Media should give more coverage to local sports: Pullela Gopichand

The e4m-GroupM Let’s Play sports marketing summit held in Delhi on Wednesday witnessed an extremely exciting session with India’s national badminton team coach Pullela Gopichand. In a fireside chat with Ayon Sengupta, Editor of Sportstar, Gopichand talked about various topics, including the support of corporates for sports, future of badminton in India and the portrayal of local sports in Indian media.

When asked about support from corporate houses towards the development of sports in India, Gopichand said, “To be fair, there's been a decent amount of support in the last few years. Whether it's the Tatas, Kotaks, Dalmias, or IDBI Federal, they've put in a decent amount of money. So, I think a lot of corporate India is also looking at sport. When we want performances, we have to build infrastructure. That's definitely important. But there is also the need to parallelly have a structure for all aspects of sport: infrastructure, coaches, support staff, policies. All of them have to go hand in hand.”

Gopichand also talked about how local sports does not get coverage in media anymore. “If you look at the front page, it's all local news. You look at the back page, it is EPL news. It's like all other news is local, but sports news is global. When I was young, I would go back and check if my name was there in the newspaper. Today we don't have any local sport being covered at all. That's a big concern. If we see the back pages of newspapers, EPL is taking up all the space. What about our sport? What about our kids who won the district tournaments? Back then, it was a huge motivation for me to see my name in the paper and I would mark it, my mother would underline it and show it. That's a huge motivation and I really think we want it back. So, mark spaces for local sport at the back page. That's something which I strongly feel about.”

Lastly, he shared that the sports authority has significantly improved over the years. “Definitely, we have consistently had long stints with people who were genuinely interested in sport. And because Prime Minister Narendra Modi is interested, nobody takes things lightly now. There's a significant difference in the way sports is treated in this government from the way it was in the past. So we are looking at this being very well.”