Kabaddi World Cup winners list: every men’s and women’s champion

India have won 18 of the 19 senior Kabaddi World Cups ever staged. That is the short version of the Kabaddi World Cup winners list, and the only crack in it came on 16 February 2020, when Pakistan beat India 43-41 at Punjab Stadium in Lahore to take the circle-style title.

The longer version is messier, because there is no single Kabaddi World Cup. Three different competitions have used the name, run by three different bodies, and two of them staged a tournament in 2025 alone. That is why two winners lists on two different sites can both look authoritative and still disagree.

Why three tournaments share the name

The oldest is run by the International Kabaddi Federation, the body recognised by the Olympic Council of Asia and the one whose results feed the Asian Games pathway. It uses the indoor rectangular court most fans know from Pro Kabaddi, and it has staged three men’s editions and two women’s editions since 2004.

The second is the circle-style World Cup, administered by the Punjab state government in India and, for its final edition, by Punjab in Pakistan. Circle kabaddi is close to a different sport. It is played on an outdoor field of 22 metres radius rather than a 13 by 10 metre mat, it has no lobbies and no bonus line, and the raider has to return through a six-metre gate called the pala rather than simply crossing back over a midline. Our guide to the two variants sets out where they part company.

The third is World Kabaddi, a separate international body that ran its first standard-style World Cup in Melaka, Malaysia, in 2019 and its second across the English West Midlands in March 2025.

All three are below, kept apart rather than merged, because merging them is what produces the contradictory numbers.

Kabaddi World Cup winners list: IKF men

Three editions, three Indian titles, Iran beaten in every final.

Year	Host	Winner	Score	Runner-up
2004	Mumbai	India	55-27	Iran
2007	Panvel	India	29-19	Iran
2016	Ahmedabad	India	38-29	Iran

The inaugural tournament in Mumbai in 2004 set the template the IKF has used since: five teams split into two pools, round-robin games, top two from each group into the semi-finals. India won it by 28 points, which is still the widest margin in an IKF men’s final.

The 2016 edition ran from 7 to 22 October at The Arena in Ahmedabad and was the biggest of the three, with 12 nations entered. Ajay Thakur finished as the tournament’s leading raider on 64 points and PO Surjeet Singh as its best defender on 23. Pakistan had been expected to play and were left out, the IKF saying at the time that it was not the right moment to engage with them.

Women’s Kabaddi World Cup winners list: IKF

Two editions, 13 years apart, both won by India.

Year	Host	Winner	Score	Runner-up
2012	Patna	India	25-19	Iran
2025	Dhaka	India	35-28	Chinese Taipei

The Dhaka tournament ran from 17 to 24 November 2025 at the Shaheed Suhrawardy Indoor Stadium in Mirpur, with 11 teams entered, and it was the first IKF World Cup of either gender held outside India. India beat Iran 33-21 in the semi-final. Sanju Devi, from Chhattisgarh, took 16 raid points in the final and was named most valuable player of the tournament.

Put the two IKF tables together and a small oddity falls out. Iran have been runners-up in four of the five IKF finals ever played, and no country other than India has won one.

Circle-style Kabaddi World Cup winners list

This is where the only non-Indian title sits. The competition ran annually from 2010 to 2014, then lost its 2015 edition when Punjab cancelled the November tournament during the unrest that followed the Guru Granth Sahib desecration at Bargari in October that year. It returned in 2016 and has been staged once since.

The circle game is the one most Indian fans have actually played, on exactly this kind of ground, and it is why the two winners lists below look so different from the indoor ones above.

Year	Host	Winner	Score	Runner-up
2010	Ludhiana	India	58-24	Pakistan
2011	Ludhiana	India	59-25	Canada
2012	Ludhiana	India	59-22	Pakistan
2013	Ludhiana	India	48-39	Pakistan
2014	Sri Muktsar Sahib	India	45-42	Pakistan
2016	Jalalabad	India	62-20	England
2020	Lahore	Pakistan	43-41	India

The 2020 final is the single result that stops India owning the whole page, and its two-point margin is the tightest any circle-style men’s final has produced. Pakistan trailed 24-18 at the interval and turned it in the second half, in the only edition they have hosted.

The women’s competition, which began three years after the men’s, has no such blemish.

