Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

On October 14, 2022, we at The Signal published the first edition of The Playbook, a weekly newsletter that promised to go deep into the business of sports and gaming from India and around the world. That first edition was about how Disney Star was building a moat to quell the charge of its new rival, Viacom18.

What a year it has been, eh? Recent reports suggest Disney has considered selling its India assets to Viacom18, among other parties. It just shows how unpredictable and exciting the world of sports business is. As I sit down to write this edition that will be published on the eve of The Playbook’s one-year anniversary, I want to start by thanking all of you for sticking with me through this ride. I couldn’t have done it without your constant support, engagement, and occasional brickbat!

As we enter year two of The Playbook, I’d love to go a little deeper into what you think about this newsletter. Which is why I’ve created a short reader survey. I’d really appreciate it if you could take out 15 minutes to participate in this survey, which will help me understand what I’m doing right, what I’m doing wrong, and what I can do better.

A big thanks also to all of you who participated in last week’s poll. More than 60% of you think that playing games of skill with stakes amounts to gambling. Here are some of the comments I received (edited for clarity):

Kautilya: “All so-called real-money games are indeed gambling since they involve the three core essentials of gambling: consideration, prize, and chance. You put some money in (consideration), there’s a payout (prize), and there’s the element of chance in the outcome. Yes, some level of skill is indeed involved, but it doesn’t take away these three fundamental elements.”

Rohan: “At the outset, it might not look like gambling, but it is addictive. And if not stopped at the right time, a person might lose all his hard-earned money.”

Keshav: “Any game that includes money (which is bet on the outcome) is gambling. Similar to what happens in cricket betting.”

***

Right, let’s get into today’s edition, which is about social media management of athletes.

A double-edged sword

Photo credit: Virender Sehwag and Venkatesh Prasad on X

In early September, former India cricketers Virender Sehwag and Venkatesh Prasad kicked up a bit of a storm on X (formerly Twitter).

Sehwag urged the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to get the Indian cricket team to be called Bharat instead of India. This was around the time a political controversy had erupted in the country over the use of Bharat and India. But Sehwag claimed his reasons weren’t political.

Twitter tweet

Prasad was on a different sort of trip. He started tweeting about the ICC World Cup tickets fiasco (which I’ve written about here). He also attacked the organisers of the Asia Cup for allotting a reserve day only for the India-Pakistan match, calling it “absolute shamelessness”.

Then, on September 9, Prasad posted this.

The post was deleted within hours, but not before people began speculating whether he was referring to Jay Shah, who heads both the BCCI and the Asian Cricket Council. Then, the following day, Prasad posted an edited version of his tweet.

Twitter tweet

The polarised nature of social media ensured that Sehwag and Prasad got praise and flak for their posts. Among the brickbats, though, was the fact that they did not sound like themselves in some of the posts and replies. Prasad even went on to attack Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, who had posted screenshots of his deleted tweets and some of the replies speculating whether he was talking about Shah. Prasad called him a “serial hate-monger”, “agenda peddler”, and even seemed to equate him with a terrorist.

It wasn’t long before X users pointed out that both former cricketers had the same social media manager. Some users, including Zubair, even dug out old tweets of the manager that were of a particular political leaning.

It was all rather ugly. And completely avoidable. Prasad’s case was especially bizarre because he did something rather off-script for any Indian cricketer, current or former. He criticised the all-powerful BCCI, headed by the son of India’s home minister. Indian sportspersons, especially cricketers, don’t usually go anti-establishment.

In 2021, when India received global criticism over the farmer protests, several Indian cricketers tweeted saying it was an internal matter and called for unity in the country, with a government-sanctioned hashtag. These included the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, and Rohit Sharma.

None of those cricketers tweeted anything earlier this year when India’s top wrestlers were manhandled and detained by the police during a protest in Delhi. Only a few Indian sportspersons, including Neeraj Chopra, Sunil Chhetri, Abhinav Bindra, and CK Vineeth, spoke up against the detention.

But just when you thought Prasad was becoming the hero Indian cricket needs, he did a U-turn. And the more he tweeted and attacked his detractors, the more doubtful it became that it was indeed he who was tweeting.

If the Sehwag and Prasad episodes prove anything, it’s that you can’t get away with something that’s not “on brand” on social media. That’s why social media managers spend a lot of time with their athletes to understand them better. “If it’s not authentic to the personality of the athlete, it comes through,” says Sharba Tasneem, Head, Talent & Programmes at sports marketing agency Meraki Sport and Entertainment.

That’s one of the reasons Sehwag and Prasad got called out. Once their followers realised it probably wasn’t them tweeting, they would have felt let down. “That’s why trust matters a lot, especially if you’re someone who did not grow up in the world of social media,” says a senior executive at a sports management agency who requested anonymity to protect business relations. “I’m sure Sehwag and Prasad would have known what’s being posted on their accounts, but I don’t think they would have been informed well enough of the consequences.”

With current, active athletes, sports management agencies work closely with them to chalk out a social media strategy. This includes making a content calendar and listing things that the athletes can or should talk about to showcase their personalities, says Divyanshu Singh, chief operating officer at sports management company JSW Sports. “We also try to define their personality: what do I want X athlete to stand up for, what’s the message I want their followers to get, what side of them do I want to show beyond their sport. That’s where strategic thinking comes in.”

To some athletes, like 23-year-old cricketer Jemimah Rodrigues, social media comes naturally to them. “Jemimah does stuff that even inspires me and my social media team,” says Singh. “From jamming with musicians to creating cool Reels, she is very forthcoming, not shy at all, and does so much on her own.”

Instagram post

But Rodrigues is an exception rather than the norm. One of the main challenges for talent management companies is convincing their athletes to post more, with social media being a crucial tool for brand building and monetisation. While cricketers get more exposure in India and are more media savvy, that’s not the case with athletes from other sports.

“Fundamentally, athletes are shy and reserved in nature,” says Singh. “So, we spend a lot of time with them in media training. Their competition is coming from social media influencers in the genres of music, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle, who have more followers than these athletes. So, it’s very important for them to grow their brand and showcase their personal side.”

Once the content strategy is set, the next step is execution. Athletes’ involvement and interest in their social media activity varies on a case-by-case basis. In general, the degree of involvement is directly proportional to the number of followers the athlete has. Someone like Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma would like to see everything run by them unless it’s a sponsor commitment, says the senior executive quoted earlier. The more followers you have, the more paranoid you’ll be about what’s going out on your handle. The younger athletes are more likely to trust their agency to do the right thing.

“Sometimes, athletes will send us a picture or video and ask us to post it,” says Meraki’s Tasneem. “We also advise athletes that they should post about a certain topic. And it’s important the athlete is aware of what’s going out from their handles. Tomorrow, if it becomes news, it shouldn’t catch them off guard.”

One of the pitfalls of outsourcing social media to an agency is what happened with former India cricketer Sourav Ganguly last year. While sharing a promotional tweet, the agency handling Ganguly’s social media pasted the entire message from the client, e-commerce platform Meesho, including the instructions: “Please ensure that the Meesho brand name or Meesho hashtag is nowhere mentioned in tomorrow’s 1st September post.” Meesho tried its best to salvage the blunder.

Twitter tweet

This was, of course, an honest mistake and hardly the first such occurrence worldwide. To avoid such gaffes, agencies try to restrict the number of athletes handled by a social media manager to two and also have a separate device for each athlete.

Usually, if an athlete has signed up with a sports/talent management company, it also handles their social media. If there are two different agencies, it increases the chances of the athlete’s social media page looking like a sellout. It’s important for the agency to figure out the right balance between genuine and paid posts. “If your page only has branded content, your engagement is going to start dropping,” says Singh.

Paid posts or collaborations can either be a part of a long-term endorsement contract or standalone influencer marketing campaigns. With top athletes like Kohli, Sharma, and Chopra, agencies try and avoid doing standalone posts because they could end up blocking big-ticket endorsement deals. “With Neeraj, we’ve positioned him as an athlete of a particular stature, and he’s only doing long-term endorsement deals,” says Singh.

However, he also points out that with the advent of influencer marketing, there is now a lot more logic and science in how athlete valuations are done.

Of course, the downside to connecting your brand endorsements to your social media accounts is that you need to be a lot more cautious when it comes to taking stands on sensitive or political issues. You might also be forced to put out something you don’t want to. Like during the farmer protests.

“A lot of athletes reluctantly pushed out tweets because they were asked to,” says the senior executive quoted earlier. “It was evident in some of the language of the tweets. But they don’t have much choice when it comes to such things.”

Unless you’re MS Dhoni.

The legendary and enigmatic former India captain, who has 46 million followers on Instagram, does not do any paid posts. His Insta feed only has personal posts about his day-to-day life. And he’s not even a regular poster. “Dhoni can get away with it because that’s how he has built his persona online. No one can get in touch with him. His social media is pretty much controlled by him only. Even if he has a social media manager, they’re probably quite jobless,” adds the senior executive, laughing.

Instagram post

Curiously, though, Dhoni’s Facebook page, where he has 27 million followers, is full of paid posts and no personal ones. But even there, he has managed to avoid posting about the farmer protests or any other political matter.

But if your client isn’t Dhoni, what’s the best way for an agency to deal with political controversies? Tasneem says her team tries to gauge whether the athlete posting about something would benefit society at large. “If it’s something that affects the athlete at a personal level and they are comfortable talking about it, then they get involved. If they aren’t comfortable, they don’t. You shouldn’t jump on the bandwagon because everyone else is doing it. It needs to make sense why you are talking about it.”

JSW Sports’ Singh concurs, saying the only advice they give their athletes is to be themselves. “Sometimes, because of the political fabric, we also get stuck as to what is diplomatically the right thing to do. But we always encourage our athletes to be authentic.”

For instance, during the wrestlers’ protest earlier this year, Chopra wanted to speak out in support of his fellow athletes. “He was very smart about it: he just said athletes should never go through something like this. He did not try to instigate and say what is wrong and what is right. He’s very articulate,” says Singh.

Twitter tweet

In 2021, Chopra even stood up for his Pakistani counterpart Arshad Nadeem after a controversy erupted over the latter using the Indian’s javelin at an event. Chopra posted a video and message requesting people to “not use me and my comments as a medium to further your vested interests and propaganda.”

That same year, Kohli surprised many by making a strong statement in support of his teammate Mohammed Shami. The Muslim cricketer had received a lot of abuse on social media after Pakistan beat India by 10 wickets in the T20 World Cup. “To me, attacking someone over their religion is the most pathetic thing that a human being can do,” Kohli said.

In both cases, it’s unlikely the athletes would have said what they did because someone told them to do it, says the senior executive quoted earlier. “The default for most social media agencies is to stay away from controversies. Don’t do anything that might elicit negative responses from a section of the population because it would also have implications on brand endorsements. So, whenever anyone takes a stand like this, I’d like to believe it’s the athletes doing it themselves. They know they’re going to get trolled, but they’re okay with it.”

Unfortunately, these are rare instances in India. While globally, athletes are ambassadors of a lot of causes in the larger socio-economic fabric, you hardly get to see that in India. (Unless, of course, it’s a global movement like Black Lives Matter that does not directly affect Indians.) “Athletes should be able to say what they want. Unfortunately, we are living in an environment where that’s not always possible,” says the senior executive.

