Indian sports is undergoing one of the most significant structural shifts in its history. With the introduction of the National Sports Governance Act of 2025 and a gradual transition from discretionary oversight to a statutory regulatory framework, the ecosystem is moving toward professionalism, accountability, and transparency.
However, while governance structures are evolving rapidly, the education and training systems meant to supply capable professionals remain critically misaligned with these new functional demands.
At a time when India’s sports industry is projected to grow into a multi-billion-pound economy by 2027, the gap between what sports education teaches and what sports institutions require has become increasingly visible. The result is a workforce that is technically qualified on paper but often ill-equipped to operate within the complex administrative, legal, and governance realities of modern Indian sport.
Institutional Complexity, Limited Human Capital
Bodies such as the Sports Authority of India (SAI), National Sports Federations (NSFs), the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (MYAS), and the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) now operate within tightly defined statutory mandates. SAI alone manages multiple national stadia, regional centers, and National Centers of Excellence, supporting thousands of athletes across Olympic and non-Olympic disciplines. This scale demands administrators skilled in public administration, infrastructure management, procurement, and inter-institutional coordination.
At the same time, NSFs are required to comply with democratic elections, age and tenure limits, financial audits by the Comptroller and Auditor General, and integrity mechanisms such as ethics committees and grievance redressal bodies. These are no longer best-practice recommendations but legal obligations. Yet, most graduates entering the sports ecosystem lack practical exposure to these requirements.
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One of the most glaring gaps lies in sports management education. Programs across the country overwhelmingly emphasize commercial aspects marketing, branding, sponsorship sales, fan engagement, and retail logistics. While these skills have relevance in private leagues and clubs, they do not reflect the public-authority nature of Indian sports bodies, many of which fall under the Right to Information Act and operate using government grants.
Governance, statutory compliance, and public finance management are often treated as peripheral topics, introduced as electives or short modules late in the program. As a result, graduates may understand how to pitch sponsorship decks but remain unfamiliar with mandatory budget allocations for grassroots development, long-term athlete development plans, or the compliance frameworks introduced under the 2025 Act.
This imbalance has created a generation of professionals trained for a commercial sports market that represents only a fraction of Indian sport’s operational reality.
Ethics and Integrity: Theory Without Tools
Integrity management is another area where education falls short. Issues such as age fraud, doping, sexual harassment, and match manipulation are not hypothetical challenges; they are recurring realities in Indian sport. Yet ethics education largely remains theoretical, framed through generic corporate ethics rather than sport-specific decision-making frameworks.
Administrators are now expected to implement safe sport policies, manage internal complaints committees, and navigate disciplinary procedures under tight legal scrutiny. However, few educational programs provide hands-on training in evidence handling, inquiry procedures, or ethical risk assessment. Short-term certificate courses exist, but their limited duration prevents meaningful skill development for roles that demand high levels of responsibility and judgement.
Coaches Caught Between Performance and Administration
On the other end of the spectrum, physical education and coaching institutions offer strong grounding in sports science, biomechanics, and training methodologies. However, as coaches increasingly assume leadership roles such as heading National Centres of Excellence or acting as high-performance directors they encounter administrative responsibilities for which they are unprepared.
Managing multidisciplinary teams, overseeing budgets, coordinating sports science inputs, and ensuring compliance with national codes are now part of the job. Yet coaching curricula remain overwhelmingly technical, creating a leadership vacuum where highly capable performance experts struggle with governance and bureaucracy.
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Sports law education in India has expanded in recent years, but it remains largely academic. Courses focus on introductions to doping regulations, torts, and contract law, with minimal exposure to procedural realities. The establishment of bodies such as the National Sports Tribunal has created demand for professionals who understand arbitration, mediation, and enforcement in sport-specific contexts.
However, simulation-based learning, mock hearings, and real-case exposure are rare. This leaves a gap between legal knowledge and practical application, particularly in areas such as dispute resolution, harassment cases, and regulatory compliance.
Another structural weakness lies in funding education. While private sponsorship dominates course content, public-sector funding and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) pathways are underrepresented. This is a major oversight in a country where government schemes and CSR funding collectively contribute thousands of crores annually to sports development.
Administrators are expected to navigate grant approvals, utilization certificates, and compliance with the Companies Act, yet these processes are rarely taught. Similarly, event management education remains focused on logistics rather than long-term sustainability and legacy planning critical elements for infrastructure-heavy sporting events.
As global sport moves toward data-driven decision-making, AI, analytics, and wearable technology are becoming central to performance and fan engagement. Despite India’s strong digital talent base, sports education has been slow to integrate these tools meaningfully. Technology modules exist, but foundational training that blends data science with sports-specific understanding remains limited.
The Cost of Misalignment
This systemic disconnect has tangible consequences. Skill mismatches lead to inefficiencies, repeated learning on the job, and high attrition. More importantly, they undermine India’s ability to build self-sustaining sports institutions capable of long-term planning and global engagement.
The findings point to a clear conclusion: Indian sports education must realign itself with the functional realities of governance, law, finance, and high-performance administration. As India positions itself as a future Olympic host and a serious global sporting nation, success will depend not only on athletes and infrastructure but also on the quality of professionals running the system.
Bridging this gap is no longer optional. It is a national imperative if Indian sport is to translate ambition into lasting excellence.
Based on Abhinav Bindra Task Force Report
