In case you missed it, read Part 1 here: The Federation Is Not the Dressing Room: Why Hockey India Needs Professional Administration

Part 2 goes deeper. Because the problem is not just about who sits in the chair. It is about the system that puts them there, keeps them there, and never once asks what they have done with the power. Hockey India’s own documents, its annual reports, its AGM minutes, its court records, tell that story better than any opinion piece can.

Who Is in the Chair and What Do They Bring to It

What does the president of a national sports federation actually need to do? Build commercial partnerships. Drive revenue independence. Set strategic direction. Manage relationships with government, sponsors, and the international federation. These are the demands of the role.

Dilip Tirkey is one of India’s greatest hockey players. 412 caps, three Olympics, Asian Games gold in 1998. After retirement, he moved into politics. Rajya Sabha MP representing Biju Janata Dal, Lok Sabha candidate, Chairman of Odisha Tourism Development Corporation. That is his post-hockey background. He is now president of Hockey India.

Tirkey has vast hockey knowledge. He knows what players need. He understands what the game demands at the highest level. That knowledge genuinely belongs in Indian hockey, in a high performance committee, an athlete welfare board, or in a role where his experience shapes how players are developed and supported. The question is whether that background matches what the president’s role actually demands. Administrative capability, commercial vision, governance experience. What does his track record show in those areas?

Now look at the secretary general’s role. Operational management, financial oversight, legal compliance, day to day governance. Bhola Nath Singh is a wrestling coach from Jharkhand who served as vice president of the Wrestling Federation of India and president of Jharkhand’s wrestling and hockey bodies. He is now the secretary general of Hockey India, the most powerful operational role in Indian hockey. What does his background bring to those specific demands?

These are not personal questions. They are job description questions. And they are questions that the system never asks before putting people in these roles.

Elections That Produce No Vision

Hockey India conducts elections. There is a returning officer. Official documents are published. Nomination forms, bylaws, objection processes, all of it is there. On paper, the process is followed correctly.

What is missing is the most important thing. What does the person standing for election actually want to do? There is no manifesto. No vision document. No public agenda. State federation representatives vote without knowing what they are voting for. They know who is contesting. They do not know why.

In the 2022 elections, one candidate filed nominations for multiple posts. Not one post, multiple. The question that raises is simple. Are you fighting these elections to serve a specific role, with a specific vision for what that role should achieve? Or are you fighting to make sure you are in the room, in some capacity, regardless of which room it is?

What emerged from those elections was not a contest of ideas. It was one group replacing another. And when elections are a contest of factions rather than ideas, nothing changes for the sport. The chair changes hands. The system stays exactly where it was.

Read More: India’s Big Call: Chase World Cup Glory or Secure Olympic Qualification?

Power With No Accountability

As we discussed in Part 1, the secretary general holds the real operational power in most Indian sports federations, not the president. That structure is not unique to Hockey India. But what Part 1 did not go into is the cost of that power having no checks around it.

The numbers tell that story. According to data compiled by sports law experts and reported by The Indian Express in March 2025, approximately 770 lawsuits related to sports and sporting bodies have been filed since 2015, at different stages across courts and central tribunals in India. Of these, 462 are in High Courts and 22 in the Supreme Court. Vidushpat Singhania, managing partner of sports law firm Krida Legal, described it plainly: literally every federation is in dispute. The All India Football Federation alone spent Rs 3 crore fighting legal cases.

Hockey India’s legal and professional fees, Rs 3.23 crore in FY 2023-24 and Rs 1.30 crore in FY 2024-25, are not an outlier. They are a symptom of a system that has no internal mechanism to resolve disputes before they reach courts. No board sets annual goals for the secretary general. KPIs are never measured at the end of the year. No performance review happens against published targets. When one role holds all operational power and answers to no formal accountability structure, courts end up doing the job that governance should be doing. And every rupee spent on legal fees is a rupee not spent on developing the sport.