But in the rare instance where an agency has to deal with an athlete who is politically invested and wants to express their opinion, it’s important for both parties to align with what they stand for and how they want to be perceived, says Siddharth Raman, deputy CEO at sports-focused digital media agency Sportz Interactive.

Meanwhile, Sehwag continues to refer to India as Bharat. Interestingly, he had no issues saying India until June this year. The mentions of India on his X timeline dried up starting July, which was when 26 political parties came together to form a new alliance called the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, with the backronym INDIA.

But, as Sehwag insists, his reasons weren’t political.

⚡️Quick Singles

⚽️🏆🌏 Saudi Arabia could have competition in its bid to host the 2034 Fifa World Cup. Reports suggest Australia and Indonesia have held talks to launch a joint bid, which could include Malaysia and Singapore too. Fifa, though, seems set on Saudi Arabia. The governing body even tweaked its rules around the number of established stadiums that a country should have to bid for a World Cup to accommodate Saudi Arabia.

🏅🏟️🇮🇳 Even as cricket is set to be included in the 2028 Olympics, International Olympic Committee chief Thomas Bach said he has noted India’s “great interest” in hosting the Games in the future. The corruption allegations around the 2010 Commonwealth Games in India would have no bearing on the decision, he added. There have been reports that India might bid to host the 2036 Olympics.

🐭🇮🇳💰 American private investment firm Blackstone is the latest party that has been linked with buying The Walt Disney Company’s India assets. Blackstone is exploring either buying a combination of assets, including sports properties and the Disney+ Hotstar streaming service, or the whole Disney India portfolio, reported The Economic Times. Other companies that reportedly held talks with Disney include Reliance Industries, Adani Group, and Sun TV.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

The ICC Men’s World Cup is here! Are you excited? Who’s your money on? Metaphorical money, of course, because this newsletter does not promote betting and gambling. 🙃

I’m excited enough that I caved and went back on my pledge to not even bother buying a ticket after the farce we’ve seen over the last couple of months. ICYMI, I wrote about the ticketing chaos here. I didn’t, of course, manage to get a ticket for an India match, so I got the next best thing: I’m going to see Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi, and Rashid Khan live in Chennai! Pakistan versus Afghanistan. Should be a cracker! It was too good an opportunity to miss. After all, considering the unpredictable nature of the politics involved, who knows if Babar and Co. will ever get to play in India again.

Speaking of the World Cup, I saw a post on X yesterday that made me chuckle. Here it is:

Twitter tweet

It’s a full-page ad in Dainik Bhaskar, one of the largest Hindi newspapers in India, with a readership of 66 million, according to its website. 11exch, as you might have guessed, is an online betting and gambling platform. The irony of a platform openly advertising services that are illegal in most parts of India in a leading daily, even as the so-far legal real-money gaming platforms are involved in a standoff with the government over taxation, is just too tasty.

Unpacking the online gaming GST saga

Photo credit: Michał Parzuchowski/Unsplash

If you’ve been following the news over the last couple of weeks, you can’t have missed stories about India’s real-money gaming (RMG) industry. The media has been carrying stories almost on a daily basis about how the industry is basically… pardon my French… screwed.

India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) authorities have sent notices to several online RMG companies over tax dues worth thousands of crores. The Economic Times said the total tax claim from the entire industry is ~₹55,000 crore ($6.6 billion), while Mint reported that it could touch ₹1.5 lakh crore ($18 billion) in the coming weeks. Business Standard reported that ~80 companies are likely to receive such notices.

India’s largest fantasy sports platform Dream11 has received “possibly the largest indirect tax notice served in the country”, worth ₹25,000 crore ($3 billion). Dream11 has already moved the Bombay High Court against the notice. Games 24x7, which operates RummyCircle and My11Circle, has been asked to cough up ₹20,000 crore ($2.4 billion). Head Digital Works, which runs A23 Rummy and A23 Games, has been asked to pay ₹5,000 crore ($600 million).

Various reports quoting anonymous industry executives have said that the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) is filing “retrospective” tax claims based on the Indian government’s new GST rules that came into effect on October 1. ICYMI, I had written an explainer on the new rules.

Essentially, real-money gaming companies have to pay 28% GST each time a user deposits money into their wallets. The companies were earlier paying 18% GST on the platform fee or commission they charge to organise each contest. To clear up the confusion, the government in August amended the Central Goods and Services Tax (CGST) Act, 2017, to state that all RMG companies, whether they’re offering games of skill or chance, have to pay 28% GST on the deposit value from October 1. The government also said that this had always been the case, and the new amendment is only clarifying it.

Twitter tweet

And then, as the RMG industry prepared to incorporate the new tax regime, the government late last month began hitting companies with GST-evasion notices. The industry has since gone on a media overdrive, with various anonymous sources telling publications how the “retrospective” tax amount being sought by the government was “insurmountable” and could potentially lead to companies going bankrupt.

Last week, at a roundtable discussion on the changing policy landscape in the online gaming industry organised by independent media platform Policy Circle, Games24x7’s chief legal officer Sameer Chugh said that the taxation issues are endangering investment worth $2.5 billion, along with 10,000 direct and 100,000+ indirect jobs. He also said that the total tax claim sought by the recent notices—₹2 lakh crore ($24 billion) by his calculation—is 10x the industry’s overall revenue in the last seven to eight years.

Another point made at the roundtable, whose guests were largely lawyers, policymakers, and other executives associated with the gaming industry, was: how can an amendment be a clarification?

Whether it was the roundtable or all the media reports that I’ve read over the last two weeks on this topic, we’ve only heard one side of the story. So far, no one from the government’s side has put forward its arguments since the tax notices were sent. That could change on October 7, when the GST Council holds its next meeting. It’s usually followed by a press conference.

However, this matter is unlikely to get any real closure until the Supreme Court announces its verdict in the ₹21,000 crore GST evasion case against Gameskraft, whose most popular offering is a game called RummyCulture. The next hearing of the case is on October 10, and industry executives claim the final verdict could determine the fate of all RMG companies hit with similar GST evasion notices.

The case

In September 2022, the DGGI issued a tax-evasion notice to Gameskraft and asked it to deposit ₹21,000 crore, the biggest claim in the history of indirect taxation in India at the time. The DGGI alleged that Gameskraft is involved in betting/gambling activities, which are “actionable claims” under the CGST Act and, thereby, liable for 28% GST. Gameskraft, like all its skill-based RMG peers, had been paying 18% GST on its platform fee.

An actionable claim is essentially a claim to an unsecured debt. According to the CGST Act, transactions that are actionable claims are not taxable, except for lottery, betting, and gambling activities. With the latest amendment to the CGST Act, the government has added horse racing and online gaming (with no distinction between games of skill and chance) to the list of taxable actionable claims. But for the purposes of the Gameskraft case, online gaming wasn’t part of the original list.

Gameskraft’s arguments

Gameskraft approached the Karnataka High Court challenging the notice. It argued that rummy, whether played offline or online, has been classified as a game of skill by various courts, including the Supreme Court. It said that it was not supplying an actionable claim since it “does not have any right or claim over the prize pool and merely holds it in a fiduciary capacity”. The prize pool is disbursed to the winning players once the game is over after deducting the platform fee.

Gameskraft also said that the DGGI had taken the entire ‘buy-in’ amount of over ₹70,000 crore as its revenue, which was “entirely misleading and a malicious attempt… to mischievously and maliciously inflate the figure”.

DGGI’s arguments

The GST body, however, argued that a platform fee or service fee “must be charged purely for meeting expenses and must apply uniformly across the board to all players”. But the platform fee that Gameskraft was collecting varied from table to table depending on the total stake amount.

The DGGI’s main argument, though, was that Gameskraft’s rummy game isn’t a game of skill because it allows players “to place stakes and bet on the outcome” of the games. And this outcome is unknown until the game is over.

The GST body argued that players on Gameskraft’s platform carry out two transactions: the first transaction is the game of rummy, which the DGGI agrees is a game of skill. But there’s a second transaction where players place stakes on the unknown outcome of games of rummy. The second transaction unequivocally qualifies as an act of betting and gambling, the DGGI argued.

It also said:

The DGGI added that even if you assume RummyCulture is a game of skill, playing it with stakes and making profits from such stakes would still be betting. “A game of skill played for stakes would still amount to betting,” it argued. It referred to several previous court cases involving rummy, video games, horse racing, and lotteries to back its arguments.

Karnataka HC’s analysis

The High Court did not buy DGGI’s argument that someone playing a game of skill for stakes is forecasting the outcome of the game and is, therefore, gambling.

It further noted:

• Rummy, whether played with stakes or not, isn’t gambling. And there’s no difference between offline and online rummy—both are “substantially and preponderantly games of skill and not of chance”.

• Other online games that are also substantially and preponderantly games of skill are also not gambling.

• The section in the CGST Act that takes actionable claims outside the purview of the supply of goods or services would clearly apply to games of skill. So, essentially, Gameskraft’s rummy game is not an actionable claim and, therefore, can’t be taxed at 28%. Only games of chance such as lottery, betting, and gambling would be taxable.

This particular paragraph in the court’s concluding statements was quite scathing:

The Karnataka High Court quashed the DGGI’s show-cause notice to Gameskraft, calling it “illegal, arbitrary and without jurisdiction or authority of law”.

But it’s not over yet.

All eyes on the Supreme Court

The DGGI approached the Supreme Court, which on September 6 stayed the Karnataka High Court’s judgement. The GST body has particularly questioned the paragraph quoted above about cherry-picking stray sentences from other judgements to build a non-existent case out of nothing. It also drew the Supreme Court’s attention to its own decision in a recent case: Skill Lotto Solutions vs Union of India.

Skill Lotto Solutions, an online lottery platform, challenged the constitutional validity of two notifications issued by the states of Kerala and West Bengal that banned online lotteries. The company argued that online lotteries are different from traditional lotteries in that they’re based on skill, rather than chance.

The respondent, the Union of India, argued that online lotteries were a form of gambling that could have harmful effects on society. It also said that the government had the power to regulate such activities.

The Supreme Court sided with the government, ruling that online lotteries are a form of gambling and can’t be protected under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to practice any occupation, trade or business. The ruling upheld the power of the government to regulate online gambling in the interest of the public.

But for this ruling to apply in Gameskraft’s case, the government will have to prove that online rummy played for stakes is gambling and a taxable actionable claim. It’ll have to prove that there is indeed a “second transaction” in Gameskraft’s rummy game that involves placing stakes on unknown outcomes, amounting to gambling.

It’s a fascinating debate. I had a long think about it and remembered the early days of social media when I used to play an online poker game on Facebook. The game provided new users with complimentary chips to begin with. I remember being quite addicted to it. But while the game offered users the option to buy more chips using real money so that you can keep playing if you lost all your complimentary chips or enter contests with higher stakes, I never did it. Because, even though poker is a game of skill, I did not want to ‘gamble’ my hard-earned money on it. This is the same reason why I never play paid fantasy sports games, which are also games of skill.

But if you are a good poker or rummy player and are confident enough in your skills to stake some money on it, does it amount to betting/gambling? Especially when it’s played online, where you don’t really know who you are up against. That’s what the Supreme Court has to decide.

