National Chess Federations Are About to Become a Real Business

Here's something nobody in sports business is paying attention to: national chess federations are about to become genuinely valuable. Not "nice for the community" valuable. Valuable valuable. The kind where people eventually sue each other.

Think about what the All India Chess Federation actually owns. The exclusive right to put "India" on a chess jersey. A database of every serious player in a country of 1.4 billion. The power to decide who's a National Master and who's just some guy with a wooden board. After Gukesh became World Champion at eighteen, a billion people watched. The federation's phone started ringing with sponsors who'd never heard the word "FIDE" before. That's not a nonprofit. That's a sports media company that hasn't filed the paperwork yet.

The German Chess Federation has more registered members than most streaming services had at launch. US Chess sits on a player database that would make a SaaS startup weep with envy. These organizations have been treated like the PTA for sixty years. They're actually sitting on platforms.

I've run World Chess for over a decade, and the lesson is simple: respect doesn't monetize. Desire does. Chess was the world's most admired game and one of its worst businesses. Everyone nodded approvingly. Nobody wrote a check. The federations have the same problem—and the same opportunity.

Football associations figured this out decades ago. The English FA generates half a billion pounds a year. They don't own stadiums. They own the right to say who's English football and who isn't. Chess federations own the same thing, minus the overhead. No grass to cut. No physios. Just titles, certifications, and a brand that's been accumulating prestige for centuries.

The people running these organizations mostly don't know what they have. They think they're governing. They're actually landlords who forgot to collect rent.

That's changing. Fast.