Aslam Inamdar: PKL stats, records and why his best season was not the one he won
Aslam Inamdar has 621 Pro Kabaddi points from 87 matches and a raiding rate a third below his peak. Here is why India still picked him for the Asian Games.
Sep 4, 2026
Aslam Inamdar is 26, he captains Puneri Paltan, and he is one of only four men who won kabaddi gold in Hangzhou and are going back to defend it in Japan this month. He is also, on the numbers, a different player from the one who arrived in 2021. Across five Pro Kabaddi League seasons he has 621 points from 87 matches, all of them for the same franchise, and the way those points are made has changed completely.
Aslam Inamdar’s PKL career in numbers
Every figure below comes from the league’s own player database. The rows close on each other, which is the useful thing about this table: 537 raid points plus 84 tackle points is 621, and each season’s raid points are its raid touch points plus its raid bonus points.
| Season | Matches | Raid points | Tackle points | Total | Raids taken | Points per raid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Season 8 (2021) | 23 | 169 | 20 | 189 | 355 | 0.48 |
| Season 9 (2022) | 17 | 138 | 12 | 150 | 268 | 0.51 |
| Season 10 (2023-24) | 23 | 142 | 26 | 168 | 343 | 0.41 |
| Season 11 (2024) | 7 | 31 | 7 | 38 | 82 | 0.38 |
| Season 12 (2025) | 17 | 57 | 19 | 76 | 171 | 0.33 |
| Career | 87 | 537 | 84 | 621 | 1,219 | 0.44 |
That 621 puts him 23rd on the league’s all-time total points list, in company that includes Pawan Sehrawat and Arjun Deshwal near the top of it. He has 13 Super 10s, 10 Super Raids and five Super Tackles, and his best return in a single match is 19 points, from Season 9.
Why his best season was not the one he won
Puneri Paltan won their first PKL title in Season 10, beating Haryana Steelers 28-25 at the GMC Balayogi Sports Complex in Hyderabad on 1 March 2024. Inamdar was the captain who lifted it. The temptation is to read that season as his peak. The column says otherwise.
His most productive raiding came a year earlier. In Season 9 he took 268 raids and turned them into 138 points, which is 0.51 points every time he crossed the line, the best rate of his career. In the title season he took 75 more raids than that and scored four more points. His rate fell to 0.41, and the share of his raids that came back with nothing rose from 40 per cent to 56.
What went up instead was the defending. Season 10 gave him 26 tackle points, still his best, at a tackle success rate of 48 per cent. So the captain of the champions was having his quietest raiding season to that point and his most productive defensive one, in the same 23 matches. A year before that, the same club had lost the Season 9 final 33-29 to Jaipur Pink Panthers in Mumbai on 17 December 2022, with Inamdar in the side but not yet leading it.
The knee injury that split the career in two
Season 11 lasted seven matches. Inamdar tore the meniscus in his knee, needed surgery, and was ruled out of the rest of the 2024 campaign on 11 November, with vice-captain Pankaj Mohite taking the armband for the run-in. He had 38 points when it happened, at a rate that was already sliding. Six months later he told the Tribune he was fit again: “I made a decision that I had to recover quickly. It has been six months now, and I have recovered properly.”
Split the career at the point he took the captaincy and the two halves barely look like the same player.
| Period | Matches | Raid points | Raids taken | Points per raid | Tackle points | Tackle points per match |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seasons 8-9, before the captaincy | 40 | 307 | 623 | 0.49 | 32 | 0.80 |
| Seasons 10-12, as captain | 47 | 230 | 596 | 0.39 | 52 | 1.11 |
Roughly the same number of raids in each half. A quarter fewer points out of them in the second, and a raiding rate a fifth lower. Set against that, 39 per cent more tackle points per match. Read as a decline it looks bad. Read as a change of job it looks deliberate, and it is the reading both his club and the national selectors appear to have taken.
What Season 12 actually showed
He played 17 matches last season and scored 57 raid points. That was third at his own club, behind Aditya Shinde on 159 and Pankaj Mohite on 118. His 171 raids came back empty 103 times, the highest empty rate of his career at 60 per cent. On raid points alone, the captain was his team’s third option.
The other column tells a better story. Nineteen of his 76 points were tackle points, a quarter of his output, against a tenth across his first two seasons, and he added two Super Tackles. Puneri Paltan reached the final again and lost it, Ashu Malik’s Dabang Delhi winning 31-28 at the Thyagaraj Stadium in New Delhi on 31 October 2025 for their second title. Inamdar scored the first point of the match.
From Taklibhan to a PKL title
He is from Taklibhan, a village in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, and he picked the sport up in 2010, in third standard, because his brother played it. His father died in 2011 and the family’s finances went with him. Inamdar took whatever work he could find, cleaning in a hotel among other jobs, and saved what he earned to travel to local matches and prize competitions.
He came through the Maharashtra sub-junior circuit and joined Puneri Paltan for the 2021 season, which was PKL Season 8. He has never played for another franchise. Every one of his 621 league points has been scored in the same shirt, which is rare in a league rebuilt by auction every year. Three players from Taklibhan now play for the same PKL side, a detail he mentions more readily than his own numbers.
Hangzhou, and now Aichi
Inamdar was in the India squad that won kabaddi gold at the 2022 Asian Games, held in Hangzhou in late 2023 after a Covid postponement. India beat Iran 33-29 in the final on 7 October 2023, an eighth men’s kabaddi gold from nine editions of the Games. The only one that got away was Jakarta in 2018.
Twelve men won that medal. Four are in the squad for Aichi: Inamdar, Deshwal, Sehrawat and Sunil Kumar, who takes over as captain. The kabaddi runs from 21 to 26 September at the Tokai Citizens Gymnasium in Aichi Prefecture, India open against the hosts on the 21st at 6am IST, and the final is on the 26th.
Sehrawat and Inamdar are named as the squad’s two all-rounders, which is the whole argument for his place. India are taking Devank Dalal, Ayan Lohchab, Deshwal and Ashu Malik, the top raiders of a league season, for a tournament that will realistically use two of them at a time. Front-line raiding is the one thing that squad does not need more of. A captain who can raid a bit and tackle at better than a point a match is a different proposition, and the numbers above are what that proposition looks like.
Aslam Inamdar: the short answers
How old is Aslam Inamdar?
He was born on 23 February 2000, so he is 26.
Which team does he play for?
Puneri Paltan, and only Puneri Paltan, since the 2021 season. He has captained them since Season 10.
How many points does he have in the PKL?
621 from 87 matches, made up of 537 raid points and 84 tackle points. That is 23rd on the all-time list.
Has he won the Pro Kabaddi League?
Yes. He captained Puneri Paltan to their first title in Season 10, beating Haryana Steelers 28-25. He also finished on the losing side in the Season 9 and Season 12 finals.
Is he a raider or a defender?
The league lists him as an all-rounder and India picked him as one for the Asian Games. Tackle points made a tenth of his output across his first two seasons and a quarter of it last season.