The next important question is: whichever way the Supreme Court rules, what impact will it have on the RMG industry? Will a ruling on Gameskraft’s rummy game decide the fate of all RMG companies with respect to their tax dues and legality?

Technically, it shouldn’t. Each platform and its various games need to be examined independently to determine whether there is a preponderance of skill or not. Most RMG companies offer multiple games. Mobile Premier League, for instance, offers fantasy sports (cricket, football, and basketball), card games (rummy, poker, and a skill-based version of teen patti), and casual games (snakes and ladders, ludo, carrom). If the Supreme Court decides that RummyCulture is gambling, it doesn’t mean all real-money games are gambling. And vice versa.

This is especially true in the case of fantasy sports because companies often experiment with various formats. I’ve seen games where players have to make virtual cricket teams comprising just three to five players instead of the standard 11. Each game also has its own points-scoring system, which impacts the result. Indian courts have only ruled that Dream11’s format of cricket fantasy is a game of skill. It doesn’t, or it shouldn’t, mean that all fantasy sports games have a preponderance of skill.

Whichever way the Supreme Court rules, expect many more court cases in the near future as India’s legal and taxation landscape for online gaming evolves.

⚡️Quick Singles

⚽️🏆🌍 The 2030 Fifa World Cup will be played across three continents. Yep, you read that right. Fifa has awarded hosting rights to Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay. The three South American nations will host the opening three games to mark the centenary of the Fifa World Cup, whose first edition was held in Uruguay in 1930. Then, the tournament will move to Europe and Africa (Climate change? What climate change?). The World Cup has never been played in more than one continent before. By covering three continents in one edition, Fifa, which follows a rotational policy, has paved the way for Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 edition. Sportswashing ftw.

⚽️🎮 Speaking of Fifa, it turns out Electronic Arts can do just fine without the brand name. The American gaming publisher’s decision to cut ties with Fifa after 30 years and rebrand one of the world’s most popular video game series seems to have paid off. The company said that 6.8 million people had paid for pre-release access to EA Sports FC 24, a 25% jump compared to last year’s Fifa 23. Apart from the name, nothing much has changed since EA has separate licensing deals to ensure the game will have 700 teams and 19,000 players across more than 30 leagues. Fifa was supposed to launch its own game, but no details have been released yet.

🏏🏆📺 Disney Star is likely to earn ₹2,000 crore ($240 million) in advertising revenue from the ICC World Cup, with an even split between television and streaming. A 10-second advertising slot during matches is going for ₹30 lakh ($36,000), a 40% jump compared with the 2019 edition, according to Bloomberg. Disney has signed up at least 21 marquee advertisers, including PhonePe and Mahindra & Mahindra, who are paying as much as ₹150 crore ($18 million) each, per Business Standard. Coca-Cola, Google Pay, and Hindustan Unilever are expected to be the other heavy spenders, along with the ICC’s official partners like Saudi Aramco, Emirates, and Nissan. Note the absence of edtech and online gaming companies, except ICC partner Dream11.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Thanks to everyone who voted in last week’s poll. More than 60% of you did not try buying ICC World Cup tickets at all. I wish I had been as smart. Could have saved myself a lot of time and frustration. Here’s a selection of some reader comments:

Ronnie: “With all the associated problems you mentioned at stadiums (you forgot an important one — stinking, overflowing loos), why would one want to watch [a match] at the stadium beats me.”

Ankya316: “Watching cricket on TV trumps watching it in the stadium. I wouldn’t go even if I was given a free ticket.”

Ankur: “TV and mobile viewing have better viewing experience and are much cheaper.”

Srikant: “I wish the BCCI/ICC had learnt from the way FIFA World Cup tickets are allotted — the lottery works really well.”

Clearly, television > stadium for watching cricket in India, at least among readers of The Playbook.

Meanwhile, Adidas has released its Team India World Cup campaign, which I thought was pretty cool. The International Cricket Council also released the official anthem for the World Cup, featuring Bollywood star Ranveer Singh. Let’s just say that I’ve seen better anthems, like this one.

Today’s edition, though, is about football, as the Indian Super League enters a landmark 10th season.

A curious partnership

Photo credit: FSDL

Last evening, I was watching the opening match of the 2023-24 Indian Super League (ISL), between Kerala Blasters and Bengaluru FC. It’s a landmark 10th season for the ISL, making it only the second Indian franchise-based league that has completed a decade. The first being the Indian Premier League, of course.

The ISL has a new broadcast partner starting this season. Earlier this month, Viacom18, controlled by India’s largest conglomerate Reliance Industries, picked up the media rights (televising and digital) for the next two seasons at the base price of ₹550 crore ($66 million), according to Mint. The ISL is operated by a company called Football Sports Development Limited (FSDL), whose majority shareholder is also Reliance. ICYMI, I had written about the ISL’s broadcasting dilemma in a recent edition of The Playbook.

Viacom18 has gone on a PR blitz as the “new home of Indian football”. It’s broadcasting the league on eight linear television channels across four languages (English, Hindi, Malayalam, and Bengali), along with streaming it for free on JioCinema. That’s for the Indian market. But did you know that you can also stream the ISL legally if you’re based outside India?

Earlier this week, FSDL made another announcement that caught my attention. It was about the continuation of a partnership with Berlin-headquartered football media company OneFootball to distribute live matches and highlights to international fans across over 190 countries.

This means that ISL fans outside India will be able to stream all 139 matches on OneFootball, which has a website and apps (mobile, tablet, and connected TV), either for free or via pay-per-view. The direct-to-consumer offering will initially launch in select markets in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region—UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait—as a per-match pay-per-view offering, before adding team and league season passes in the next few months. Outside these markets, the ISL will be available to stream for free on OneFootball. The ISL and OneFootball had first tied up for the 2021-22 season.

OneFootball, founded in 2008, is an interesting platform. It’s like a one-stop shop for all football-related content: live scores and commentary, news, statistics, videos, highlights, and live streaming of matches on a free and pay-per-view basis.

While there are several such aggregator platforms for football live scores and non-live content, OneFootball stands out with its strategy to acquire streaming rights of global properties in the so-called dark markets, where rights-holders have been unable to strike broadcast deals. It currently has partnerships with leagues such as LaLiga, Bundesliga, Scottish Premiership, Danish Superliga, J League (Japan), K League (Korea), and Liga MX (Mexico).

Screenshot from OneFootball website

OneFootball’s aim is to be the go-to source for football content for millennials and Gen Zs. “It can be frustrating for users to find where matches are – we want to be somewhere fans can get around this,” Nikolaus von Doetinchem, OneFootball’s vice president of OTT streaming and media rights, told Broadcast Sport in an interview last year.

“Ease of access to live matches is important. Free or pay-per-view, it won’t take longer than two minutes to get into our content. An important part is that the biggest market, in my view, is the piracy market, which is worth an estimated $25 billion a year. This isn’t because they don’t want to pay; it’s because the product isn’t right,” he added.

This morning, while browsing through the “TV” section of the app, I saw live streams of matches in Argentina’s Primera Division and Brazil’s Brasilerao Serie A, which were on pay-per-view for ₹199 ($2.4). There were also match streams scheduled for later in the day from the top divisions in Finland, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine, some of which were free to watch. So, if you’re a Brazilian expat living in a country where your local football league doesn’t have a broadcast partner, instead of streaming the matches illegally, you can watch them on OneFootball. That’s the premise of the business model.

As for news and other non-live content, OneFootball has syndication deals with publications such as The Guardian, The Independent, GiveMeSport, Stats Perform, and Sportskeeda, along with some tie-ups with leagues, federations, and clubs themselves for content.

For a platform that caters to a niche, OneFootball has racked up over 100 million monthly active users and gets 400 million video views per month, according to its website. In April last year, the company raised $300 million in its Series D funding round, at a valuation of over $1 billion. Its investors include Liberty City Ventures, Animoca Brands, Quiet Capital, RIT Capital Partners, and Dapper Labs.

The company raised the funds to accelerate its expansion into Web3. The plan was to enable clubs, leagues and players “to release digital assets and fan-centric experiences based on blockchain technology.” Basically, non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This was back when Web3 and NFTs were all the rage.

As it turned out, the crypto bubble eventually burst. In December 2022, OneFootball started laying off employees. The company’s founder and chief executive, Lucas Von Cranach, admitted in February this year that its foray into Web3 had been “too ambitious”. In June, he stepped down from his position as CEO. In July, OneFootball shut down its NFT marketplace, which was operated by blockchain company Dapper Labs. By August, its headcount had more than halved to 250 from 540 during the crypto boom.

Currently, OneFootball’s main sources of revenue appear to be pay-per-view subscriptions and advertisements. While browsing through the app, I noticed prominent ads for online betting and gambling company 1xBet, including for ISL matches. A sports media platform has an obvious synergy with betting, but a problematic one in countries like India where gambling is illegal. Of course, if you take a look at some of the sponsor logos on ISL team jerseys and even in the stadiums, it’s hard to believe that’s the case.

Kerala Blasters are sponsored by 1xBat, a sporting goods company that’s a surrogate for betting company 1xBet (Photo credit: FSDL)

So, what is the ISL getting out of the OneFootball partnership? A senior executive from the Indian sports broadcast industry told me that it’s unlikely there are too many ISL fans outside India, even in the Middle East. “On top of that, data charges in the Gulf are quite high. I know someone in the UAE who uses an Indian SIM card with international roaming for data because it’s apparently cheaper than getting a local connection.” A 3 GB monthly mobile broadband plan from Emirati telecom company Etisalat costs AED 139 (₹3,130). That’s apart from the pay-per-view charges.

Also, if the ISL did indeed have a substantial fanbase in the Middle East, you’d think they would have tried to find a local broadcast partner. The ISL did not respond to an emailed questionnaire before this edition was published. I’ll update the edition online if and when it responds.

As for OneFootball, the international rights for ISL would not have been very expensive. If the India rights went for a base price of $33 million per season to a company that also owns the ISL, with reportedly only one other bidder participating in the auction, you can imagine the interest for the international rights. So, the financial risk for OneFootball would not have been significant.

That said, OneFootball does have users in India, although it appears they largely use the app for its live scores feature. One such user is Arjun Kulkarni, a Mumbai-based sales and strategy executive at a tech company, who’s a Liverpool fan. “I’ve been using OneFootball for nearly a decade. I use it to follow live scores and commentary for the Premier League, Champions League, and international matches. The user experience is far better than other apps I’ve come across, including the Premier League’s own app,” he says, adding that he’s never watched any of the live streams.

Fans of platforms such as ESPNcricinfo and Cricbuzz would resonate with this.

⚡️Quick Singles

🤝💰 It would be the mother of all mergers if it were to happen. The Walt Disney Company has held preliminary talks with potential buyers for its India streaming and television business, including Reliance Industries, reported Bloomberg. The American giant could sell its entire Disney Star business in India or individual assets including sports rights and streaming service Disney+ Hotstar, the report said. With Sony and Zee also trying to merge, are we headed towards a virtual duopoly in the Indian entertainment and sports media landscape?

