Mohammad Reza Shadloui: PKL records, the Gujarat Giants fall, and what comes next
Iran’s left corner has 391 tackle points, two PKL titles and the biggest single-match tackle haul the league has ever seen. He also spent last season being dropped and stripped of the captaincy.
Aug 8, 2026
Mohammad Reza Shadloui is the left corner who turned defending into a scoring position. In five Pro Kabaddi League seasons the Iranian has piled up 391 tackle points, won two titles with two different clubs, and set a single-match record that still looks like a typo. He is also, as of his most recent season, a player whose franchise dropped him and took the captaincy off him seven matches in. Both things are true, and any honest profile has to hold them together.
Who is Mohammad Reza Shadloui?
Shadloui was born on 14 May 2000 in Naghadeh, a town in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, which makes him 26. He plays left corner, the defensive position that takes the raider coming down that flank, although PKL lists him as an all-rounder because he raids as well. He won gold with Iran’s junior side at the inaugural Junior World Kabaddi Championship in 2019, where they beat Kenya 42-22 in the final, and he had already played senior international kabaddi at the 2018 Kabaddi Masters in Dubai before he ever appeared in the Indian league.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Born | 14 May 2000, Naghadeh, Iran |
| Position | Left corner defender, listed as all-rounder |
| Country | Iran |
| PKL debut | Season 8, 2021, Patna Pirates |
| Most recent PKL team | Gujarat Giants, Season 12 |
| PKL titles | 2 (Puneri Paltan, Season 10; Haryana Steelers, Season 11) |
| Career PKL record | 109 matches, 513 points, 391 tackle, 122 raid |
Why does he appear under three different names?
Search for him and three spellings come back, which is the main reason his numbers look inconsistent from one website to the next. His full name is Mohammadreza Shadloui Chiyaneh. PKL listed him as Mohammadreza Chiyaneh through his early seasons, moved to Mohammadreza Shadloui Chiyaneh later, and most Indian coverage now shortens it to Shadloui. English-language reference pages usually split the first name into Mohammad Reza. Some match reports have gone with Shadlou.
Our own archive shows the drift plainly, with the Season 8 records pages on this site carrying him as Chiyaneh and the later ones as Shadloui. If a record list looks like it is missing a season of his, check whether that season is filed under the other surname before deciding the number is wrong.
Shadloui’s PKL career, season by season
Five seasons, four franchises, and a line that climbs steadily before falling off a cliff.
| Season | Team | Matches | Tackle points | How it ended |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 (2021-22) | Patna Pirates | 24 | 89 | Lost the final, won Best Defender |
| 9 (2022) | Patna Pirates | 20 | 84 | Second in the league for tackle points |
| 10 (2023-24) | Puneri Paltan | 24 | 99 | Champions, Pune’s first title |
| 11 (2024-25) | Haryana Steelers | 24 | 82 | Champions, Haryana’s first title, MVP |
| 12 (2025) | Gujarat Giants | 17 | 37 | Lost Eliminator 2 to Bengaluru Bulls |
Those five seasons add to 109 matches and 391 tackle points, which is exactly what his career page carries alongside 122 raid points and 513 points in all. The seasons reconcile with the career line, which is worth checking on any kabaddi player page before you trust the totals on it.
The auction market tracked the same curve with a lag. Puneri Paltan paid 2.35 crore rupees for him ahead of Season 10, making him the most expensive overseas player the league had bought to that point. Haryana Steelers took him for 2.07 crore in the 2024 auction, the second-highest bid of that sale. Gujarat Giants went to 2.23 crore for Season 12. No other player has gone above two crore in three straight auctions.
What records does Shadloui hold?
The headline one comes from 19 November 2022, playing for Patna Pirates against Dabang Delhi. He scored 16 tackle points in a single match, beating a record of 11 that Manjeet Chhillar had set for Puneri Paltan in Season 4 and Neeraj Kumar had matched in Season 7. He still tops that list. The detail that makes it strange is that all 16 points came from Super Tackles.
A Super Tackle is awarded when the defending side is down to three players or fewer and still stops the raider, and it pays two points instead of one. Sixteen points from Super Tackles means eight of them in a single game, which is a record of its own, and it says something about how that night was going: he was scoring at double rate precisely because his team kept being reduced to a skeleton defence. He finished the match with 19 points once his three raid points were added. The full list sits in our page on the most tackle points in a single PKL match.