What Hockey India Documents Actually Show

Hockey India’s 2024-25 annual report runs to 198 pages. It covers every tournament played, every tour conducted, every award given, every coaching course completed, every player who debuted, every player who retired, every camp held. It is a detailed record of activity. What it does not contain is a single forward looking target. No commercial revenue objective. No framework against which the administration will measure itself in the coming year. 198 pages, all looking backwards.

What Are Others Doing

The KNHB in the Netherlands publishes an annual plan alongside its financial accounts. Their 2026 plan sets a 7.5% growth target for the youngest youth segment, a 10% growth target for seniors aged 35 to 45, and a 2.5% reduction target for churn among players aged 16 to 24. Every target has a percentage. Every percentage will be measured and reported the following year. Hockey Australia’s 2025 Strategic Plan fits on one page. Vision, pillars, measurable focus areas, LA 2028 named as a goal with milestones.

England Hockey reported income of £11.4 million with year on year comparison, explained a deficit of £182,000 with a recovery plan, and presented a Channel 4 broadcast deal covering 42 matches that generated 700,000 live views as a commercial outcome.

Hockey India’s AGM in July 2025 tells the same story. Nine agenda items. The majority consumed by political disputes. The Delhi Hockey disaffiliation. The Mahesh Dayal petitions. The Vice President vacancy. Telangana Hockey’s communications. Recovery proceedings against a former president. Not a single agenda item about the future of the sport. No strategic goal for the coming year. Not a mention about commercial target. No membership plan. Nothing.

The KNHB’s November 2025 AGM discussed the annual plan and budget for 2026 with specific percentage targets for every membership segment, reported a club satisfaction survey result of 6.6 out of 10 openly, and committed to an action plan to improve it. A federation voluntarily telling its members it scored 6.6 out of 10 and here is what it will do about it. That is what accountability looks like from the inside.

What All of This Produces

Hockey India called the Hockey India League a success. Three teams did not make it to Season 2. UP Rudras withdrew citing financial concerns. Team Gonasika cited personal reasons. Odisha Warriors pulled out of the women’s league with reports of difficulty paying players. This does not look like success, in any way.

The metric being used is social media impressions. Billions of impressions for the entire tournament. India has 1.4 billion people. YouTube views for matches were sitting in the 30,000 to 50,000 range. This is a tournament with players from across the world. Social media impressions are not a success metric unless it caters to a new target audience. In this ecosystem, it does not mean success.

Read More: From Telegram to Instagram: Indian Hockey Still Has a Visibility Problem

The HIL is Indian hockey’s flagship competition. It should be the clearest demonstration of what the federation can build commercially and administratively. Instead it raises questions that the federation has not answered publicly. This is what happens when there are no KPIs, no accountability framework, and no one measuring outcomes against targets. Brownie points replace real metrics. Activity replaces results.

When the Courts Have to Step In

On April 20, 2026, the Delhi High Court delivered its judgment in CONT.CAS(C) 1119/2025. Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav found Hockey India and its Secretary General Bhola Nath Singh guilty of civil contempt of court.

The case connects to W.P.(C) 613/2025, a writ petition challenging whether Singh is even eligible to hold office under the tenure and age restrictions of the National Sports Development Code of India, 2011. That eligibility case is still pending. What the contempt ruling addressed was something far simpler. The court had issued an interim direction: provide meeting links to an elected Vice President so they could attend Hockey India meetings. A basic administrative instruction.

It was ignored. Not once. Twice.

The court found the disobedience to be conscious, concerted, deliberate, and wilful. An apology was eventually filed, approximately 250 days after the original direction. The court noted it lacked genuine remorse. Sentencing is scheduled for May 4, 2026.

Bhola Nath Singh is named here because the court named him. Not for any other reason. The point is not personal. The point is what this sequence reveals about the system. A court order was issued. It was ignored twice. An apology came 250 days later. The accountability that should have existed inside the federation was so absent that a court had to enforce a basic governance instruction. And even then, it did not come voluntarily.