👕🏏 Indian cricketer Deepak Chahar has launched his own sportswear and sporting goods brand called DNINE Sports, with an initial investment of ₹2.5 crore ($300,000), reported Mint. It will sell affordable cricket apparel, shoes, accessories, and health supplements made by a third party, Weolive. The parent company, LCDC Athletics, is not looking for any external capital at the moment. Earlier this year, Chahar had also launched a separate company, JCDC Sports, that operates a fantasy sports platform called Trade Fantasy Game.

🏏🇺🇸🏆 The ICC has confirmed New York, Dallas, and Florida as the three venues that will host matches during the USA leg of 2024 T20 World Cup. An agreement has also been reached to build a 34,000-seat modular stadium in New York. Grand Prairie in Texas and Broward County in Florida already have existing infrastructure to host matches, although the capacity at both stadiums will be increased. The US is co-hosting the tournament along with the West Indies.

🏏🇮🇳📈 The Indian Premier League’s (IPL’s) valuation grew by 3.3% from $10.9 billion last year to $11.2 billion in 2023, according to a report by consulting and valuation services firm D&P India Advisory. The Women’s Premier League (WPL) is worth $150 million, according to the report. In rupee terms, ​​the WPL is worth ₹1,250 crore, which is almost a fourth of what the IPL was valued at when it launched in 2008—₹4,700 crore.

🇩🇪👟 Adidas CEO Bjorn Gulden doesn’t think the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, meant the antisemitic comments he made on social media that led the sportswear brand to cut ties with him last year. Gulden made the comments, where he also said he doesn’t think Ye is a bad person, during an appearance on the In Good Company podcast. Adidas later released a statement saying the company’s position on the rapper “has not changed”. Last month, Adidas reported that it generated $437 million in revenue from selling discontinued inventory of the Yeezy brand, its collaboration with Ye.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

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In exactly 20 days, the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 will begin in India, with the previous edition’s finalists, New Zealand and England, facing off at Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium on October 5.

Did you manage to snag a ticket to any of the matches? Well done if you did! Getting a ticket to an India match has been akin to winning a lottery. Actually, it would have been better if tickets had been allocated via lottery (more on that later).

But if you’re an Indian cricket fan who’s failing to get excited about a home World Cup, I get you. The events that have transpired over the last couple of months have just sucked all the excitement away, at least for me. From the ridiculously delayed release of the schedule just 100 days prior to the start of the tournament, to nine matches being rescheduled over a month later (including the marquee India-Pakistan clash), to the eventual sale of tickets starting August 25, just over a month before the start of a World Cup, it’s all been rather shambolic.

For context, the schedule for the 2019 World Cup in England and Wales, which began on May 30, 2019, was released on April 26, 2018—over a year before the tournament started. The ticketing process began on May 1, 2018. That’s how it should be for a World Cup, so that fans from across the world have ample time to plan their trip.

But for India 2023, the scheduling delay was just the first hurdle faced by fans. The second one arrived after the sale of tickets began on August 25, which is what this edition is about. If anything, it was a bigger farce.

‘The fans are being robbed’

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The social media team of BookMyShow, the official ticketing platform of the 2023 World Cup, deserves a raise. For the last three weeks, they’ve encountered enough criticism and abuse on social media to last a lifetime. Some of it was for technical glitches, which is perhaps understandable considering there are a potential 759 million Indians with internet access who could have tried buying tickets.

But a lot of the criticism was due to a glaring scarcity of tickets made available for purchase. For instance, a tech-savvy X (formerly Twitter) user pointed out that just over 8,000 tickets were available for purchase on BookMyShow for the India-Pakistan match at the Narendra Modi Stadium, which has a capacity of over 130,000. Others posted videos of how they were unable to book tickets despite getting through to the seat selection page. Few eagle-eyed users even found a command in the source code called “​enableFakeSeatBlocking” that was apparently active for India matches.

Was BookMyShow scamming people, as was the overall sentiment on X?

A product manager at a tech company that has a lot of experience managing a high number of concurrent users told me that “​enableFakeSeatBlocking” appeared to be a flag in the code that allows dummy or bot bookings.

“Generally, when you book a ticket, you get a confirmation from the payment aggregator and a ticket number. But this flag probably allows tickets to be booked without an actual transaction—it’s basically a dummy booking that holds the ticket. The organisers are not opening up all the seats to fans because they probably want some for themselves.”

The product manager, who requested anonymity as they aren’t authorised to speak to the media, added that this practice, called rigging or capping, is common during music concert ticket sales and even big sales on e-commerce platforms. “IRCTC is another classic example: you keep seeing people complaining that they couldn’t get any train tickets, but agents have no issue. It’s a problem that comes with the first-come-first-serve system.”

The alternative to a first-come-first-serve (FCFS) system is a public ballot, which is useful when demand outstrips supply. Here’s how it works: fans can register their interest in buying tickets for an event by a certain date; the organisers then conduct a ballot and inform the fans whose names were drawn to purchase their tickets in a specified booking window. If any tickets are left after the ballot, they can then be sold via a second ballot or via a general FCFS sale.

The 2019 World Cup had two ballots, followed by a general sale. The tournament received over three million ticket applications for 800,000 tickets. In fact, the 2016 World T20, which was hosted by India, also had a ballot system. I had participated in it too for the India-West Indies semi-final. I got through the ballot and purchased my ticket in the specified booking window with no hassle whatsoever.

This really begs the question as to why the ballot system wasn’t used for the 2023 World Cup, for which demand would only have been higher. BookMyShow did not respond to a questionnaire I sent before this edition was published. I’ll update the edition online if and when they respond.

But whether it was FCFS or a ballot, the main issue was that there weren’t enough tickets available for purchase. And that was not BookMyShow’s fault. The platform can only sell the tickets that are allotted to it by the tournament organiser, which is the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). On September 6, Mint reported that less than 10% of the total number of tickets for the tournament were made available to BookMyShow. Less than 15,000 tickets were available for the India-Pakistan match and less than 10,000 each for the India-Australia, India-Afghanistan, and India-Bangladesh games, the report added.

Photo credit: ICC

The scarcity of tickets was also responsible for some of the issues faced by BookMyShow users. Despite getting to the top of the queue, many users were unable to book the tickets because others were booking them faster. “In the IPL, it takes about 15 minutes to sell ticket inventory of 10,000-15,000. For the World Cup, if you assume 10% of tickets are on sale, that’s around 5,000 tickets for a 50,000-capacity venue. It won’t take more than three to five minutes for 5,000 tickets to sell out for an India match,” said a senior sports management executive who’s worked in Indian cricket. They requested anonymity as they aren’t authorised to speak to the media.

Hours after the Mint report was published, the BCCI released a statement.

However, 400,000 tickets across 48 matches still makes it only about 8,300 tickets per game. There was also no clarity as to whether the 400,000 tickets were equally distributed across all 48 matches or it was based on which teams were playing or which stadium the game was being held at.

By all accounts, it’s unlikely that more than 20% of the tickets per match have been made available for purchase. “In the Indian Premier League (IPL), up to 60-65% of tickets go up for sale, while the rest are given to sponsors, the BCCI, its state associations and their various member clubs,” said a second senior sports management executive who’s worked in Indian cricket. They requested anonymity to protect business interests. “For World Cups, the International Cricket Council (ICC) gets about 2,000-3,000 tickets for itself and its partners. The local organising committee gets some. If the fans are only getting 10-15% of the tickets, where are the rest going?”

Apart from the ICC and its sponsors, the only other stakeholders who can get tickets are the BCCI and its state associations. Whichever stadium hosts a match in India is linked to one of 28 state cricket associations affiliated with the BCCI. And each state body has dozens of district associations and clubs linked to it. Some state associations also give memberships to cricket academies. Of course, not everyone associated with these various bodies is eligible for a ticket, but you get how far the web spreads.

Chennai Super Kings’ CEO Kasi Viswanathan told The Times of India earlier this year that the IPL franchise is obligated to give 13,000 tickets per match to the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association’s member clubs. That’s over a fourth of the MA Chidambaram Stadium’s capacity.

And this is by no means a recent trend. During the 2011 World Cup, co-hosted by India, only 4,000 tickets were available for fans to purchase for the final at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium, with a capacity of 33,000. ESPNcricinfo reported that the Mumbai Cricket Association was contractually obligated to offer 20,000 tickets to its member clubs. That’s 60% of the stadium’s capacity.

Photo credit: Tourism Victoria/Flickr/Creative Commons

“The fans are being robbed. There is no way for them to buy tickets from the state associations,” said the second senior sports management executive quoted above. “The only other available route is purchasing the official hospitality packages, which cost 10-15x the standard ticket price.” The ICC has about a dozen official agents who are authorised to sell travel and tour packages for its events. However, with just over two weeks to go before the World Cup begins, the second senior executive added that hospitality tickets are still not available. “There’s still no clarity where the hospitality zones will be in the stadiums right now. Everyone is frustrated.”

The ICC’s hands are tied. For one, according to the usual contract for ICC events, the local organising committee (LOC)—in this case, BCCI—has all the control over ticketing. The LOC decides who gets how many tickets, and how and when the tickets will be sold. “The ICC will have certain requirements, like X number of tickets per venue and an option to buy more if required. That’s why tickets are usually released in lots after gauging the demand. The ICC would have got its allotment of a few thousand tickets, and the balance is managed by BCCI and its state associations,” said the first senior sports management executive quoted earlier.

Can the ICC not step in when it sees the kind of mismanagement that has transpired over the last few months? Well, not if the LOC is the BCCI, which reportedly accounts for 80% of the ICC’s annual revenue.

If you’re someone who has attended or tried to attend a cricket match in India, whether it’s the IPL, India bilaterals, or the World Cup, you’d know that these are longstanding issues. There have been several reports of mismanagement and chaos while selling cricket match tickets in India over the years. Some have even led to stampedes and baton charges by the police.

Apart from the scarcity of tickets available for purchase, another reason for the chaos is the incomprehensible fact that fans who have purchased tickets online are also made to collect physical copies from the stadium. This is because of a lack of technology and infrastructure.

“In India, we aren’t very tech-driven in terms of ticketing,” said the first senior sports management executive. “If you’re selling a mobile ticket, you need to have the technology and various checks and balances in place to stop people from taking screenshots of those tickets. That feature isn’t available in India.”

Sharing screenshots of mobile tickets can be a security concern. “Say you’re a corporate client, and you’ve bought 200 tickets. But who are these 200 tickets going to be distributed to? Who will be the end-user? That’s why a physical ticket is preferred,” said the first senior sports management executive. “E-tickets are common abroad because their ticketing agencies have more control over piracy and duplication.”

Most of the cricket stadiums in India also don’t have the infrastructure to facilitate completely online tickets, the executive added. “They only have turnstiles where you need a paper ticket to be inserted in order for the gate to open. Only Ahmedabad, Lucknow, and a couple of other venues have the infrastructure where you can scan a mobile ticket at the turnstiles. Upgrading the older infrastructure comes at a huge cost—in crores. I don’t think any of the state associations are in a position to spend that kind of money to do it.”

On that note, during the 2023 IPL, I had attended a match in Chennai, where a mobile ticket was sufficient. The ticketing agency, Paytm Insider, had personnel stationed at the turnstiles who were manually scanning mobile tickets. However, the first senior sports management executive said this isn’t the most optimal way to do it.

