Reports now put the PKL 13 auction in late October, and the Asian Games are why
Mashal Sports has still not announced a date. The window being reported has moved from July to late October, which would push Season 13 into December.
Aug 6, 2026
There is still no date for the Pro Kabaddi League Season 13 auction, and the reporting around it keeps moving later. The latest, from Khel Now on Thursday, puts it somewhere between 18 and 25 October. That is a report sourced to people around the league rather than an announcement, and Mashal Sports has confirmed none of it.
Take it as the direction of travel rather than a fixture. Earlier in the year the same auction was being talked about for a July or August window. It has drifted twice since.
September and October are already full
The reason is not complicated. India’s kabaddi players have an international season in front of them before they have a league one.
The Asian Games kabaddi competition runs from 21 to 26 September at the Tokai Citizens Gymnasium in Aichi, Japan, with the group stage from the 21st to the 24th and both finals on the 25th and 26th. The Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship is also expected in October, according to the same report. Between them they account for much of the two-month stretch in which an auction would normally sit.
Franchises will not want to spend crores on players who are mid-tournament, and the federation will not want its squad distracted by one. Holding the auction after both events is the tidier answer, even if it costs the league time.
What a late auction does to the season
Season 12 is the useful comparison. That auction was held on 31 May 2025. The season started on 29 August and finished on 31 October, when Dabang Delhi beat Puneri Paltan in the final at the Thyagaraj Sports Complex in Delhi, with Fazel Atrachali named MVP.
Slide the auction to late October and the same sequence cannot happen. Squads need practice camps, and camps need squads. Khel Now’s projection has Season 13 starting around December, roughly three months later in the year than Season 12 began, off an auction held five months later than Season 12’s was.
For a league that has spent a decade building its slot in the Indian sporting calendar, that is not a small adjustment. It also collides with a December to February window that cricket rarely leaves quiet.
The players in the middle of it
The squeeze is worse for the men who are in both processes at once. The Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India started with 45 probables for its first national camp and has cut that to 29 for the second. From those 29, selectors pick 14 for Japan.
The names in camp are the same names franchises will be bidding for: Pawan Sehrawat, Naveen Kumar, Arjun Deshwal, Ashu Malik, Aslam Inamdar, Devank Dalal, Sunil Kumar, Nitesh Kumar. A raider who has a good Asian Games in September walks into an auction room three or four weeks later with his price freshly rewritten. One who gets injured in Aichi walks in with a different problem.
That is the part worth watching. A late auction delays the season, but it also changes the nature of the bidding. Season 12’s was done at the end of May, three months before a ball was thrown in anger. Season 13’s, if the October window holds, would happen with two tournaments’ worth of fresh evidence sitting on the table.
Nothing is real until Mashal says so
All twelve franchises are expected back, and the coaching carousel has already turned. None of that fixes the calendar. Until the league puts out a date, the October window is a well-sourced guess and nothing more, and anyone who has followed PKL scheduling knows how those have gone before.