The Sports Code

The Sports Code exists to prevent exactly this. It mandates tenure limits, age restrictions, athlete representation, transparency standards. The framework is there. What is missing is the will to enforce it from the inside. When that will does not exist, courts end up doing the job that governance should be doing. Nine cases filed against Hockey India in Delhi High Court in 2025 alone. Legal and professional fees of Rs 3.23 crore in FY 2023-24 and Rs 1.30 crore in FY 2024-25. Is this the right use of federations funds?

The Questions Nobody Is Asking Hockey India

Indian hockey on the field is in a good place. The results are real. The talent pipeline is real. None of that is in question.

But at some point, Indian hockey needs to stop and ask some basic questions. What is the actual role of a national sports federation? Is it to conduct elections, organise tournaments, and issue press releases about social media impressions? Or is it to grow the sport, build commercial independence, develop the next generation, and be genuinely accountable to its members?

What does governance actually mean here? Does it mean one role holding all operational power with no board setting goals and no framework measuring outcomes? Or does it mean published targets, annual accountability, and a structure that separates power from accountability?

What are elections for? To decide which group controls the federation? Or to give Indian hockey a leadership with a vision, a mandate, and the professional capability to deliver on it?

These are not complicated questions. Every successful hockey federation in the world has already answered them. The answers are sitting in their annual plans, their AGM minutes, their strategic documents. All of it is public. All of it is available.

The only question left is whether Indian hockey is willing to ask.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are those of the author. References: Delhi High Court judgment CONT.CAS(C) 1119/2025 dated April 20, 2026. Delhi High Court case records for Hockey India, 2025. KNHB Annual Plan 2026. Hockey Australia Strategic Plan 2025. England Hockey Annual Report 2024-25 and AGM Minutes March 2025. Hockey India Annual Report 2024-25 and 15th Congress Meeting Minutes July 2025.

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<p>The post The Federation Is Not the Dressing Room, Part 2: What Hockey India Own Documents Reveal first appeared on Give Me Hockey.</p>

Hockey India’s current president Dilip Tirkey, a former India captain with 412 international caps and one of India’s finest defenders of his generation, is the president of Hockey India. He brings legitimacy, a clean image, and genuine love for the sport. What he has not brought, at least not visibly, is the kind of administrative and commercial capability that the federation actually needs.

Compare his tenure to that of Narinder Batra. Batra had serious controversies. The IOC eventually banned him. But whatever Batra’s failings as a person, he transformed what Hockey India was in the world. He silenced the retired-player commentary that had dogged Indian hockey for years, the kind where former stars would publicly second-guess every selection and every tour.

Under his watch Hockey India’s political standing in world hockey rose sharply. He became FIH president. India had a seat at the table in global hockey decisions in a way it had never had before. Batra understood how to work a system, how to build influence, how to make Hockey India a name that mattered in global sport. That is a specific skill and it has nothing to do with how many goals you scored.

A great player and a great administrator are two entirely different people. Confusing the two is a governance failure, not a compliment.

The Hockey India League Problem

The Hockey India League is the most visible test of the current administration’s capability. Bringing the league back after years away deserved every bit of celebration it got. The HIL in its original avatar was genuinely exciting and helped build a generation of Indian hockey fans. But bringing something back and building something sustainable are two very different things.

The questions that any competent sports administrator would ask from day one are: what does this league cost per season, what does it earn, what is the broadcast deal worth at the federation level, what is the franchise model and does it create self-sustaining stakeholders, and what does the five year vision look like? This is not a complicated question. They are basic business questions. And from everything that has been visible publicly, Hockey India has not answered them in any meaningful way.

Hockey India League 2.0 runs more on enthusiasm and government support rather than commercial discipline. It feels like the federation was more interested in the optics of bringing the league back than in understanding why it failed the first time.