“For e-tickets, the turnstiles should have a combined server that can get the attendance data of the complete stadium in real time. This data—how many people have entered from which gate, and which seating zone has how many spectators—is crucial in terms of emergency evacuations and contingency plans. The limitation of a hand-held scanning device is that its data is restricted to one gate. Collating the data from all gates manually will take 20-30 minutes, which isn’t good enough.”

Whatever the reasons, it’s rather unfortunate that a cricket board that earned revenue of ₹27,411 crore ($3.3 billion) over five years (FY18-22) cannot figure out an efficient way to sell match tickets. Or, as the second sports management executive puts it, the BCCI’s financial success, a substantial part of which is down to media rights sales, is probably the reason why it doesn’t care much about match-going fans. “In the end, it’s all a function of how much fan engagement you want, how many tickets you want to sell and how much revenue you want to generate. Do you think the BCCI needs any more revenue?” the executive said, laughing.

After all, the BCCI knows that come rain, hail, or sunshine, millions of Indians will queue up to buy tickets to go see their heroes in action, no matter how mismanaged the sales process is. According to reports, tickets for the India-Pakistan match in Ahmedabad are selling for as high as ₹56 lakh ($67,400) in the resale market. Sky-high hotel and flight prices are also no bar. The Captable reported that the demand for charter flights to travel for the match is also booming.

Who cares about a few technical glitches and stampedes, right?

⚡️Quick Singles

🏏🇮🇳🇵🇰 Speaking of India-Pakistan cricket, streaming platform Disney+ Hotstar reportedly set a new personal peak concurrency record of 28 million during the Asia Cup Super 4 round clash between the arch-rivals. The platform’s previous record was 25 million, set during the India-New Zealand semi-final of the 2019 World Cup. Rival JioCinema has the overall record in Indian cricket—32 million, set during the 2023 IPL final. Like JioCinema, Hotstar also started streaming matches for free beginning with the Asia Cup, albeit only on mobile phones. The platform will stream the 2023 World Cup for free on phones, too.

👟💰 Sportswear company Agilitas Sports, co-founded by three former senior Puma India executives, has acquired Mochiko, one of India’s largest sports shoemakers. Gurugram-based Mochiko manufactures shoes for global brands such as Adidas, Puma, New Balance, Skechers, and Asics, reported The Economic Times. Bengaluru-based Agilitas Sports had raised $52 million in May. ICYMI, I had written about the baby steps India is taking towards becoming the world’s sports shoe factory.

🃏🏏 The double whammy of the crypto crash and hike in Goods and Services Tax seems to have been too much for cricket NFT platform Rario to take. Dream Sports, the majority shareholder in the company, has fired Rario’s co-founders Ankit Wadhwa and Sunny Bhanot, and also laid off 60% of its workforce. This was after some disputes and disagreements related to the fulfilment of commitments by Rario, including the termination of a contract with the organisers of the Lanka Premier League, reported Mint.

🏏🥤 After unseasonal rains in April-June, cola companies are hoping for a better second summer of sorts with the Asia Cup, World Cup, and the India-Australia bilateral series. Pepsi has signed cricketer Hardik Pandya to endorse Gatorade, while Reliance Industries-owned Campa Cola recently launched its own sports drink brand called Campa Cricket. The brand will leverage the Mumbai Indians IPL team, also owned by Reliance, for promotions. Coca-Cola’s Thums Up is the official beverage partner for the World Cup, while Limca Sportz is the tournament’s official sports drink.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Did you manage to book tickets for the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023? Congratulations if you did! I’m sure it must have felt like winning one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets. I wasn’t so lucky, despite trying to book a ticket twice—during the pre-sale window for Mastercard customers earlier this week and the general sale window yesterday. At one point yesterday, the wait time displayed on the BookMyShow website was “more than a day”. But the tickets were sold out in 15 minutes. 🤷‍♂️

I remember how smooth the process was during the 2016 World T20. I had applied for tickets for the India-West Indies semi-final in Mumbai. There was a lucky draw; if you got through, which I did, you could just go and book the ticket online within a specified window. I’d have much rather preferred that system so that you at least know whether you’re going to get a ticket or not. But then again, that tournament was much better planned and organised. For one, the schedule wasn’t announced less than three months before the tournament began.

So, I guess, television for the win!

Speaking of TV, have you watched the Rajinikanth movie Jailer? It’s still running in cinemas, but it should be out on a streaming platform soon. Once it’s out, I’m going to be looking out for one particular scene…

Opening a big can of worms

Photo credit: Raghu Rajaram/X

A couple of weeks ago, I crossed something off my bucket list: watch a Rajinikanth movie in a theatre. I know, I should be ashamed for waiting nearly 35 years to do this. But it is what it is.

The movie was a typical Rajini affair: heavy on the masala and testosterone, Thalaivar in nearly every frame, and lots of whistle-worthy scenes. The second half was a bit stretched, but then I guess you can’t expect a Rajinikanth movie to be a tightly edited two-hour affair. People want more. I had a great time, although Jailer is far from being the best Rajini movie I’ve watched.

Then, earlier this week, I came across a report that made me go 🤔.

The report, by news agency PTI, said that the makers of Jailer have agreed to digitally alter a scene in the movie that shows a contract killer wearing the jersey of Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB). The character makes “derogatory and misogynistic statements about a woman”.

This was after RCB filed a lawsuit in the Delhi High Court saying that the filmmakers had used its jersey without permission, and that its association with the negative character would “result in dilution and tarnishment of its brand image”.

Now, if you go by this report, you might think that RCB has a point. But honestly, having watched the movie myself a couple of weeks ago, I vaguely remember someone wearing an RCB jersey in a scene, but it was a minor character at best. He wasn’t the main antagonist by any means and barely had any screen time. So, I couldn’t help but wonder if RCB was maybe overthinking this.

I put this question to Karthik Srinivasan, a communications strategy consultant who has worked with clients such as Google, Myntra, and Himalaya. Having watched Jailer, he doesn’t remember noticing the RCB jersey at all. “Only when I read the news did I think about it and realise it’s possible someone might have been wearing an RCB t-shirt. It looks completely incidental. It wasn’t a conscious choice by the filmmakers.”

Srinivasan adds that the important thing to find out is whether anyone made the connection between RCB and the negative character until the matter actually went to court. “For instance, if they claimed that there are thousands of memes online of this bad guy and people are mocking RCB as a result of that, then at least there is some ground for the brand to ask for a cut. But otherwise, I don’t think anybody cares for that scene; it’s so incidental.”

While RCB declined to comment, I did a search on X (formerly Twitter) for the term “Jailer RCB”. The only posts I could find were ones about this case, which means people only started talking about it after the matter went to court and was reported in the media. There were also some jokes made at RCB’s expense, like this one.

Twitter tweet

It’s a classic case of the Streisand effect, when censorship backfires.

Anyway, the producers of the movie, the Sun TV Network and Kalanithi Maran, have agreed to digitally alter the jersey to remove the RCB branding before it’s released on television and OTT platforms. The jersey will also be edited or altered in the theatrical version by September 1. The two parties resolved the matter outside court, per reports.

Srinivasan says that this case can open a big can of worms. “Will you now be able to point out any colour scheme, brand, or logo anywhere on the screen where a negative character is shown and then say that this harms us? If you go down this road, there is no end to it. Any and every brand can take offence to any and every scene, and it’ll become a complete epidemic. Imagine Anand Mahindra taking offence to Rohit Shetty blowing up Scorpios in his movies: ‘Why are you blowing up Scorpios? Why not Toyotas?’”

This case might lead to film costume designers becoming more careful and cognizant of not having any recognisable brand associated with negative characters in the future. It’s the extreme opposite of companies working with film producers to feature their brands in prominent scenes as a commercial arrangement, which is quite common in Indian cinema.

Of course, RCB is far from being the only brand that’s sensitive about how it is portrayed in films and series. In 2020, American filmmaker Rian Johnson revealed how Apple is particular about bad guys not having iPhones on camera. In the hit American drama series 24, all the good guys use Macs, while the villains have PCs. In Slumdog Millionaire, Mercedes and Coca-Cola didn’t want their products associated with negative characters.

At the other end of the spectrum are brands that actually use negative characters to sell their products. Like classifieds platform Quikr, which made a series of ads (like this one) featuring Bob Biswas, a serial assassin played by actor Saswata Chatterjee in the hit 2012 Bollywood thriller Kahaani. One of the most iconic Hindi film villains of all time, Amjad Khan’s Gabbar Singh, also appeared in an ad for Brittania Glucose-D biscuits.

But RCB’s owner, Diageo, is unlikely to tread this path. The alcoholic beverage company has used actors and sportspersons in its surrogate ads for brands such as Kingfisher and McDowell’s No 1, but never a negative character. And that’s because of how alcohol has been historically perceived in Indian society, including movies.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, if you look at brand associations in films, most villains and negative characters were the only ones shown drinking alcohol,” says Aalaap Roy, a marketing and strategy professional who has worked with brands such as Diageo, Unilever, and CondeNast.

“There’s that famous Amrish Puri dialogue about Black Dog whisky [which is a Diageo brand]. There has always been a negative association with alcohol. Only in the last few years has there been a major change in terms of alcobev brands trying to showcase themselves in a positive sense. That taboo is slowly going away,” he adds.

This is one of the key reasons why alcobev brands today have strict guidelines about not wanting to be associated with anything that’s negative, whether it’s religious, political or anything that might cause a social stir. “Maybe 10 years ago, alcobev was a distribution-led business. Today, it’s slowly becoming more of a brand-led business,” says Roy.

This might explain why RCB is being so touchy about that scene. At the end of the day, Royal Challengers Bangalore is an extension of the Royal Challenge whisky brand and, in effect, Diageo. (In a previous edition of The Playbook, I’d written about how RCB built a robust brand over the last 15 years.)

What still makes it a bit of a stretch is that the RCB association was with a minor character who was on screen for barely five minutes. The PTI report also mentions the name of Muthoot FinCorp, whose logo is on the front of the jersey shown in the movie. That’s the added dimension in the case of sports jerseys, which have multiple sponsor logos as well.

But the point Roy is making is that if the contract killer in Jailer was wearing the jersey of any other IPL team, their owners probably wouldn’t have minded it. But because it’s RCB and Diageo, things have gone this far. “Even if it was a Pepsi or Coke, I don’t think those brands would have done anything,” he says.

Both Srinivasan and Roy also said that nobody would have cared if this was a regular movie. But Jailer is a Rajinikanth movie. In terms of popularity and potential reach, it’s right up there in the Indian film industry.

I wonder what would have happened if Rajinikanth himself was wearing the RCB jersey in a scene where he chops a bad guy’s head off (yep, Jailer has its fair share of gore, unlike a typical family-friendly Rajini movie.) Would RCB still have taken offence?

The new home of Indian cricket

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Viacom18 completed its takeover of Indian cricket media rights on Thursday. The Reliance Industries-backed broadcaster bagged the linear television and digital rights for international bilateral and domestic cricket played in India for the next five years for ₹5,963 crore ($721 million). It already owns the digital rights for the IPL until 2027. The only major cricket property it doesn’t own is the ICC rights, which are with Disney Star.

