India has produced world champions in archery and has remained among the leading nations in the sport for years. Yet outside the Olympic cycle and major international competitions, the sport has struggled to command the kind of commercial attention that can turn elite performance into a sustainable professional career.
The Archery Premier League (APL) is an attempt to change that. Launched in 2025 as the world’s first franchise-based archery league, APL has been designed not only as another competition for India’s top archers, but as a commercial platform around the sport.
The Archery Association of India (AAI), which administers the league, sees media rights, sponsorships, merchandise and gate revenue as the building blocks of that economy.
The ambition is considerable. AAI wants APL to eventually rank among the top two sports leagues in India. But it also acknowledges that the business is still in its early stages- the first season did not break even and as per Delhi franchise’s owner it might take two to four seasons more to reach just that point.
That makes the league’s second season less about simply staging another tournament and more about testing whether India’s strength in archery can be converted into a sustainable sporting property.
Building a business around an Olympic sport
The argument for creating APL was not that India lacked good archers. It was almost the opposite.
India has produced world champions, while its athletes have competed at the highest levels of international archery. What has been missing, according to AAI, is a platform that can bring greater visibility to the sport and create more opportunities for athletes.
“Any income that may come in will be handy for the Association to be self-sufficient and take care of its day to day requirements,” AAI said in response to questions from financialexpress.com.
The league is therefore expected to serve two purposes. It has to improve the competitive environment for Indian archers while also creating a commercial ecosystem around them.
AAI says it wants the league to benefit archers, franchises and the association itself over the next five years. Media rights are expected to become an important part of that equation, alongside sponsorships, merchandise and ticket revenue.
For the first season, the prize pool stood at ₹2 crore. The financial test, however, has already been made clear by the organisers themselves.
The franchise bet
For franchise owners, the attraction lies in the gap between the quality of India’s archers and the commercial infrastructure surrounding the sport.
Dr Vikas Garg, chairman and owner of the Delhi franchise, describes archery as a category where the sporting asset already exists but the business around it remains underdeveloped.
“That’s not a gap in sport; that’s a gap in business,” Garg said.
His decision to enter APL was initially driven by an interest in the sport, but the longer-term investment thesis is based on patience. Garg does not expect the franchise to behave like an established sports property that can generate quick returns.
For him, the opportunity lies in building value over several seasons as the league develops its audience, sponsorship base and media proposition.
That also explains why APL’s ambitions extend beyond the six franchises that featured in its inaugural season. AAI says it is considering increasing the number of franchises from the third season, depending on how the second season performs.
The league is therefore still in the process of establishing its commercial value.
Can archery become a television product?
One of APL’s biggest experiments has been its attempt to alter the way archery is consumed.
Traditional archery can be a slow and highly technical sport for a casual viewer. APL has responded by changing the competitive format, bringing recurve and compound archers together, featuring men and women in the same team structure and reducing the time available to shoot an arrow from the internationally allotted 20 seconds to 15 seconds.
Matches are designed to last around 20 minutes, with fixtures scheduled under lights and in prime-time windows.
The objective is straightforward: make the competition easier to follow and more suitable for television.
AAI believes this can ultimately strengthen the league’s media-rights proposition. It has said that it wants to maximise revenues from broadcast and media rights as APL matures.
That makes the audience question particularly important. A league cannot build a large media-rights business simply because its athletes are successful internationally. It needs viewers who are willing to watch the competition regularly.
APL is effectively trying to turn archery’s Olympic appeal into a weekly sporting habit.
Season One: The viewership test
The early numbers suggest the experiment found an audience, even if a modest one.
Across Sony LIV, the league recorded 110,000 video views from 86,800 users, generating 3.15 million minutes of watch time. YouTube Live added another 103,527 views from 63,600 unique viewers, with the average viewer spending 13 minutes and five seconds on the platform per session.
The World Archery federation’s own streaming platform, Archery+, carried more than 25 hours of live coverage across 11 days, with subscriber playtime crossing 1,364 hours. The finals alone accounted for 155 hours of that viewing.
The more interesting number may be the time spent rather than the headline view count. APL matches are designed to last roughly 20 minutes, meaning the 13-minute average session on YouTube Live represents a substantial portion of a typical match. It is still too early to say that the format itself is responsible for that engagement, but the numbers offer an encouraging sign for a sport whose commercial future depends heavily on convincing viewers to stay rather than simply click.
The athlete is becoming the commercial asset
For Indian archers, the proposition goes beyond the prize money. Before APL, athletes typically depended on employment with organisations, sponsorships and support from philanthropic institutions alongside competition earnings.
The league introduces another commercial layer. Garg believes franchises can contribute to an athlete’s career through exposure, personal branding, media training and sponsorship opportunities, rather than simply paying them to compete.
That could prove particularly important in a sport where athletes can spend years building international credentials without necessarily becoming recognisable to a wider Indian audience.
“Fans follow people before they follow teams,” Garg said, arguing that franchises need to make their archers recognisable personalities before team identities can develop.
The league also brings Indian archers into closer contact with established international competitors. Garg sees that as one of the less visible but potentially important benefits of the franchise structure.
For younger Indian archers, spending an extended period training and competing alongside some of the world’s leading athletes provides exposure that is difficult to replicate through conventional domestic competition.
World Archery’s assessment of the first season also pointed to the competitive benefits. Indian coaches and athletes credited the league’s compressed format with improving match temperament, communication and mental strength.
Coach Purnima Mahato said the shorter shooting window forced archers to make decisions under pressure and helped improve their confidence.
That gives APL a sporting argument beyond entertainment: it is attempting to create a different kind of competitive environment for Indian archers.
From Olympic cycle to full-time career
This may ultimately be the league’s biggest test. AAI’s stated ambition is not simply to produce one Olympic medal. The federation wants India to win multiple medals at the Games and believes greater exposure and competition can help build that pipeline.
But the commercial ambition runs parallel to the sporting one. AAI wants APL archers to have more lucrative careers within five years, with the hope that a stronger professional ecosystem will attract more young talent to the sport.
Garg’s ambition is even broader: he wants the league to give archery a commercial identity between Olympic cycles. The challenge is that APL itself is still building that identity.
“We looked at India’s Olympic and World Championship medal trajectory in archery, which has been steadily improving. We looked at grassroots participation numbers coming out of state associations. We benchmarked against how PKL and ISL built audiences from a standing start — both were “no one watches this” sports before their leagues launched. We also stress-tested the sponsor appetite before committing capital, not after,” he tell us.
As per Garg, for younger Indian archers, sharing a team environment with international stars offers experience that extends beyond competition, giving them exposure to different techniques, mental approaches and the demands of high-pressure match play.
The league has yet to establish the scale of its media-rights business, while its franchise base remains small and its audience is still developing. Its organisers are nevertheless betting that these are early-stage problems rather than structural ones.
The logic is that India’s archers already possess sporting credibility. What APL needs to build is the business around them- a regular audience, recognisable franchises, sponsors willing to stay for the long term and a media product capable of attracting viewers beyond the Olympics.
If that happens, the league could change more than the way archery is watched. It could change the economics of being an Indian archer, turning a sport largely built around medals and Olympic cycles into a professional career that has a commercial season of its own.