Arjun Deshwal: PKL stats, records and why third all-time undersells him

Arjun Deshwal is an Indian raider who plays for Tamil Thalaivas in the Pro Kabaddi League and is one of four survivors from the side that won India kabaddi gold at the last Asian Games. He has scored 1,383 raid points in 132 matches, which puts him third on the league’s all-time raid points list behind Pardeep Narwal and Maninder Singh. He has also got there quicker than either of them, and quicker than anyone else in the top ten.

Arjun Deshwal’s PKL stats, season by season

Seven seasons, two clubs, and a jump in the middle of it that is hard to miss.

Season	Team	Matches	Raid points	Chart position
Season 6 (2018)	U Mumba	3	4	90th
Season 7 (2019)	U Mumba	19	104	17th
Season 8 (2021-22)	Jaipur Pink Panthers	22	267	2nd
Season 9 (2022)	Jaipur Pink Panthers	24	296	1st
Season 10 (2023-24)	Jaipur Pink Panthers	23	276	Joint 1st
Season 11 (2024)	Jaipur Pink Panthers	23	227	3rd
Season 12 (2025)	Tamil Thalaivas	18	209	4th
Career		132	1,383	3rd all-time

Those season figures are worth adding up rather than taking on trust. The matches come to 132 and the raid points to 1,383, which are exactly the career totals the league publishes, so the column is complete and nothing is missing from it.

Split it at the move to Jaipur and the two halves barely look like the same player. His two U Mumba seasons produced 108 raid points in 22 matches, a shade under five a game. Everything since has produced 1,275 in 110 matches, which is 11.59 a game. Most raiders improve. Very few more than double.

The rate is the record, not the total

Third all-time is the number every profile leads with, and it undersells him. Rank the ten highest raid scorers in league history by what they score per match and the order changes completely.

Player	Matches	Raid points	Per match
Arjun Deshwal	132	1,383	10.48
Naveen Kumar	111	1,120	10.09
Maninder Singh	165	1,568	9.50
Pardeep Narwal	190	1,801	9.48
Pawan Sehrawat	142	1,340	9.44
Ashu Malik	105	882	8.40
Bharat Hooda	108	829	7.68
Rahul Chaudhari	154	1,045	6.79
Sachin Tanwar	157	1,058	6.74
Deepak Hooda	157	1,020	6.50

Deshwal tops it on 10.48, with Naveen Kumar the only other man above ten. Narwal’s 1,801 came from 190 matches, 58 more than Deshwal has played. Maninder Singh needed 165. That gap is the whole argument: Deshwal is 418 points behind the record with three fewer seasons of mileage on him than the man who holds it.

He is also 43 points clear of Pawan Sehrawat, whom he passed into third during Season 12.

Two seasons on top of the raid chart, and no Best Raider award

Deshwal has finished a Pro Kabaddi season as its leading raid scorer twice. The Best Raider award went somewhere else both times.

In Season 9 he scored 296 raid points in 24 matches with 17 Super 10s, more than anyone else managed that year, and Jaipur Pink Panthers beat Puneri Paltan in the final for their second title. He was named Most Valuable Player. Best Raider went to Bengaluru Bulls’ Bharat, who finished on 279 from 23 matches and shared the season’s highest Super Raid count on 11.

Season 10 was closer still. He and Ashu Malik both finished on 276 raid points from 23 matches. Deshwal had 17 Super 10s to Malik’s 15. The award went to Malik.

Neither decision was wrong on its own terms, and the awards weigh raiding efficiency rather than a raw total. But it does leave the league’s third-highest scorer, and its fastest, without the one trophy that carries his job title.

From an army trial in Roorkee to ₹1.405 crore

Deshwal was born on 7 July 1999 in Basera, a village in the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, and is 27. He played cricket first and came to kabaddi through family pressure rather than choice.

“Since a young age I was fond of playing different sports but my family actually pushed me into kabaddi,” he told Lallantop Sports. “I didn’t like playing kabaddi initially and used to go to the ground nearby my house and play cricket there. My guru who belonged to my family then slowly started working on my kabaddi skills. He was the one who had faith in my abilities and backed me to do well.”

The route into the professional game came sideways. At 18 he travelled to Roorkee in Uttarakhand for an army trial, was signed up under the sports quota, and found out how the Pro Kabaddi auction worked from inside the army setup. “No one from my village had earlier featured in Pro Kabaddi,” he said. “I had earlier represented UP in Senior Nationals but the job offer by the army is where I actually came to know about the registration process for the Pro Kabaddi auction.”

U Mumba bought him for ₹8 lakh ahead of Season 6. An injury held him to three matches. He played 19 the following season for 104 points, enough to be noticed and not enough to be kept.

Then the Season 8 auction, where Jaipur Pink Panthers paid ₹96 lakh, roughly twelve times what he had cost two years earlier. “I was initially nervous since it was the first time I was entering an auction pool not knowing what to expect,” he said. “I was confident of the auction panning out well but never had I imagined to go for that much money.”

Four seasons at Jaipur returned 1,066 raid points from 92 matches, a title, an MVP award and the captaincy. He reached 1,000 career raid points in his 97th match, the second-fastest anyone has done it after Naveen Kumar’s 90.

Season 12 with Tamil Thalaivas

Tamil Thalaivas bought him for ₹1.405 crore at the Season 12 auction after Jaipur declined to match the bid, reuniting him with coach Sanjeev Baliyan. Sehrawat was named captain, then played three matches and was sent home for the rest of the season over what the club described as disciplinary reasons, which left Deshwal as the raiding unit on his own.

The season was a mixed one. Tamil Thalaivas did not win the title, which went to Dabang Delhi, and Deshwal’s 209 raid points from 18 matches were his lowest full-season return since the move to Jaipur. It also contained the best single game of his career: 26 points against Patna Pirates in Chennai on 7 October 2025, in a 56-37 win, the highest score by any raider in the season. That match brought up his 71st Super 10 and moved him third on the league’s all-time list for those too.

Arjun Deshwal at the Asian Games

Deshwal was in the India squad that beat Iran 33-29 in the Hangzhou final to win kabaddi gold at the last Asian Games, and he is in the twelve going to Japan to defend it. The Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India named the squad on 23 August, with Sunil Kumar as captain in place of Sehrawat.

Only four of the gold-winning team survived the cut: Deshwal, Sunil Kumar, Sehrawat and Aslam Inamdar. He raids alongside Ashu Malik, Ayan Lohchab and Devank Dalal, which on last season’s numbers is the strongest four-man raiding unit India could have picked. Kabaddi at the Games runs from 21 to 26 September.

Deshwal is the least fashionable name in that group and, on career rate, the best of them.

Arjun Deshwal: quick answers

How old is Arjun Deshwal? He was born on 7 July 1999 and is 27.

Which team does Arjun Deshwal play for? Tamil Thalaivas, who signed him for ₹1.405 crore at the Season 12 auction. He played the four seasons before that for Jaipur Pink Panthers, and his first two for U Mumba.

How many raid points does Arjun Deshwal have? 1,383 from 132 matches, third on the Pro Kabaddi all-time list behind Pardeep Narwal’s 1,801 and Maninder Singh’s 1,568.

Has Arjun Deshwal won Best Raider? No. He was Most Valuable Player in Season 9, when he led the raid chart on 296 points, but the Best Raider award has gone elsewhere in each of the two seasons he topped the scoring.

Is Arjun Deshwal in India’s Asian Games squad? Yes, as one of four raiders and one of four players retained from the squad that won gold in Hangzhou.

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