According to reports, Viacom18 bid ₹3,101 crore ($375 million) for the digital rights and ₹2,862 crore ($346 million) for the television rights in the e-auction. The total bid of ₹5,963 crore is less than the ₹6,138 crore ($944 million at the time) that Star India had paid for the previous rights cycle in 2018. But on a per-match basis, Viacom18 is paying slightly more: ₹67.75 crore versus ₹60 crore). The number of matches could rise from the current 88, depending on the BCCI’s bilateral commitments.

What’s interesting about the auction is that it seems Viacom18 was the only serious bidder. Sony Pictures Networks India was reportedly the only other main contender, bidding ₹3,000 crore for digital and ₹2,762 crore for television rights, while Disney Star only placed a couple of bids, according to Mint. The Economic Times reported that Sony bid ₹5,863 crore in total, while Disney didn’t participate in the e-auction at all.

Whichever the case, it seems both companies were clear they wouldn’t bid aggressively. Here’s what a Disney Star executive told Mint:

Apart from declining viewership, Sony and Disney Star’s apparent disinterest in the BCCI bilateral rights is also likely down to macroeconomic conditions globally. Disney’s financial struggles are well documented, while Sony has always been frugal in its spending and focused on keeping its financials in the black.

With the two companies already committing $1.5 billion each for the ICC rights (Disney sub-licensed the television rights to Sony and kept the digital rights for itself after paying a whopping $3 billion for them last year), it was unlikely they’d bid aggressively for the BCCI rights. They’ve put their bets on ICC tournaments over BCCI bilaterals, which is understandable considering a majority of the viewership for the latter is dedicated to series featuring Australia and England. Unfortunately, due to politics, bilateral cricket with Pakistan is a no-go.

India is scheduled to host Australia and England two times each for bilateral series between now and 2027. Meanwhile, there are five major ICC men’s tournaments in this period: the 2023 World Cup, 2024 World T20, 2025 Champions Trophy, 2025 World Test Championship, and 2026 World T20.

Sony’s interest in the rights, up to a certain extent, was understandable considering it doesn’t have any Indian cricket currently. For the next four years, the only cricket featuring India on Sony will be the team’s ICC matches on TV and its tours of England (TV + digital). India is scheduled to travel to England three times for bilateral series between now and 2027.

Was Sony perhaps caught off-guard by Viacom18’s aggressive bid for the television rights? So far, the latter’s strategy has largely been digital-focused, as it disrupted the market with free sports streaming on JioCinema. The BCCI rights will allow Viacom18 to keep its calendar filled with Indian cricket, although it’ll have to figure out how to best market non-marquee bilateral series, of which there are many. Unfortunately, domestic cricket barely gets any viewership in India.

Twitter tweet

Considering the condition of the global economy right now, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say Viacom18 came to the BCCI’s rescue. The board has struggled to hold onto sponsors since the pandemic, with the Indian team’s jersey manufacturer and lead sponsor rights history resembling games of passing the parcel.

Most recently, IDFC First Bank bought the title sponsorship rights for all bilateral and domestic series in India for the next three years for ₹4.2 crore per match, just slightly higher than what the previous sponsor, Mastercard, was paying: ₹3.8 crore. The only other bidder in that auction, interestingly, was SonyLIV, which is Sony’s streaming platform. It reportedly bid ₹2.7 crore per match, just a touch above the base price of ₹2.4 crore.

The BCCI isn’t the only sports rights holder that’s struggling to get good rates in a global economy battered by post-Covid inflation. In the UK, the Premier League might also have to settle for a minor bump when its next media rights auction comes around, according to the Financial Times. Analysts quoted in the report expect the total value of European football media rights to be down 17% in 2023-24 compared to 2018-19. A Premier League club executive is quoted saying they’d be happy with even a 5% bump.

But the difference between a Premier League match and a BCCI bilateral game is that the former is a great spectacle to watch, both on television and in the stadium. The superior in-stadium experience for match-going supporters and the resultant atmosphere only add to the television-viewing experience for the millions of fans watching around the world.

As for the BCCI, the less said about in-stadium experience, the better.

⚡️Quick Singles

⚽️🔵💰 Hong Kong-based multi-level marketing company Qnet, an official partner of Premier League champions Manchester City since 2014, has been investigated for human trafficking in at least three African countries, according to a report by Norwegian football magazine Josimar. The company is facing allegations that it’s a Ponzi scheme, even leading to suicide and debt. Qnet denied that it’s a pyramid scheme, while Manchester City said that the company had undergone its due diligence process when it extended their partnership in 2019.

⚽️🇸🇦🇪🇺 After buying some of the best footballers in the world, Saudi Arabia is now interested in having discussions about joining the Uefa Champions League. This is not a joke. The Saudi Pro League’s chief operating officer, Carlo Nohra, told Bloomberg in an interview that it’s “trying to be different” and “any kind of format-changing or improvements that can be introduced into the league will be welcomed.” Non-European clubs playing in the Uefa Champions League wouldn’t be unprecedented. The competition includes teams from countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Israel, Cyprus, and Armenia.

⚽️🇸🇦🥋 Speaking of Saudi, the oil-rich nation has now made its first move into the mixed martial arts industry by buying a minority stake in the US’ Professional Fighters League (PFL) for $100 million. According to the Financial Times, this was the first deal by SRJ Sports Investments, the multibillion-dollar investment company launched by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund earlier this year. As part of the deal, PFL will launch a league for the West Asia and North Africa region in the second quarter of 2024. Saudi Arabia has so far invested billions of dollars in football, golf, boxing, and Formula One.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Congratulations to all you Indian readers out there! I’m sure all of you, like me, are over on the moon!

Nearly 54% of you don’t play any fantasy sports, according to the results of last week’s poll, so I hope the previous edition didn’t bore you! Among those of you who do play, the free Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game is the most popular, with over 30% of the vote share. Was quite surprised to find that India’s most popular fantasy sports platform, Dream11, got less than 8% of the votes.

Some, like Ankur Vohra “do not find [fantasy sports] engaging long term”, while Rohan Narang used to play earlier but thinks that the element of skill has faded away. Meet Kachhy, meanwhile, “played Dream11 for some cricket and NBA games in the past, but strictly always the non-money version.” Now, he only plays FPL, where he’s currently in 10th position out of 50 players in The Playbook’s mini league. Dileep V is in the lead with 144 points in two gameweeks! If you want to join our mini league, here’s the league code: d5dh3d.

Right, let’s get into this week’s edition, which is a bit tech-y.

A few hurdles to go

Have you been watching the BWF badminton world championships? Yeah, I know, PV Sindhu lost, but we’ve still got Satwik-Chirag and HS Prannoy in the quarterfinals, so 🤞.

If you were watching, and if you’re eagle-eyed, you might have noticed something peculiar.

Take a look at this collage of two screenshots taken during Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand’s second-round match on Thursday.

Did you spot the difference between the two screenshots?

Yep, the brand advertised to the left of the TotalEnergies Quartz ad is different. The top screenshot shows the logo of M88 Mansion, a Philippines-headquartered online gambling company that’s big in Asia. The bottom screenshot has the logo of Oddset, a Danish sports betting company.

How is this happening?

The top screenshot is of the main, static broadcast camera that shows most of the live action. The bottom one is from a different camera angle that’s mostly used while showing replays. If you see the view from all other regular cameras as well, you’d spot the Oddset ad. That’s because Oddset is the actual logo that’s plastered on the perimeter board at Copenhagen’s Royal Arena. The main broadcast camera, meanwhile, is showing a virtual ad of M88 Mansion that’s superimposed onto the broadcast feed. Considering the brand, it’s probably visible only to audiences in Asia.

Welcome to the world of virtual advertising in sports. Over the last five or so years, rights holders have been digitally inserting advertisements into broadcast feeds using augmented reality (AR) technology. Such ads can be superimposed on perimeter boards, the playing field, or any empty spaces. They’re usually geotargeted so that rights holders/broadcasters can tailor their ads based on their audience’s location. As a result, both rights holders and brands maximise their sponsorship revenue potential.

There are broadly two types of virtual ads in sports broadcasting: overlays and inserts. An overlay is where a virtual ad is placed over an existing ad, like the badminton example above. An insert is where the virtual ad is placed in an empty space, such as the playing field. The Chevrolet, Brahma, and Wise Up logos next to the goal in the screenshot below are all virtual inserts.

Screenshot via Broadcast Virtual

Companies such as uniqFEED (Switzerland), Broadcast Virtual (Australia), Supponor (United Kingdom), SponixTech (Qatar), and DELTACAST (Belgium) offer this technology. Here’s how uniqFeed’s tech works, according to its website:

uniqFEED’s team of operators receives the isolated camera signals and world feed from a live sporting event from which [our software] AdApt then composes multiple regionalized feeds before virtual content is digitally inserted. This is performed live during the match or game. The feeds are then sent out via the various broadcasters.

This technology has been used by leagues and federations such as Bundesliga, Serie A, UEFA, Cricket Australia, New Zealand Cricket, National Rugby League (Australasia), ATP and WTA tennis, NBA, and NFL.

Screenshot via Supponor

Contrary to popular belief, the Jio ads that you might have seen at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium last season were not virtual. According to Hamburg-headquartered sports marketing agency Sportfive, virtual advertising doesn’t exist in the Premier League. And when Manchester City announced its partnership with Jio in January, the press release said the Jio branding will feature across the club’s in-stadia and digital assets.

Twitter tweet

In India, we largely get to see the virtual insert ads. For instance, during India’s tour of Bangladesh last December, you might remember seeing a virtual 3D ad of the Hollywood movie Avatar: The Way of Water, which had released that month. There was another one I remember of French automobile brand Citroën, where a car did a doughnut manoeuvre on the cricket ground. These ads were facilitated by sports marketing agency ITW Consulting.

Broadcaster Star India has also tried out such ads for its properties Pro Kabaddi and the Indian Super League. You might have seen virtual ads for UltraTech Cement and Vivo in Pro Kabaddi, where the playing surface breaks and the sponsor logo or product emerges from underneath.

But that’s largely it. We don’t really get to see many geotargeted virtual overlays in India (the BWF badminton one is for the whole of Asia). And that’s because of how the Indian sports market is: dominated by one sport. According to the India Sports Sponsorship Report 2023 by media buying agency GroupM, cricket accounted for 85% of the overall sports industry spending last year. That’s of course a reflection of the viewership the sport commands.

So, let’s split the Indian market into cricket and non-cricket. In cricket, the broadcasters don’t own any of the footage. And the two major rights holders in world cricket, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the International Cricket Council (ICC), don’t want geotargeted ads because it will jeopardise their existing sponsors.

And when most of cricket’s viewership comes from India, the rights holders would rather get Indian and major global brands as their sponsors, thereby eliminating the need to geotarget in the first place. Have a look at the ICC’s partners for the upcoming men’s World Cup:

Screenshot via ICC website

Some of the international cricket boards, such as the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), Cricket Australia, and New Zealand Cricket, have tried geotargeted virtual ads for the Indian market. Last month, Reliance Industries-backed sports marketing and management agency RISE Worldwide signed a deal with the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to monetise virtual sponsorship inventory for the 2023 Ashes series. RISE has also worked with Cricket Australia in the past.

