Ashu Malik: PKL stats, records and the title he won in 14 matches

Ashu Malik is a raider from Sonipat, the captain of Dabang Delhi K.C., and the man who has scored 916 points in 105 Pro Kabaddi League matches since walking into the league as an unknown teenager in Season 8. He has a Best Raider award, a career-best 23-point night, and two PKL title medals. What the career page will not tell you is that the title he lifted as captain came in the season he played least, and that this is the most interesting thing about him.

Who is Ashu Malik?

Born on 9 January 2002 in Sonipat, Haryana, Malik grew up in the district that has supplied Indian kabaddi with raiders for two generations. He is a right raider, and Dabang Delhi is the only PKL side he has played for.

The route in was not smooth. He has spoken about his family pushing him towards his studies and giving him no backing at all for the first three or four years, and about cutting his weight from 80kg to move the way a raider needs to move. He built his name on the Yuva Kabaddi Series and K7 circuits, and Dabang Delhi took him as a New Young Player for Season 8. His best-known return from that circuit actually came after his debut PKL season rather than before it, in the Yuva Kabaddi Series Summer Edition of 2022, when he carried Murthal Magnets to the title with 295 points in 26 matches, 281 of them from raids. Plenty of profiles have the order the wrong way round and credit that tournament with earning him the Delhi contract he already had.

He had turned 20 six weeks before Delhi won their maiden title, beating Patna Pirates 37-36 in the Season 8 final in Bengaluru on 25 February 2022. He was on the mat for 22 matches that season and contributed almost nothing. That is not a slight, it is the record: 59 points across the whole campaign, at 2.7 a match.

Ashu Malik’s PKL stats, season by season

Five seasons, one franchise. The rise from a squad raider to the league’s leading scorer took two years.

Season	Year	Matches	Raid pts	Total pts
8	2021-22	22	51	59
9	2022	23	141	158
10	2023-24	23	276	280
11	2024-25	23	262	265
12	2025	14	152	154
Career		105	882	916

Those season figures are worth checking rather than taking on trust, because the career line is the sum of them and nothing else. Matches: 22 plus 23 plus 23 plus 23 plus 14 is 105. Total points: 59 plus 158 plus 280 plus 265 plus 154 is 916. Raid points add up to 882 and tackle points to 34, and 882 plus 34 is 916 again. Every one of those lands exactly on the career totals published on his profile, which is the test a stat sheet either passes or quietly fails.

The same check works on his big-raid tallies and produces something the profiles miss. His career return of 46 Super 10s and 30 Super Raids is fully accounted for by seasons 9 to 12 alone: 5, 15, 18 and 8 Super 10s, then 6, 9, 8 and 7 Super Raids. Which means that in 22 matches of a title-winning debut season, Ashu Malik did not record a single Super 10.

What are Ashu Malik’s records and awards?

Season 10 is the one on the honours board, and it was handed to him by someone else’s misfortune. Delhi’s captain Naveen Kumar went down on 27 December with a knee ligament injury that needed surgery and ended his season, Malik took the armband for the rest of the campaign, and he finished on 276 raid points from 23 matches, level at the top of the charts with Jaipur Pink Panthers’ Arjun Deshwal.

A dead heat needed a tiebreak, and the one the league used is the most flattering number he owns: do-or-die raid points, where a raider goes in knowing a failure costs his side a point. Malik had 41 of them to Deshwal’s 36, and the Best Raider of Season 10 award went to Delhi.

Achievement	Detail
Best Raider of the Season	PKL Season 10, 276 raid points
PKL titles	Season 8 (squad member), Season 12 (captain)
Career best in a match	23 points v U Mumba, 25 September 2025
Season 11 landmark	First raider to 100 raid points in that season
Contract	Rs 1.90 crore, PKL 12 auction, via Final Bid Match

The 23-point night is the peak. Delhi beat U Mumba 47-26 at the SMS Indoor Stadium in Jaipur with three all-outs, Malik raided 24 times and converted almost all of them, and the same match took him past 100 raid points for Season 12. It moved Delhi to the top of the table.

The Season 11 problem that Season 12 solved

Here is the part of the story that gets skipped, and it is the reason the 2025 title reads differently to the way it is usually written.

In Season 11 Malik was outstanding. He scored 262 raid points in 23 matches, an average of 11.39, from 445 raids at 58.87 per cent, with 18 Super 10s. Delhi finished second in the standings on 13 wins, five defeats and four ties from 22 matches, which took them straight into the semi-finals on the back of a 15-match unbeaten run. Patna Pirates ended the run and the season in one night, winning Semi-final 2 by 32-28 at the Balewadi Sports Complex in Pune on 27 December 2024.

