Premier Badminton League

Premier Badminton League

Most recent season or competition: 2020 Premier Badminton League
Formerly	Indian Badminton League
Sport	Badminton
First season	2016
Administrator	Badminton Association of India
Country	India
Venue(s)	Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore , Ahmedabad, New Delhi, Lucknow and Guwahati
Most recent champion(s)	Bengaluru Raptors (2nd title)
Most titles	Bengaluru Raptors (2 titles)
TV partner(s)	List of broadcasters
Sponsor(s)	Star Sports, Bridgestone
Tournament format	Round-robin and knock-out
Official website	pbl-india.com

Premier Badminton League (PBL) is a team badminton league operating in India. Sportz & Live Private Limited (Sportzlive) has the rights to operate and execute the Premier Badminton League.

The inaugural season of PBL was held from 2 to 17 January 2016.

won the last two editions in 2018-19 and 2020, becoming the only team to win the title twice.

Sponsorship

Period	Sponsor	Tournament
2016	Star Sports	Star Sports Premier Badminton League
2017–2019	Vodafone	Vodafone Premier Badminton League
2020–Present	Star Sports	Star Sports Premier Badminton League

Organisation

Tournament format

Teams play each other in round-robin format in league stage. Each team plays six ties in the league stage in which each tie consists of five matches. The matches played are two Men's singles, Women's singles, Men's doubles and Mixed doubles. Each of these matches are best of 3 games.^[1] Teams earn one point for each regular match win; in addition, each team must choose a Trump match, where a win is worth two points, and a loss subtracts one point.^[2] After league stage, the top four teams in the table will qualify for the knockout stage. The winners of semi-finals goes into the final, in which the winner will be crowned the PBL champions.

Player auctions

The player auctions are usually held at the end of each year for the subsequent season. Professional players from around the world enter the bidding where teams buy them.^[3] The league has helped players more than double their annual earnings from prize money in the year 2018. According to the prominent Danish player Victor Axelsen, this was a crucial part of their annual income.^[4] Each franchise has a purse of ₹2 crore (US$250,000) and the maximum a team can spend on a single player was ₹77 lakh (US$96,000) in the most recent 2020 auction.^[5]

Fifth Season

The fifth season auctions were held on 26 November 2019 in

2020 being the Olympic year, key players like Saina Nehwal, Kidambi Srikanth, Carolina Marín, Victor Axelsen and others have decided to skip the season.^[8][9]

Some of the players were traded between Mumbai, Chennai and Pune teams ahead of the season.^[10]

Franchises

Currently seven franchises compete in the league.^[11] There were nine franchises in the previous season(2018–19).^{[12][11][7][10]}

Hyderabad Hunters

Northeastern Warriors

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Locations of the seven PBL teams