SportVot and Sevens Football: how Kerala's grassroots game is going live

Kerala's favourite game goes live

Sevens Football, the seven-a-side game that fills grounds across Kerala every winter, now has a season-long live production partner. On 28 October 2026, sports-tech platform SportVot announced it will be the Official Live Production, Streaming and Distribution Partner of the Sevens Football Association (SFA) for the 2026 season.

Under the deal, SportVot will produce the top tournaments on the SFA calendar with multi-camera coverage and broadcast graphics. Every match will stream exclusively on the SportVot app.

For a sport that has packed local stands for decades but rarely reached a screen, that is a big change. Fans who cannot get to the ground will be able to watch live. Players and clubs get the visibility that only professional coverage brings.

"Some of the biggest sporting communities in the country exist outside mainstream television, and Kerala's Sevens Football is a perfect example." — Shubhangi Gupta, Co-founder and CMO, SportVot

The partnership was facilitated by Arnold Wilson, Director and Co-founder of Chapter One Sports.

The deal at a glance

The structure is simple. SportVot handles the whole broadcast chain: production on the ground, the stream and the distribution. The SFA brings the tournaments, the clubs and the crowds. The financial terms have not been disclosed.

What Sevens Football is

Sevens is Kerala's own version of the game. Teams play seven a side on small local grounds, often on dirt, with short halves and big crowds in temporary wooden stands. The season runs from November to May, because the monsoon makes the rest of the year unplayable (Olympics.com).

The scale is bigger than most people outside Kerala realise. ESPN has estimated that around 600 tournaments are held each year across the state, and about 50 of them are run by the SFA (Wikipedia). Malappuram is the heartland, and whole communities turn out after work to watch.

Sevens is also a working economy. Clubs sign semi-professional overseas players, mostly from West Africa, for big tournaments, paying them around $30 to $80 a match. When several traditional Kerala clubs shut down between about 2000 and 2014, Sevens helped keep local footballers earning. It has also produced India internationals, including IM Vijayan, Anas Edathodika, Ashique Kuruniyan and Sahal Abdul Samad.

Who SportVot is

SportVot is a Mumbai-based sports-tech company founded in 2019 by Sidhhant Agarwal, Shubhangi Gupta and Yash Bhagwatkar. It builds cloud-based, AI-assisted tools that let local leagues and events produce and stream matches without a traditional TV setup.

Investors have backed that model twice. SportVot raised ₹9.4 crore in February 2024 in a round led by Omidyar Network India, then ₹32.7 crore in April 2026 in a round led by IAN Alpha Fund, to expand internationally and strengthen its AI-driven production.

The company says it has produced and streamed more than 650,000 games across 28+ countries. It earns from production services for event organisers, subscriptions, pay-per-view and brand partnerships.

Football has become a growing focus. SportVot has a partnership with the Lxme IWL 2, the second tier of Indian women's football, and recently worked with the AIFF on India's women's friendlies against Russia. Sevens adds one of the country's most passionate grassroots football audiences to that list.

The second scoreboard: grassroots sport is a media business now

On the field, this is about Kerala's football culture. Off it, it is a bet that grassroots sport can be a media product.

• An untapped audience. Sevens has huge local crowds and a loyal diaspora, especially Malayalis in the Gulf. Until now, most of them could only follow it in person. A live stream turns that following into viewers that can be counted and sold to sponsors.

• Exclusive content. Every match is only on the SportVot app. That gives the platform a reason for fans to download it, and a library of matches no one else has.

• Cheaper production. Traditional TV crews do not make sense for a seven-a-side tournament in Malappuram. Lean, cloud-based production is what makes the maths work at this level.

• Visibility for players and clubs. Live footage gives players a showreel and clubs something to show sponsors. For a sport that already feeds talent into Indian football, that could matter as much as the money.

There is a wider shift behind this too. Clubs and leagues at every level are learning that they are content businesses as well as sports teams, a theme we explored in your club plays once a week, but it publishes every day.

What we don't know yet: the value of the deal, how many viewers the streams will draw, and whether fans will pay to watch. Those numbers will decide whether this becomes a template for other regional sports.

The takeaway

Sevens Football never needed television to be popular. What it lacked was a way to take that popularity beyond the ground. SportVot is betting that a stream can do it, and that grassroots sport can earn like a media property.

At The Sports Columnist, we cover the money, deals and decisions behind sport. Every game has a second scoreboard, and for Kerala's Sevens, it is finally switching on.

Partnership details are from SportVot's announcement of 28 October 2026. Funding figures are from Entrepreneur India, and Sevens figures from Olympics.com and Wikipedia.

Would you watch Sevens Football live on your phone, and which regional sport should go live next?