Year	Host	Winner	Score	Runner-up
2013	Ludhiana	India	49-21	New Zealand
2014	Sri Muktsar Sahib	India	36-27	New Zealand
2016	Jalalabad	India	45-10	United States

New Zealand and the United States as circle-style finalists is not the misprint it looks like. Circle kabaddi travelled with the Punjabi diaspora rather than with the sport’s governing bodies, so its international field has always leaned towards Canada, England, the United States and New Zealand in a way the IKF field never has.

World Kabaddi World Cup winners list

Two editions so far, four titles across them, and India have all four.

Men’s finals:

Year	Host	Winner	Score	Runner-up
2019	Melaka	India	57-27	Iraq
2025	England	India	44-41	England

Women’s finals:

Year	Host	Winner	Score	Runner-up
2019	Melaka	India	47-29	Chinese Taipei
2025	England	India	57-34	England

The March 2025 tournament was played across Wolverhampton, Coventry, Birmingham and Walsall from 17 to 23 March, with both finals at WV Active Aldersley in Wolverhampton. It was scaled back from a planned 16 men’s and eight women’s teams to nine and six after visa problems, and it was the first senior kabaddi World Cup of any description staged outside Asia.

These four results carry an asterisk that the other tables do not. The IKF said during the England tournament that it had not authorised the event, that its outcome would not be recognised by the Olympic Council of Asia, the Asian Kabaddi Federation or the Asian Games, and that no national federation competing in Asian Games kabaddi was taking part. On the IKF’s account the sides in England, India’s included, were not their countries’ nationally sanctioned teams. Read the table as a record of what happened on the mat rather than as a line in India’s official honours list.

The men’s final is still the most interesting scoreline in this article. England took India to 44-41, and before that no team from outside Asia had finished closer than nine points to India in a Kabaddi World Cup final in any style, that being New Zealand’s 36-27 defeat in the 2014 circle-style women’s final.

Who won the Kabaddi World Cup 2025?

Both answers are correct, which is exactly the problem. India won the World Kabaddi men’s and women’s titles in England in March 2025, and India won the IKF Women’s World Cup in Dhaka that November. Three trophies, one calendar year, one winner.

So if a source dates the 2025 champions to Wolverhampton, it is counting World Kabaddi. If it says Dhaka, it is counting the IKF. If it tells you the last Kabaddi World Cup was in 2016, it is counting only IKF men’s editions, which is defensible but leaves four tournaments out. A page that gives one date without naming the competition has not really answered the question.

Why the men’s IKF World Cup has not been played since 2016

A fourth men’s IKF World Cup was announced for January 2025, was to be held in India and broadcast by Star Sports, and was postponed indefinitely before a ball was raided. Nothing has replaced it on the calendar. A decade on from Ahmedabad, the men’s competition that the Asian Games pathway actually recognises has not been staged, while the two bodies outside that pathway have run four tournaments between them.

That gap is the real reason this winners list confuses people. The most authoritative men’s competition is the least frequently played one.

Where the next world title is decided

Not at a World Cup. Kabaddi returns at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, at the Tokai Citizens Gymnasium from 21 to 26 September 2026, with group games running to 24 September, the semi-finals on 25 September and both finals on 26 September. Ten men’s teams and eight women’s teams are entered. It is the sport’s ninth straight appearance at the Games since 1990, and India go in as defending champions in both draws after Hangzhou.

It is also the harder assignment of the two. Iran took both golds in Jakarta in 2018, beating India 27-18 in the men’s semi-final and 27-24 in the women’s final, and that remains the only Asian Games at which India lost either title. Our Asian Games kabaddi winners list has the full record.

For anyone coming to these tables cold, the team sizes and court dimensions differ between the two codes, which is worth knowing before setting a 62-20 circle scoreline against a 38-29 indoor one. The rules explainer covers the scoring, and the history of the sport traces how a village game ended up with three governing bodies.

Which country has won the most Kabaddi World Cups?

India, by a margin with no real parallel in a senior international team sport. Eighteen titles from 19 tournaments, across three competitions and two genders, with one defeat in Lahore in 2020. Pakistan are the only other nation to have won one.

The runners-up column tells the same story from the other side. Iran have lost four IKF finals, Pakistan four circle-style finals, England three finals across two different competitions, and New Zealand two.

The domestic league is the one place the pattern breaks, for the obvious reason that every team in it is Indian. Our list of Pro Kabaddi champions has that record season by season.

More kabaddi records and explainers

Featured photo: Pro Kabaddi