India’s grassroots sports ecosystem stands at a pivotal point, with rising interest and participation on one hand, and persistent structural gaps on the other. While investments at the elite level have improved and awareness around sports is growing, the pathway from early talent identification to professional development remains fragmented. Questions around scalability, data adoption, coaching quality, and inclusivity continue to shape the conversation. In this context, industry leaders are increasingly focusing on building structured, sustainable models that can support long-term athlete development. In an interaction with TAM, Sourjyendu Medda, Founder of SFL (Sports For Life), shares his insights on addressing these challenges and creating a more cohesive sports ecosystem in India.
TAM: You have moved from building a unicorn in commerce to building champions in sport. Which founder principles transfer seamlessly and where does sport demand an entirely new playbook?
Sourjyendu Medda: Some things carry over directly. The obsession with systems that scale. The discipline of measuring what matters and ignoring vanity metrics. The ability to hire people who are better than you at the thing you need done. The comfort with long time horizons.
What does not transfer is the relationship with the customer. In commerce, the transaction is relatively clean. A product is delivered, the customer evaluates it. In sport, the product is human development. The outcomes are non linear, deeply personal, and often invisible for months. A parent enrolling their seven year old is not buying a service. They are placing a bet on what their child might become. That demands a completely different kind of trust.
The other difference is infrastructure. Commerce is largely digital. Grassroots sport is physical, human, and local. You cannot deploy a coaching curriculum the way you deploy code. Every centre, every coach, every batch has its own context. Building consistency without killing that local intelligence is the hardest operational problem I have worked on.
TAM: If AI driven performance tracking can dramatically improve outcomes, why has Indian grassroots sport failed to adopt data at scale and what structural gaps must be fixed first?
Sourjyendu Medda: Because the problem was never the availability of AI. The problem is the absence of the layer beneath it. AI needs structured input. It needs consistent data collection, standardised assessments, digitised workflows. Most grassroots academies have none of this. Coaching is intuitive. Assessment is subjective. Record keeping is informal. You cannot run machine learning on a WhatsApp group.
The gaps run deeper than tools. India’s grassroots coaching workforce is large but undertrained in systematic athlete development. Before you introduce data, you need coaches who understand periodisation, age appropriate loading, progressive skill frameworks. Data without coaching context is noise.
Then there is the platform problem. There is no national or even regional infrastructure that connects academies, captures performance data, and enables tracking over time. Every academy is an island. SFL is building that connective layer, designed so that data collection becomes a byproduct of the coaching workflow, not an extra task. And underneath all of it is trust. Parents and coaches have seen too many edtech promises land poorly. Building trust in sports tech requires demonstrated outcomes, not slide decks.
TAM: India has four times the population of the United States but far fewer Olympic champions. What is fundamentally broken in our talent identification and development pipeline?
Sourjyendu Medda: Population size without a functioning pipeline is just a large denominator. It does not produce athletes. It produces potential, which is very different. What is broken is the transition layer. India does reasonably well at the two extremes. At the base, there is growing interest in sport. At the top, government investment in elite preparation has improved. What is missing is everything in between. The structured pathway from a child showing early aptitude at eight to that child being systematically developed through their teens.
In most Indian cities, a talented ten year old has no clear next step. The academy they train at may not have a competitive structure. Age group tournaments with proper standards are limited. Scouting is informal and network dependent. Coaching quality varies wildly. And there is almost no data that follows the child from one stage to the next.
The US system works because it has layers. School sport feeds into club sport, which feeds into collegiate programmes, which feeds into professional and Olympic pathways. Each layer has structure, competition, and visibility. India needs its own version of that, adapted to our context.
At SFL, that is the core problem we are working on. Academies are the entry point. Tournaments create competitive exposure. Technology enables tracking and scouting. Together, they start forming a pipeline. But pipelines are not built in funding cycles. They are built in generations.
TAM: Can grassroots sports become a venture scale and commercially viable business without compromising access and inclusivity and how is SFL solving this challenge?
Sourjyendu Medda: This is the question that defines the next decade of Indian sport. And I believe the answer is yes, but the business model has to be designed for inclusivity from day one, not bolted on later as CSR. The common mistake is building for the premium segment first and hoping to trickle down. That creates excellent facilities for a narrow demographic and leaves the country’s actual sporting talent untouched. It works commercially in the short term but hits a ceiling fast.
SFL’s approach is to build structured, quality programming at price points accessible to the urban middle class, which in India is a very large and underserved market. We do not compete on luxury. We compete on systems. Our coaching curriculum, technology platform, and operational model are designed to deliver consistent quality across centres without needing the economics of a premium club.
Scale is what makes inclusivity sustainable. A single centre serving 200 children has limited viability. A network sharing a common platform, curriculum, and brand can achieve the unit economics that keep fees affordable. That is the model.
Grassroots sport will never generate SaaS margins. But it can be a viable, growing, meaningful business if you build it with discipline and accept that the returns compound over years, not quarters.
TAM: What will define success for SFL: medal tallies, professional athletes produced, or a cultural shift in how India views sport as a career?
Sourjyendu Medda: The cultural shift. Because medals and professional athletes are outputs of a system. The system only gets built when the culture values it. Sport in India is still a secondary pursuit for most families. It is encouraged up to a point and then quietly deprioritised when academic pressure builds. That pattern will not change because of one Olympic gold or one IPL contract. It will change when enough families experience firsthand that sport builds qualities in their child that nothing else does. Focus, resilience, the ability to work within a team, the willingness to fail and try again.
SFL is working towards that. Not producing one champion, but building the environment where thousands of children grow up treating sport as a serious, structured, respected part of their lives. Some will become professional athletes. Many will not. But all of them will carry something from the experience that shapes who they become. Success for SFL is when a parent in a tier two city considers an SFL academy as seriously as they consider a good school. When sport is not extracurricular but essential. When the question shifts from whether a child should play sport to which sport and how seriously. We are not there yet. But the direction is clear.