The idea was to develop a new source of revenue for foreign cricket boards in the Indian market, as the ads increase the commercial potential for rights holders and offer flexibility. According to The Economic Times, an international cricket board can earn ₹1.5-2 crore ($180,000-240,000) per match by selling virtual ad inventory for matches featuring the Indian team.

These foreign boards have tried virtual pitch mats, where Indian audiences get to see geotargeted static sponsor ads in the midwicket region of the cricket field. However, a senior executive from the media buying industry told me that they didn’t get enough traction to justify the high production costs involved, which can go into tens of thousands of dollars depending on factors such as the scale of the event, the technology used, and the level of customisation required.

“If it’s static branding only, why not just get the traditional painted pitch mats? They are cheaper, too. So, while these virtual ads were tested, there was no incremental gain for anyone to pursue it further,” they said. RISE Worldwide’s spokesperson wasn’t available for comment.

Screenshot via Broadcast Virtual

I asked the media buying executive if it’s possible to make the ads dynamic, i.e. allow multiple brands to buy time-based slots to advertise on the virtual pitch mat. They replied that it’s difficult given cricket’s format, which is vertical: the main broadcast angle that you see from behind the pitch shows the live action in a vertical alignment, where the midwicket region isn’t visible. “So, even if you try and show multiple brands on the pitch mat, you won’t derive much value unless the broadcaster cuts across to show the midwicket area again and again, which won’t happen.”

Such ads would work better in non-cricket properties like football and rugby, which have a horizontal broadcast format, and even vertical sports with smaller fields of play, such as badminton and tennis. But the problem is: there isn’t a sufficient audience for these sports in India to make it worth the while for the rights holders. “What’s the Premier League’s audience in India? 15 million? That’s hardly enough to justify the acquisition costs,” said the media buying executive.

So, in their current shape and form, virtual ads are good to have but not must-haves in India. And that’s because they’re not really solving any problem. They’re almost irrelevant in cricket, while international sports properties don’t have a large enough audience in India.

Until things change, we’ll have to be satisfied with Pandoran creatures popping out of cricket grounds every now and then.

⚡️Quick Singles

🎾🧑‍💻 Tennis legend Rafael Nadal is the new brand ambassador of Indian IT major Infosys. As part of the three-year partnership, Infosys will develop a personalised, AI-powered match analysis tool for Nadal’s coaching team, which will allow them to “simultaneously track insights from his live matches when he is back on tour, alongside historical data from his previous matches,” the company said in a statement. Infosys is also the digital innovation partner of the ATP Tour.

🏏🏆💳 After ending its partnership with the BCCI earlier this year, payments major Mastercard has signed up with the ICC as a global partner for the 2023 men’s World Cup. According to The Economic Times, an ICC global partnership costs $10 million per year. Cricket’s governing body has three categories of sponsors: global partners, official partners, and category partners, which get benefits like media integration, in-stadium branding, tickets, and hospitality. Mastercard was earlier the title sponsor for all bilateral series played in India from September 2022 to March 2023. The BCCI is still looking for a new title sponsor and has cut the base price for the rights from ₹3.8 crore ($460,000) per match to ₹2.4 crore ($290,000).

⚽️🇬🇧 After the Roman Abramovich saga last year, the Premier League is setting up a process to force “bad” football club owners to sell their shares, reported Financial Times. English football’s top flight wants to introduce a divestment protocol for club owners in the case of “disqualifying events”. However, any such rule change would require the approval of at least 14 Premier League clubs out of 20. The Premier League has previously also sought to tighten its club ownership rules.

📺💰 Bodhi Tree Systems, the investment vehicle of former Star India head Uday Shankar and former 21st Century Fox chief James Murdoch, has upped its stake in broadcast network Viacom18 from 13% to ~16%. The company purchased an additional 2.89% stake for ₹953.23 crore ($115 million), valuing Viacom18 at ₹32,983 crore ($4 billion), according to The Economic Times. The stake acquisition was financed through the money that Bodhi Tree raised from American media company NBCUniversal earlier this year, which reports pegged at around $150-200 million. Viacom18 owns the broadcast rights to properties such as the Indian Premier League (digital), LaLiga, SerieA, and the Paris 2024 Olympics.

🛒🤝🐭 Amazon has held talks with Disney about a potential collaboration for the latter’s new ESPN streaming service, reported The Information. Amazon could help distribute the new service via its OTT aggregator Prime Video Channels. The report said the tech giant could also end up taking a minority stake in ESPN, which is considering charging a high premium of $20-35 a month for the new service. Amazon’s global head of sports Jay Marine recently said that the company will be aggressive but also rational in pursuing more live sports rights deals. Amazon is currently in the second year of its 11-year, $11 billion deal with the NFL.

⚽️🇧🇷🇮🇳 Brazilian football star Neymar could play his first match in India after his club Al Hilal was drawn in the same group as Mumbai City in the AFC Champions League. The match will be played at the Balewadi Sports Complex in Pune later this year. The other teams in Group D of the Asian Champions League are Iran’s FC Nassaji Mazandaran and Uzbekistan’s Navbahor Namangan. Can’t wait to see how Indian brands try to leverage this match if Neymar does indeed travel to India!

😳 Correction

Last week’s edition incorrectly referred to Bata as an Indian brand. The error is regretted.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Thanks to the dozens of you who voted in last week’s poll. A whopping 75% of you do not watch the Indian Super League, which underlines why selling the media rights is turning out to be so toilsome for the owners. The deadline for submitting a bid was August 7, and a shortlist was supposed to be made by August 11, per The Economic Times. There has been radio silence on this front in the last week.

A big thanks also to the 34 of you who have joined The Playbook’s FPL mini-league. Meet Kachhy is off to a flyer with 86 points in gameweek 1, and currently occupies the top spot. I’d rather not state my points tally. If you want to join, here’s our league code: d5dh3d.

Now, in case the rest of you have been wondering what the hell FPL is, you’re in luck. Today’s edition is about Fantasy Premier League, the official fantasy game of the Premier League. More than two decades old, the free-to-play, season-long fantasy football game is extremely popular among Premier League fans. This season, there have been over 8.97 million sign-ups at the time of writing. By the time you read this, it’s likely to have crossed the 9 million mark. That’s 21% of the ~42 million Twitter X followers of the official Premier League handle.

Earlier this week, FPL found itself in a bit of a controversy.

Loading the dice

Photo credit: Jaideep Vaidya

On August 12, the BBC published a story that said the gambling industry has been targeting advertisements at players of Fantasy Premier League. “We found gambling ads and promotions on some of the biggest FPL-related podcasts, sites and social media feeds,” the report said. This is a huge concern since FPL is open to children—anyone over 13 can play; and if you’re under 13, all you need is a parent or guardian’s permission.

The Premier League has its own official FPL podcast that’s ad-free. However, there are also dozens of other content creators and companies that have made a business out of offering tips to millions of FPL players worldwide. They have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of followers. Andy Mears, who runs a YouTube channel called Let’s Talk FPL, has ~294,000 followers on X. His YouTube channel has 364,000 subscribers. Mark McGettigan, aka FPL General, has 228,000 followers.

There are a few popular Indian FPL content creators too, such as Pranil Sheth aka Lateriser (~88,000 followers), Utkarsh Dalmia aka Zophar (32,000), and Pras (38,000). The trio run a podcast and YouTube channel called The FPL Wire, which has over 26,000 subscribers.

The FPL Wire was among the podcasts and websites that were mentioned in the BBC story. It was reportedly carrying ads for Fairplay Exchange, a platform that offers peer-to-peer cashless betting. After the story was published, The FPL Wire put out a statement on Twitter saying that it had removed all the tweets and the three videos associated with the Fairplay campaign. It also said it won’t be accepting any compensation for this association.

Twitter tweet

There was, however, no apology. And with the shelf life of FPL content being a week at best, since you’re supposed to pick a team for every match week, deleting previous tweets and videos would not have served much purpose. The damage was already done. It’s worth noting there are currently over 150,000 FPL players from India, where gambling is illegal except for a handful of states. That said, at least The FPL Wire acknowledged what had happened.

FPL General got caught up in this too, since he had appeared as a guest on one of The FPL Wire’s episodes that ran the Fairplay campaign. He tweeted saying he was annoyed with the BBC for carrying a photo of that episode showing him in conversation with Zophar, with the Fairplay ad on the screen. McGettigan said he had “turned down numerous offers to promote gambling recently” and had “made it clear that there’s to be no gambling ads on my podcast too”.

But here’s the thing: McGettigan’s podcast, The 59th Minute FPL Podcast, is sponsored by Fantasy Football Scout (FFS), one of the largest FPL content websites. It offers articles, news, stats, and tools to help FPL managers get better at the game. It has signed on some of the top FPL content creators out there, including FPL General and The FPL Wire trio. But if you go to the FFS website, you’ll see ads from bet365, betway, and DraftKings, which are three big betting companies.

Screenshot of the Fantasy Football Scout homepage

So, where do content creators draw the line? Especially when some Premier League clubs themselves have gambling companies as sponsors. However, in April, Premier League clubs collectively agreed to withdraw front-of-shirt gambling sponsorships by the 2026-27 season.

Robert Wayne, a content creator who runs the YouTube channel FPL IQ, thinks that McGettigan was a bit hard done by because he was only a guest on The FPL Wire show. “He has personally refused gambling ads on his shows. He was just an unlucky victim who has now taught everyone in the community a lesson,” Wayne told The Playbook.

I asked Wayne how widespread gambling ads were in the FPL content community. He said that the biggest creators like Let’s Talk FPL and FPL General don’t do it, but the tier below that is flush with gambling ads. These ads are either of gambling companies or websites set up by gambling companies. And they often are about games that are modelled on FPL but have huge cash prizes.

A popular one is Fantasy 5, where you choose a team of five players instead of the 11 in FPL. If the players beat a certain fantasy points target, you stand a chance to win a big jackpot. “That’s an introduction to gambling—it’s a free game with a big cash prize,” said Wayne. “Fantasy5 is owned by BoyleSports, which is a big bookmaker.” FanTeam is another paid fantasy football game that has tied up with FPL content creators.

On the FFS website, bet365 is advertising a season-long fantasy football game with a total prize pool of £500,000. Wayne said that this was the second time FFS had tied up with the gambling company. “They first did it a couple of years ago. Back then, the whole FPL community came out and asked them to stop doing it. They did stop, but now they’ve done it again this year.”

Fantasy Football Fix, another big FPL content platform, has a no-gambling-ads policy. However, it has had gambling partnerships previously and even explained to the BBC how they worked:

Fantasy Football Hub, the third major FPL content platform, doesn’t have a betting sponsor, but it has signed up with individual creators who advertise gambling companies. Like AbuBakar Siddiq, aka BigManBakar, who has over 147,000 X followers.

Wayne explained how such partnerships work: “The gambling companies can offer content creators a deal in two ways: one is a flat fee per sign-up. So, the bigger you are, the more money you get. But the main way they do it is to offer you a cut from the rake. So, for instance, if it’s £100 to enter a competition, the company keeps £10 for itself, called the rake. The other £90 goes into the jackpot. From that rake of £10, they’ll give content creators, say, £3.”

