Olympians Manika Batra, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Manav Thakkar and Harmeet Desai will headline a 10-member Indian team at the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) World Team Table Tennis Championships starting on Tuesday in London.
The championships will feature separate men’s and women’s competitions, known as the Swaythling Cup and the Corbillon Cup respectively. Each tie consists of up to five singles matches, with the first team to win three matches progressing to the next round, according to Olympics.com.
A total of 64 teams are competing in both the men’s and women’s events, divided into four groups of 16. The top two seeded groups, which include the top seven teams plus host nation England, begin in Stage 1a, while the remaining teams compete in Stage 1b.
All eight teams from Stage 1a advance to Stage 2, which is a knockout stage. However, these teams also play group games to determine seedings for the next round. From Stage 1b, 14 group winners and six of the best second-placed teams qualify for Stage 2, while the remaining eight second-placed teams must compete in an additional preliminary round to produce four more qualifiers.
The knockout rounds start from the round of 32 and continue until the final. The Indian men’s team, led by world number 38 Manav Thakkar, is placed in Group 7 of Stage 1b alongside Slovakia, Tunisia and Guatemala. The women’s team, led by world number 49 Manika Batra, will face Ukraine, Uganda and Rwanda in Group 6 of Stage 1b.
The World Team Table Tennis Championships were first held as a standalone competition in 2000. China has dominated the event ever since, winning all titles except for the men’s victory by Sweden in 2000 and the women’s title claimed by Singapore in 2010. The 2026 championships will conclude on May 10.
India squad at World Table Tennis Championships 2026:
Men’s team: Manav Thakkar, Manush Shah, G Sathiyan, Harmeet Desai, Payas Jain
Women’s team: Manika Batra, Yashaswini Ghorpade, Diya Chitale, Sutirtha Mukherjee, Syndrela Das
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