winning on the biggest stages.
S8ul Esports head coach Harrison Rogers echoed the sentiment, highlighting the team’s composure and adaptability across stages. He described the Top Five finish as a major milestone that reinforces confidence in the roster’s ability to challenge for future championships.
The Sapporo result builds on S8ul’s growing international presence in Apex Legends. In 2025, the organisation competed at the ALGS Midseason Playoffs during the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, where it also became the first Indian team to be selected as a Club Partner.
With back-to-back appearances at Apex Legends’ premier global events, S8ul is no longer just participating, it is placing itself firmly on the world map, carrying Indian esports with it.
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.
