Hockey India League 2025-26
Vedanta Kalinga Lancers, champions of the Men's Hero Hockey India League, represent Odisha in India's premier field hockey competition. Odisha is arguably the country's biggest hotbed for young hockey talent, and representing it came with a unique responsibility: to engage a fanbase as passionate and deeply rooted as the state itself. The 2025-26 season delivered on every front – on the field and off it.
Brand Identity: Rooted in Odia culture
To help the Vedanta Kalinga Lancers connect with their fanbase on a deeper level, we wove the heart of Odia culture into our design language. Motifs drawn from the Konark Wheel, the Konark Sun Temple and Sambalpuri textile patterns became central to our visual identity, appearing across designs, videos and key branding touchpoints. The Lancers' jersey colours served as our primary palette across social media and brand materials, ensuring a consistent, unified look across every medium and platform.
Out-of-home: Built to turn heads
For the 2025-26 season, we developed a series of hand-drawn player illustrations that gave our designs a fresh, dynamic energy, used across both social media and large-format branding.
When it came to OOH, our guiding question was simple: how do we make this impossible to ignore? The illustrations delivered, drawing attention and admiration from everyone who caught a glimpse. For the team bus, the goal was to embed the team's spirit directly into the design. Player illustrations, team colours and our cultural motifs came together to make the bus a genuine extension of the team's identity.
Merchandise and collateral: Identity in every detail
When the canvas is a billboard, the goal is impact. Whether it's a scarf or a sticker, it's about quiet consistency. Both carry the same identity – just at different volumes. From laptop stickers and team scarves to matchday brochures and broadcast assets, every piece carried the Lancers' identity with purpose, helping the team connect with fans in ways that hadn't been done before.
Social media: Built to stand out
Our social media approach had one clear goal: to stand apart from the rest of the league. Every matchday poster was hand-drawn, featuring prominent local landmarks from each host city, giving the Lancers a distinct, recognisable presence on India's biggest hockey stage.
Across all graphic content, our cultural motifs remained a prominent part of the overall design, keeping the connection to Odisha front and centre, while building a visual identity that was unmistakably the Lancers' own. The season's biggest moment, the championship win, was captured in a graphic that brought everything together in one frame.
Video Content: From the pitch to the culture
Video content played a central role in keeping our audience engaged throughout the season. Our output was deliberately varied, spanning short-form content, match highlights, special animation-based videos, celebratory content and long-form pieces rooted in Odia culture, ensuring there was always something fresh to watch, share and talk about.
Impact: Numbers that speak for themselves
The Vedanta Kalinga Lancers were the fastest growing team on social media during the 2025-26 Hero Hockey India League season, adding over 17,000 followers across platforms and reaching over 24 million people in the process. On matchdays, the energy online mirrored the energy in the stands, with fans turning up in record numbers and rallying behind the team all the way to the championship.