Hockey India, like most Indian sports federations, remains heavily dependent on government funding. The Sports Authority of India, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, state governments like Odisha that have invested heavily in the sport. Private revenue, the kind that makes a federation genuinely independent and sustainable, has not grown the way it should have under the current leadership. Running a federation is ultimately a business. And a business requires revenue that does not come from government handouts.

The Real Power and the Real Problem

There is another dimension to this that rarely gets discussed openly. In most federations, the president is not actually the person running day to day operations. The secretary general is. And when a federation has a ceremonial president who brings a famous name but limited administrative experience, the real power shifts entirely to the secretary general and the professional staff. This is not unique to Hockey India. The BCCI has operated similarly for years, with presidents serving largely ceremonial roles while the operational machinery runs through the secretary and the professional layer.

The problem is not that this structure exists. The problem is when the administrative layer running things is not accountable in the way it should be. When a senior Hockey India official publicly defends a coaching decision by citing his own background in a completely different sport as his qualification, that is not a governance structure working well. That is a governance structure that does not understand the difference between process and results. The federation’s job is to create conditions where the right people are in the right roles, coaches are appointed on merit, and decisions are made based on evidence. When administrative ego starts driving technical decisions, players and coaches pay the price.

What the Best Federations Actually Do

Look at the federations running the most successful hockey programmes in the world. The Netherlands, Australia, Belgium. In each case, former players are present in the system, but in technical roles. High performance directors, coaching pathway heads, selection committee members, athlete welfare advisors. Their experience is used where it is actually relevant: understanding what a player needs, what a training environment should look like, what it means to perform under pressure.

Professional sports administrators run the commercial and administrative machinery in each of these federations. The KNHB in the Netherlands is led by president Erik Klein Nagelvoort, a former international umpire and long-time partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers who owns a data marketing company. Hockey Australia’s CEO David Pryles came from Softball Australia, appointed specifically because the federation wanted someone with a proven commercial background. These are deliberate choices. People with backgrounds in sports business, broadcast negotiation, stakeholder management, financial planning. Not people who earned the role because of what they did on the pitch.

Belgium’s remarkable rise as a hockey nation is instructive here. It was not driven by a former Red Lion sitting in an administrative chair. It was driven by systematic investment in professional coaching structures, data analytics, and long term planning. That is an institutional capability, not a playing credential.

The National Sports Development Code of India, 2011, already mandates athlete representation on executive committees. That is the right structure. Athlete voice in the room matters. Players should have a seat at the table, input on selection philosophy, player welfare policies, and development pathways. But athlete voice in the room is very different from athlete at the head of the table by default, without the skills the role actually demands.

Read More: From Telegram to Instagram: Indian Hockey Still Has a Visibility Problem

Right Person, Right Role

This is not an argument against former players in administration. It is an argument for putting the right people in the right roles. A former player who has also built genuine administrative and commercial skills is exactly the kind of person you want running a federation. But the playing career alone is not the qualification. It has never been the qualification.

Hockey in India today is standing at an important juncture. The World Cup is coming. The Asian Games follow. LA 2028 is on the horizon. The HIL needs to become financially self-sufficient or it will remain a vanity project. The women’s team is rebuilding. The men’s team is trying to rediscover consistent form. All of this requires a federation that is run with commercial discipline, strategic clarity, and genuine accountability. And right now, that is exactly what is missing.

A great player does not automatically become a great administrator. The skills are almost entirely non-overlapping. What Indian hockey needs at the helm of its federation is not the most decorated name in the room. It is the most capable one.

The question of whether Hockey India currently has that capability, and what the federation’s own documents reveal about how it is actually being run, is something we will look at in detail in Part 2.

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<p>The post The Federation Is Not the Dressing Room: Why Hockey India Needs Professional Administration first appeared on Give Me Hockey.</p>