TransStadia Buy World Series Boxing Mumbai Team

TransStadia has committed its future to Indian Boxing by buying the franchise rights for the World Series Boxing (WSB) Mumbai team.

TransStadia are a sports management and infrastructure development company who have given $5 million for a period of ten years to secure the franchise.

Udit Sheth, CEO of TransStadia,  said “There are two angles to this. First is TransStadia is in the business of sports where we do sporting infrastructure, managing intellectual property rights, management and development and we have our own manufacturing and technology division. For TransStadia to go on a global platform it was very important for us to be affiliated to a property which has a global reach not just a national reach and WSB provided that opportunity to us.

The second perspective is, the WSB itself is promoted by Aiba and duly supported by the Indian Boxing Federation. Now boxing has always been developed on a very ad-hoc basis and for the first time they have put boxing on a team format in a global competition. So my objective was to be part of this new initiative because there are few properties which are global in nature, (though) there are many leagues. The only league which is global in nature is Formula One. WSB is a property which is not the same as motorsports but I would say boxing has always been very popular in India and worldwide.”

He also believes Indian boxers can showcase their talents. He added: “In India, it has not been packaged properly for the masses, we have a lot of boxers in North of India who are doing well (on a global level), this is an opportunity for India to showcase that capability and for us to show that we are ready to perform and compete at the international level. Being part of this initiative we are going to be part of a very elite group of 12 teams. Every year they will add two teams. This year we are in a very nice group, we are going to be fighting with Los Angeles, Milan, Korea, Moscow, Astana. So it’s a very international format.”