Most Popular Sports in India, Ranked

Cricket is India’s most popular sport by a wide margin, followed by football, field hockey, badminton, and kabaddi. Wrestling, tennis, athletics, boxing, and chess round out a top 10 built on Olympic medals, world titles, and dedicated domestic leagues, and every one of them has a real fan base you can measure in tens or hundreds of millions.

At a glance: India’s top 10 sports

1. Cricket

Cricket is not just the most popular sport in India, it is close to a national religion. Surveys routinely put the share of Indian sports viewers who follow cricket above 90%, and the sport has more than 300 million dedicated fans by most industry estimates. The Indian Premier League is one of the richest sports leagues on earth, packing stadiums for six weeks every year and pulling television and streaming audiences in the hundreds of millions for marquee matches. Star batters and bowlers carry film-star level fame, and some of the richest cricketers in the world are Indian. Nothing else in the country comes close in reach, money, or cultural weight.

2. Football

Football has grown into India’s clear second sport, with an estimated 150 million-plus fans, concentrated in West Bengal, Kerala, Goa, and the North Eastern states where it has been the dominant sport for over a century. The Indian Super League consolidated the domestic game under one banner and lifted its production value and sponsorship, while interest in the English Premier League and other European competitions runs high on Indian television. Sunil Chhetri, India’s all-time leading scorer, became the face of the sport’s modern era before retiring from internationals in 2024, and rising transfer fees have made some of the richest Indian footballers genuine domestic celebrities.

3. Field Hockey

Field hockey holds a special place as the sport most often linked with India’s national identity, despite having no official national-sport designation. The men’s team won eight Olympic gold medals between 1928 and 1980, a run of dominance no other hockey nation has matched, and it remains the country’s most successful Olympic sport by medal count. The modern team has revived some of that pride with bronze medals at both the Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 Olympics under captain Harmanpreet Singh. Punjab, Haryana, and Odisha remain the sport’s heartlands, and several of the greatest field hockey players in the world’s history have come from India.

4. Badminton

Badminton has become India’s leading individual sport, fueled by a run of Olympic and world-championship medals over the past decade. PV Sindhu holds an Olympic silver (Rio 2016) and bronze (Tokyo 2020), the best haul by any Indian badminton player, while Lakshya Sen and HS Prannoy have added world-stage results of their own. The Premier Badminton League gives the sport a domestic television window, and badminton’s mix of accessible courts and world-class role models has made it a genuine second sport in many urban households. Sindhu and her peers regularly feature among the greatest badminton players of their generation.

5. Kabaddi

Kabaddi is one of India’s oldest sports, but the Pro Kabaddi League transformed it into a modern television product. Launched in 2014, its first season drew an estimated 435 million viewers, a number that rivaled cricket’s biggest broadcasts and instantly made it India’s most-watched non-cricket league. Star raiders such as Pardeep Narwal and Rahul Chaudhari became household names, and the format’s raid-and-tag rules turned out to translate unusually well to prime-time TV: fast, physical, and easy to follow even for first-time viewers.

6. Wrestling

Wrestling, known locally as kushti or pehlwani, has deep rural roots, particularly in Haryana and Punjab, where akhara training grounds have produced generations of Olympic medalists. Sushil Kumar’s back-to-back Olympic medals in 2008 and 2012 established wrestling as a reliable medal sport for India, and Aman Sehrawat continued that tradition by winning bronze in the men’s freestyle 57kg category at the Paris 2024 Olympics. The domestic Pro Wrestling League gives the sport a television audience beyond the Olympic cycle, and wrestling remains one of the few disciplines where India competes at a genuine world-class level.

7. Tennis

Tennis has never been a mass-participation sport in India, but its doubles specialists have kept it firmly in the national conversation. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi won multiple Grand Slam doubles titles through the 1990s and 2000s, and Rohan Bopanna extended that legacy by becoming, at 43, the oldest player ever to reach world No. 1 in doubles after winning the 2024 Australian Open. Sania Mirza’s singles and doubles career did similar work for the women’s game. None of them appear among the outright greatest tennis players in singles history, but India’s doubles pedigree is real and unusually deep for a country its size.

8. Athletics

Athletics moved from a niche Olympic-cycle interest to genuine mainstream attention after Neeraj Chopra won India’s first Olympic gold in athletics, in the javelin throw at the Tokyo 2020 Games, then added a silver at Paris 2024. His rivalry with Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem turned javelin into appointment viewing across the country, a rarity for a track and field event outside the Olympics themselves. Sprinters, middle-distance runners, and race walkers get far less coverage, but Chopra’s success has visibly lifted grassroots interest in athletics academies in several states.

9. Boxing

Boxing built its Indian following on a run of world championships rather than Olympic gold. Mary Kom won six World Amateur Boxing Championship titles and an Olympic bronze in 2012, becoming one of the country’s most recognized athletes across any sport. Nikhat Zareen has since added two world titles of her own, and Vijender Singh’s Olympic bronze in 2008 first put Indian boxing on the map. The sport draws its strongest following from the North East and Haryana, where amateur boxing clubs feed directly into the national program.

10. Chess

Chess is India’s fastest-rising sport by fan attention, and it earned that spot in a single moment: D Gukesh beat China’s Ding Liren in December 2024 to become the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion in history, at 18. India now fields several elite grandmasters at once, including Arjun Erigaisi and R Praggnanandhaa, giving the country genuine strength in depth at chess’s top level for the first time. Online platforms and a wave of youth academies have turned that success into a visible grassroots boom, particularly in Tamil Nadu and Chennai, the sport’s traditional Indian base.

Where things stand in 2026

The gap between cricket and everything else remains enormous, but the chasing pack has never been more crowded. Football, badminton, and kabaddi each have a real domestic league driving year-round attention rather than relying on the Olympic cycle, while wrestling, athletics, boxing, and now chess ride a steady stream of individual world-class results. India’s most popular Olympic sports list overlaps heavily with this one, a sign that Olympic medals, more than anything else, are what turn a niche Indian sport into a mainstream one.

How we ranked them

This list combines estimated fan numbers from industry and broadcaster research, competitive results (Olympic medals, world titles, and major tournament wins), and the presence of a sustained domestic league or broadcast window, since a sport with no regular season tends to fade between major events. Cricket, football, and field hockey rank on scale and history; badminton, kabaddi, and the individual sports rank on a mix of measurable results and fast-growing attention. Fan numbers for non-cricket sports vary by source and are best read as reasonable estimates rather than exact counts.