The return of Ultimate Table Tennis (UTT), the league in India, after a pause of four years has been welcomed by the country's top players. 

All of them, along with a few foreign faces, turned up in Pune to play the franchise-based competition amid a packed calendar in an Asian Games year.

While UTT demands just a three-week window — this season began on July 13 and ended on Sunday — from them, India’s top paddlers are increasingly dedicating a lot more time to competing in leagues abroad besides their international and national assignments.

Earlier this year, cramped in between his World Table Tennis (WTT) tournaments in Europe and UTT in India, G Sathiyan signed off from his debut appearance in the French Pro A League, the top tier of French table tennis. 

Later this year, after the conclusion of a hectic phase for India's paddlers that features the Asian Championships and Asian Games, young Manav Thakkar is set to make his debut in the French league and park himself there for three months from October.

Thakkar, the former U-18 and U-21 world No.1, also has in his CV the German Bundesliga (its table tennis league is called Tischtennis Bundesliga), where he competed in the top division to join Sharath Kamal and Sathiyan as the Indians to do so. 

It's a route Sharath, the 41-year-old Commonwealth Games champion, took more than a decade ago as one of the rare Indian faces turning up regularly for the prestigious German league. It’s now a route a lot more Indian paddlers are charting out, despite the schedule challenges, as the preferred way to blend training with game time and development.

“The advantages of these foreign leagues are that they are longer in duration and more on the developmental side,” 

Sathiyan, who in 2019 broke into the top 25 in world rankings, said. “The benefits are many: you get exposure to their infrastructure, you get to play quality matches with top players, and you also get to spar with them. Which in turn helps you in international events too."