The league that lifted Indian volleyball
While the national body cycled through suspensions, a privately run league built the pipeline that powered India’s bronze at the AVC Cup.
The air inside the indoor arena at the Veer Savarkar Sports Complex feels thick, but not from the Ahmedabad summer. Two thousand people are on their feet, their breath and noise pushed back at them by the chilled-water vents overhead. It is a late Sunday evening in June 2026, and on court, in red, the Indian men’s volleyball team is one point from a medal it has never won.
India leads 24–17 in the fourth set against Bahrain. The Bahraini server sends in a heavy, flat ball that skims over the net. India takes it clean, the pass lifted high into position, and middle-blocker Amrinderpal Singh rises into the lights. He meets the set at full stretch and drives it past the frantic reach of the block, into the taraflex floor. For a moment the noise is just a white wall. Then it breaks into a roar.
India has the point, the set 25–17, and a 3–1 win that brings home bronze at the 2026 Asian Volleyball Confederation (AVC) Cup, the country’s first senior continental volleyball podium since the 2014 final in Almaty. Minutes later, the live rankings move: India jumps sixteen places to World No. 42.
Amir Singh, a different Singh entirely, who won the Arjuna Award for volleyball in 2001, files past with bronze around the players’ necks. Then your eye goes up to the VIP boxes.
There are no blazer-clad officials from the Volleyball Federation of India (VFI) waving at the broadcasters. No local strongmen arguing over who should stand closest to the podium.
That absence is the story: a private league, now valued at over $90 million, built the podium a national federation couldn’t, and ten days later, got the sport’s global governing body to say so in writing.
The Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) account of the tournament shows the scale of its involvement across the field: eight of the participating teams received coaching support through its Volleyball Empowerment programme, and nine received equipment or knowledge-transfer funding. India’s grant, tied to coach Dragan Mihailović’s appointment, totalled $484,500. None of that money explains why India finished ahead of other similarly funded sides.
The VFI spent most of the last decade suspended by someone. FIVB suspended it in 2016 over a leadership coup. The Sports Ministry suspended it again in 2019, for six years. Elections finally happened in 2025, under Delhi High Court supervision, and nine months later, FIVB gave the new leadership provisional recognition. It was stripped of that too, just two months before this medal.