The second record is a rate rather than a total. He reached 300 tackle points in 76 matches, quicker than anyone in league history, during Season 11. He was blunt about what that meant, noting that his compatriot Fazel Atrachali had needed ten seasons to reach 500 while he had taken four to reach 300. In Season 12 he became only the second Iranian to play 100 PKL matches, behind the same Atrachali.
Season 10 was his best year as a pure defender. He led the league with 99 tackle points and added 27 raid points as Puneri Paltan won their first championship, beating Haryana Steelers 28-25 in the final, and he took Defender of the Season for the second time. He also finished one tackle point short of becoming the first overseas player to reach 100 in a single season, which is the kind of near-miss that follows a player around.
Season 11 was the more complete one. He moved to the club he had just beaten in a final, finished as the leading tackle-point scorer with 82, added 57 raid points for 139 in total, and became the first player since Manjeet Chhillar to post 50 or more of each in a season. Haryana Steelers won their maiden title by beating Patna Pirates 32-23, and he was named Most Valuable Player. His season-11 numbers, including four Super Tackles and five High 5s, sit alongside the rest of that year’s defence in our list of the top tackle-point scorers in PKL Season 11.
What happened to Shadloui in Season 12?
Gujarat Giants bought him as the centrepiece of their squad, named him captain and unveiled a new jersey alongside the announcement. Seven matches later they took both jobs away at once.
The numbers behind that call are stark for a player of his standing. Across those seven matches he had 9 tackle points, an average of a little over one a game against the 3.4 he had managed the previous season, and 6 raid points. Gujarat had won once and were bottom of the table. For the first time since his debut in Season 8 he was left out of the starting seven, with Rakesh taking the armband ahead of the Telugu Titans fixture in Jaipur.
He came back into the side and finished with 65 points from 17 matches: 37 tackle points, 28 raid points, two Super Tackles and two High 5s. Set those last two against the four and five he managed in Season 11. A High 5 requires five tackle points in one match, so two of them across a whole season tells you he was rarely the defender a game turned on. Gujarat still scraped into the playoffs and went out in Eliminator 2 to Bengaluru Bulls.
There is a reading of this that is not about decline. He was carrying a captaincy for the first time, at a rebuilding club whose raiding never fired, and a left corner with nothing happening in front of him gets exposed rather than fed. He made that argument himself after a defeat to Jaipur Pink Panthers, pointing at the inexperience around him. Whether it holds up is the question the next auction will answer.
Shadloui with Iran, and the Asian Games in September
His international record is the part of the CV that has not wobbled, even if the results have gone one way. He captained Iran at the 2023 Asian Kabaddi Championship in Busan, where India won 42-32 for their eighth title in nine editions and a late error of his own settled it. Months later he captained them again at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, where Iran took silver after losing a final to India 33-29 that was suspended for over an hour in a dispute over officiating.
The next chapter is six weeks away. Kabaddi at the 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya runs from 21 to 26 September at the Tōkai Citizens Gymnasium in Tōkai, with group matches from the 21st to the 24th, semi-finals on the 25th and both finals on the 26th. The draw was made in Nagoya on 23 July. Iran are in Group B alongside Nepal, Thailand, Pakistan and Malaysia. India are in Group A with Bangladesh, South Korea, Chinese Taipei and hosts Japan, so the two cannot meet before the semi-finals.
Shadloui is in the probable squad Iran have named out of their training camps, but the captaincy is not his this time. That job has gone to Fazel Atrachali, who will also carry Iran’s flag at the opening ceremony. For a player who spent last season being measured against Atrachali’s career totals, being led by him in Japan is its own kind of answer. Our look at India’s own Asian Games probables covers the side he would most likely meet in a final.
What comes next for Shadloui in PKL?
Nothing is settled. The Season 13 auction has not been held, and reporting suggests it may not happen until around the middle of October, pushed back by a calendar that now has the Asian Games and a Commonwealth championship stacked into the same autumn. The season itself is not expected to start before December. None of those dates are official, so treat them as expectations rather than fixtures.
The timing matters more for him than for most. A defender coming off 37 tackle points walks into an auction room with a question mark over him. A defender who has just won a medal with Iran in Japan walks in with an answer. Six days in September will move his price further than anything he did across four months last season.
New to the sport and want the basics behind the terms above? Start with our guide to how many players are on a kabaddi mat and how the court is laid out, or read the full Kabaddi World Cup winners list.