How kabaddi works at the 2026 Asian Games, and what India must defend

Kabaddi at the 2026 Asian Games runs from 21 to 26 September in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. Ten men’s teams and eight women’s teams play a group stage followed by semi-finals and a gold-medal match. There is no bronze medal match — both losing semi-finalists receive bronze. India enter as defending champions in both events.

The format

Event	Teams	Groups	To semi-finals
Men	10	2 groups of 5	Top 2 from each group
Women	8	2 groups of 4	Top 2 from each group

Every team in the men’s competition plays four group matches; every team in the women’s plays three. The top two from each group advance directly to the semi-finals. Win the semi-final and you play for gold; lose and you take bronze without another match.

That last point matters. A Pro Kabaddi team that loses a playoff still has a losers’ bracket, still has matches to play, still has a chance to rebuild momentum. Here, a single bad match in the knockout stage ends everything. The semi-final is the tournament’s most loaded fixture, and India have lost exactly one of them in men’s kabaddi since the sport entered the Asian Games in 1990.

India’s record

Event	Editions	Golds	Only non-gold
Men	9 (since 1990)	8	Bronze, 2018
Women	4 (since 2010)	3	Silver, 2018

The dominance is almost complete. Indian men won seven consecutive golds from 1990 to 2014 before the 2018 interruption; Indian women won gold on debut in 2010 and again in 2014. In both cases, the exception was the same edition: Jakarta 2018.

What happened in 2018

Iran ended both Indian winning runs in a single Asian Games. The men’s team lost 27–18 to Iran in the semi-final — the first defeat by an Indian men’s kabaddi side at any Asian Games — and settled for bronze. The women’s team reached the final but lost 27–24 to Iran, their first defeat in Asian Games history as well.

The losses carried an uncomfortable weight beyond the medals. Kabaddi is India’s sport in a way no other is: invented here, codified here, dominant here. Losing to Iran — twice, on the same stage, in the same week — prompted a reckoning with how the national teams were assembled, coached and prepared.

In 2022 (held in 2023 due to the postponement), both teams won gold again. The men beat Iran 33–29 in a final that was halted for nearly an hour over a disputed rule interpretation; the women beat Chinese Taipei. The correction was complete, but the 2018 results remain the reminder that dominance is not automatic.

How Asian Games kabaddi differs from Pro Kabaddi

The on-mat rules are essentially the same: seven players per side, raid-and-defend, do-or-die, revivals, all-outs. What changes is the tournament structure, and that changes behaviour.

	Pro Kabaddi	Asian Games
Format	League over many weeks, then playoffs	Group stage, then knockouts
Narrow-loss bonus	1 league point for losing by 7 or fewer	None — a loss is a loss
Bronze medal match	N/A (different structure)	No match; both losing semi-finalists get bronze
Team composition	Franchise squads, multi-nation	National teams only
Season length	8+ weeks	6 days

The absence of a narrow-loss bonus is the tactical difference that matters most. In Pro Kabaddi, a team trailing by nine with two minutes left is still playing for something: get within seven and you take a point home. That calculation shapes late-game raiding risk across the league.

Here, a loss by one point and a loss by twenty are the same result. There is no cushion, no partial credit, no arithmetic to chase. A team that falls behind has no incentive to play safe and every reason to push — which makes group-stage matches more volatile than the Pro Kabaddi equivalent.

The 2026 groups

Men

Group A	Group B
India	Iran
Bangladesh	Pakistan
South Korea	Nepal
Chinese Taipei	Thailand
Japan	Malaysia

India and Iran have been drawn into separate groups, which means a meeting is possible only in the final. South Korea — the team that handed India a shock group-stage loss in 2018 — are in India’s group.

Women

Group A	Group B
India	Sri Lanka
Iran	Thailand
Japan	Chinese Taipei
Bangladesh	Nepal

India and Iran are in the same group this time, ensuring at least one meeting. The winner of that match likely tops the group; the loser would need to avoid a further slip to reach the semi-finals.

The 2026 squads

Both Indian squads number twelve players each.

Men	Women
Sunil Kumar (c)	Pushpa Rana (c)
Pawan Sehrawat (vc)	Ritu Negi (vc)
Aslam Inamdar	Sonali Shingate
Ashu Malik	Sanju Devi
Ayan Lohchab	Pooja Kajla
Arjun Deshwal	Ritu Sheoran
Devank Dalal	Jyoti Thakur
Jaideep Dahiya	Pinki Roy
Rahul Sethpal	Manisha Kumari
Sumit Sangwan	Bhavna Thakur
Gaurav Khatri	Raj Rani
Ankit Jaglan	Nikita Kumari

Only four members of the gold-winning men’s team from 2023 return: Sunil Kumar, Pawan Sehrawat, Aslam Inamdar and Arjun Deshwal. The turnover is substantial, and it reflects both squad rotation and the depth of talent in Indian kabaddi — enough that two-thirds of a gold-medal team can be replaced and the side still arrives as favourites.

The schedule

Date	Stage
21–24 September	Group matches
25 September	Semi-finals (men and women)
26 September	Gold-medal matches (men and women)

All matches take place at the Tokai Citizens Gymnasium in Aichi Prefecture.

What to watch for

India’s dominance is real, but 2018 proved it is not guaranteed. Three things to track:

• The men’s group match against South Korea. South Korea beat India 24–23 in the group stage in 2018, contributing to the chaos that ended in bronze. This is the fixture with historical teeth.
• The women’s group match against Iran. Iran have beaten India once, in a final; a group-stage meeting is new territory, and losing it would complicate the path to gold.
• The semi-finals. A loss here awards bronze and ends the tournament. India’s only Asian Games semi-final loss came in 2018. The knockout stage is where the format stops being forgiving.

What the record does not guarantee

Eleven golds from thirteen editions, across both events, is as close to ownership of a sport as any country has at any multi-sport Games. But the absence of a bronze medal match means a single poor twenty minutes can cost a medal entirely — not in a fixture you can prepare for, but in a semi-final against whichever team emerges from the other group.

That is the design of the format. It tests consistency across the group stage and nerve in the knockout. India have passed both tests more often than anyone, and 2018 showed what it looks like when they do not.