The post-mortem on that season was blunt about why. Delhi had built an attack with no second act. When Malik and Naveen Kumar were both quiet on the same night, and a semi-final is exactly the night that happens, there was nobody else to turn to. A raider that good had become a structural weakness.

What happened to Ashu Malik in PKL Season 12?

He got hurt. Malik took a right leg injury against Haryana Steelers, sat out the Chennai leg games against Bengal Warriorz and Gujarat Giants, and in the end appeared in only 14 of the 20 matches Delhi played across a season that ran from 29 August to 31 October 2025. Delhi finished second in the 18-match league stage behind Puneri Paltan, who topped it on points difference, then beat the same side twice in the playoffs.

His coach Joginder Narwal held him back until he was fully fit rather than rushing him. Malik said before the final that the three or four days since the qualifier, plus the physios Delhi had, would be enough to get him right, and that he would play it strapped up.

He did play it. Delhi had already come through Qualifier 1 against the same opponents, a match that finished 34-34 and went to a tiebreaker, where Akshit Dhull and Malik took the raids that sealed it 6-4. Then in the final Delhi beat Puneri Paltan 31-28 at the Thyagaraj Sports Complex to win their second title, becoming the first home side since U Mumba in Season 2 to lift the trophy in their own city. The scoring that night came from Neeraj Narwal with eight raid points and Ajinkya Pawar with six, and the match was settled by a last-minute Fazel Atrachali tackle. Malik’s own contribution was slight.

The individual awards went the same way. Atrachali took Most Valuable Player on 52 tackle points. Raider of the Season went to Patna Pirates’ Ayan Lohchab, on 316 raid points from 22 games with 16 Super 10s, and Defender of the Season to his team-mate Navdeep on 73 tackle points. Delhi’s captain, the man who had been the league’s best raider two seasons earlier, was not on the list.

Read those two seasons next to each other and the shape is clear. Delhi lost a semi-final because everything ran through Ashu Malik, then won a title in a season where, for six matches out of 20, nothing could. He was still excellent when fit, at 10.9 raid points a match and 58.46 per cent from 260 raids, with eight Super 10s and seven Super Raids in 14 outings. But the title arrived once the side had learned to score without him, and captaining a team through that is a harder and less glamorous thing than topping the raid charts. Compare it with the opposite arc at Gujarat Giants, where Mohammad Reza Shadloui went from MVP to dropped inside a season.

Has Ashu Malik played for India?

Not at an Asian Games, which is the gap in his CV. India’s men’s squad for the 2022 edition in Hangzhou, played in late 2023, was built around Pawan Sehrawat, Naveen Kumar, Arjun Deshwal and Aslam Inamdar, with Nitesh Kumar, Parvesh Bhainswal, Sachin, Surjeet Singh, Vishal Bhardwaj, Sunil Kumar, Nitin Rawal and Akash Shinde alongside them. Malik was not in it. He was 21, and had not yet had the Season 10 that changed how he was seen.

He is in the conversation now. The Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India ran an elite camp at the Inspire Institute of Sport in Bellary and named 90 probables, 45 men and 45 women, from which a 14-man squad has to be cut. Sehrawat, Naveen, Deshwal and Inamdar are all still there, which is the tightest raiding field India has had to pick from in years.

Asked in April what he was working on, Malik went to the least individual answer available. “It’s a team sport and without a good combination, we cannot even win the smallest of matches, let alone big ones in the Asian Games,” he said, and: “We can only win the gold when the team plays as one unit.” On the swings a raider’s form takes, he offered something more personal: “The game is like your fingers, sometimes up, sometimes down. Your job is to practice consistently and not let negativity creep in.”

What comes next for Ashu Malik?

Two dates. The kabaddi competition at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games runs from 21 to 26 September at the Tokai Citizens Gymnasium, with the group stage to the 24th and both finals on the 25th and 26th. Ten men’s teams split into two groups of five, and India, who are defending champions in both the men’s and women’s events, are in Group A with Bangladesh, South Korea, Chinese Taipei and hosts Japan.

Then the league. There is still no confirmed date for the PKL Season 13 auction, and reporting now puts it somewhere between 18 and 25 October, after both the Asian Games and an expected Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship. Malik is one of the few big names for whom that timing is not a source of anxiety: Delhi used their Final Bid Match card at the Season 12 auction to keep him for Rs 1.90 crore on a two-season deal, so he is already contracted for the season the rest of the league is about to bid for.

For a player who had 59 points and no Super 10s to his name when Delhi first won this thing, that is a reasonable position to be in at 24. If you want the wider picture of where Delhi’s title sits, our guide to the PKL points table and how the scoring works has the full Season 12 standings, and the Kabaddi World Cup winners list covers the international honours India will be defending in Japan.

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