Wayne also admitted that he had signed up for such a partnership in the past but stopped doing it after he realised its impact. “I saw someone who clicked on my affiliate link and deposited hundreds of pounds in a gambling account in a short space of time. Some of the content creators probably have no idea of the effects of their gambling partnerships. There are also no warnings or steps to protect children.”

People who play FPL, also known as FPL managers, are prime targets for gambling companies because of the nature of the game. While skill definitely plays a part, there’s also an element of prediction involved. And while FPL is a free game with no money involved, the gambling companies target FPL managers and try to lure them into their paid fantasy contents, with the ultimate goal of converting them into proper gamblers.

There isn’t much that the Premier League can do to regulate external FPL content because it’s outside its purview. An FPL spokesperson told the BBC that it reserves the right to “delete the mini-league and suspend or delete the registration of any player who is the administrator of, or a participant in, the mini-league without liability” if it finds out that the mini-league is being run for commercial purposes. But it can’t do anything about FPL content creators running gambling adverts. Gambling is legal in the UK.

So, the only way to solve the problem is if the FPL content community comes together and takes a united stand to refuse gambling adverts. What are the odds of that happening? Probably higher than Erling Haaland going goalless for an entire season.

⚡️Quick Singles

⚽️🍎🇦🇷 Apple is really squeezing the 🐐 that is Lionel Messi. According to Bloomberg, the tech giant is working on a docu-series about the footballing legend’s move to Major League Soccer (MLS) earlier this year. Apple TV+ is already working on a separate series about Messi’s journey to the 2022 World Cup win. Meanwhile, Messi is off to a flyer in MLS, scoring nine goals in six appearances for Inter Miami. In fact, the Messi effect is now at such a level that opposition coaches are pleading with their team’s fans to not sell their tickets in the resale market. Tickets for games featuring Inter Miami are selling at ~$300 each on major resale platforms, reported Front Office Sports.

⚽️🇧🇷🇸🇦 Brazilian superstar Neymar Jr became the most high-profile footballer to move to the Saudi Pro League this summer, with Al-Hilal scooping him up on a two-year deal worth a reported $300 million, excluding add-ons. With add-ons, the 31-year-old could potentially earn $400 million by 2025. Al-Hilal had already spent €178 million ($193 million) on players this summer prior to the Neymar deal. All Saudi clubs in total would now have spent more than €600 million ($650 million) just this summer. And wait till you get a load of what Neymar’s deal apparently includes:

Twitter tweet

🇮🇳🎮📺 JioCinema has joined Star Sports in the esports arena. The streaming platform has partnered with game developer Krafton India to live-stream the official Battlegrounds Mobile India Series (BGIS) 2023. Krafton claimed that over 2,000 teams have signed up for the tournament, which will have a total prize pool of ₹2 crore ($240,700). Star Sports is broadcasting the BGMI Masters Series, organised by esports major NODWIN Gaming, which also has a prize pool of ₹2.1 crore.

👟🇮🇳🇨🇭🇩🇪 Switzerland-headquartered footwear brand Bata is in talks with German sportswear major Adidas for a strategic collaboration in India, reported CNBC-TV18. The primary objective of the collaboration is for Adidas to leverage Bata’s extensive retail network of around 2,100 stores spread across 700 Indian cities, the report said. A day after the report was published, Bata issued a clarification saying that the company is “continuing to explore opportunities for strategic alliance/collaborations/tie-ups for the Indian market” and would disclose this information as and when it happens.

🏃📺 After Formula One, tennis, golf, NFL, football, and rugby, Netflix is now working on a sports docu-series on the world of sprinting, reported Deadline. The series will feature athletes from the United States, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Italy. The streaming giant is set to shoot a part of the series at the upcoming World Athletics Championships in Budapest.

😳 Correction

An earlier version of this edition incorrectly stated that Bata is an Indian brand. The error is regretted and has been corrected.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

The Premier League is back! Which means, after two-and-a-half months of stress-free weekends, it’s time to brace yourself for some heartburn again on Saturdays and Sundays. Well, if you’re a Manchester United fan at least.

If you haven’t joined The Playbook’s FPL mini-league, here’s your final chance before the season begins: our league code is d5dh3d. There are already 21 of us in the mini-league, so come join us if you’re a fellow FPL manager.

Quick shoutout to all of you who voted in last week’s poll. More than 70% of you do not own an original jersey or official merchandise of an Indian sports team. Which again underlines the challenge that brands selling licensed sports merchandise in India are up against.

Right, let’s get into this week’s edition, which is about an important current media rights auction. No, not the one you’re thinking about.

A one-horse race

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

A couple of weeks ago, the Indian Super League (ISL) invited bids for its next media rights cycle beginning in September 2023. According to The Economic Times, the league set a base price of ₹550 crore ($66.5 million) for a two-year deal that can be extended for an additional three years. At ₹275 crore a year, it’s a 37.5% jump on what Star India has reportedly been paying for the last 10 years.

The report also said that Star India is unlikely to bid for the rights again since it has been losing more than ₹100 crore from the ~₹200 crore it has been paying annually as the media rights fee. With parent Disney’s current financial struggles, it’s understandable that Star wants out.

But the thing is, Star is not just a mere broadcaster of this league. It owns 35% of it. So, in effect, if the multiple reports are indeed true, Star India is not interested in broadcasting its own league. Well, not for ₹275 crore a year at least.

While this is unprecedented by itself, The Economic Times report also said that other broadcasters, too, are unlikely to bid. One reason for this is the base price, which the broadcasters feel is too high for a property that “has not seen great traction and monetisation has been very weak”. Fair enough.

But that’s not the primary reason. The broadcasters are also reportedly unhappy with “the obvious conflict of interest”. Because Star India’s partner and majority stakeholder in Football Sports Development Limited (FSDL), the company that owns the ISL, is Reliance Industries. The same Reliance that’s disrupting sports broadcasting in India with its subsidiary Viacom18.

So, why would I as a sports broadcaster want to invest in a league that’s owned by not one but two of my rivals? Come to think of it, it’s baffling that no one considered the possibility of this scenario when the ISL was conceived more than a decade ago. Of course, back then, Reliance did not have a sports broadcast network.

It was in 2010 when the All India Football Federation (AIFF) announced that it had sold the commercial rights of Indian football for 15 years to the erstwhile IMG Reliance, a sports management and marketing agency, for ₹700 crore (~$100 million at the time). IMG Reliance was a joint venture between New York-based IMG Worldwide and Reliance Industries. The AIFF deal also gave IMG Reliance the exclusive rights to organise a franchise-based tournament that would eventually replace the I-League as India’s premier football division. The ISL was launched in late 2013, which was when Star came on board not just as a broadcaster but as a major stakeholder.

Under the original agreement, Reliance Industries had a 45% stake in FSDL, Star held 35%, while the remaining 20% was with IMG Reliance. In late 2020, Reliance bought out IMG Worldwide’s 50% stake in IMG Reliance and rebranded the agency as RISE Worldwide. Effectively, it took control of 65% of FSDL. Meanwhile, India’s largest conglomerate had also begun sowing the seeds to launch its own sports network.

But in 2013, when the ISL was launched to much fanfare, Star India got the 10-year broadcast rights. There were big statements made about the league’s potential impact, including “the opportunity to grow to an unrivalled commercial success quite unlike any other sport” and “helping India qualify for the 2026 World Cup”.

As it turned out, India hasn’t gotten anywhere close to qualifying for the global showpiece event. And while the ISL is only the second franchise-based league in India to complete a decade and has expanded from eight teams to 12, it can hardly be called an unrivalled commercial success. FSDL has never been in the black. It posted losses of ₹46.3 crore ($5.5 million) in FY22, ₹13.7 crore ($1.6 million) in FY21, and ₹27 crore ($3.2 million) in FY20, per company filings.

As for the franchises, in 2014, FSDL reportedly projected that they would turn profitable in five years. Only two franchises ended up posting pre-tax profits in FY19 (Bengaluru FC and FC Pune City) and FY20 (Bengaluru FC and Jamshedpur FC). In the case of Bengaluru FC, a significant chunk of its sponsorship revenue reportedly comes from its parent company, JSW Group.

In fact, in 2021, during peak Covid, Bengaluru FC CEO Parth Jindal wrote a letter to ISL chairperson Nita Ambani saying the club was losing ₹25 crore ($3 million) every season. He also expressed concerns about the “fragile financial condition” of the league. In the last 10 years, one franchise, FC Pune City, has shut down operations while another, Delhi Dynamos, was forced to move base to Odisha. Kerala Blasters has started selling banana chips, among other things, in a bid to diversify revenue streams.

Photo credit: ISL

In a 2022 research paper titled “The other ISL: analysing the finances of the Indian Super League (football) and its franchisees”, published in the journal Managing Sport and Leisure, authors Sarthak Mondal, Daniel Plumley, and Rob Wilson also pointed out other issues with the ISL’s structure that are unique to the league.

Firstly, only one of the franchises, Jamshedpur FC, owns its own stadium, a tangible asset that allows teams to maximise revenue streams. Two, the ISL charges a franchise fee, a practice that’s common in Indian sports leagues but not so globally. Major League Soccer comes close, but it only charges its franchises a one-time fee for entering the league.

For the first 10 years, ISL clubs have reportedly been paying a flat franchise fee of ₹12 crore ($1.4 million) every season. From the 11th season onwards, they’ll have to pay 20% of their annual revenue. However, the ISL also splits 70% of its central revenue equally with the franchises. From the 11th season, this will come down to 60%. This amount is also calculated after deducting FSDL’s expenses for organising the league, which perhaps explains why the base price has been set so high. ₹275 crore per year would be sufficient to keep the league running.

In fact, Mondal, one of the authors of the paper, believes the base price is a bit low. With 12 teams and a total of 139 matches per season, it works out to be ₹1.97 crore per game. “The IPL earns ₹104 crore per game. While we must recognise that ISL will not have the ability to sell the rights at that value, ideally the sweet spot will be somewhere between ₹3.5 crore and ₹5 crore per match,” Mondal, a sports economics lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, told The Playbook.

That would perhaps make sense for a regular league. But, as mentioned earlier, the ISL’s power dynamics are unique, wherein the league is now in effect owned by two broadcasters. Even when it was just Star India, the situation “may be causing some commercial issues for the ISL franchisees as the broadcasting rights may not be being fully realised,” Mondal and his co-authors wrote in their paper.

Photo credit: ISL

There is a precedent for this. In 2021, Star India retained the media rights for the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL), the second-most watched sports league in the country after the IPL, with a bid of ₹905 crore for five seasons. The base price? ₹900 crore. According to reports, Star India was the only broadcaster that participated in the auction.

Why was there no interest from other parties? Because Star India is also the majority stakeholder in Mashal Sports, the company that owns PKL. The broadcaster has been associated with the league since its inception in 2014. Ring a bell?

So, when Star India retained the rights by paying pretty much the base price, PKL team owners were unhappy, to say the least.

“It is unusual that a sports league is owned by a broadcaster, which has helped up to now, but if we are to realise the true potential of kabaddi then fresh money and fresh players coming in across various channels can help,” Rajesh Shah, owner of Patna Pirates, told Sportstar at the time. “I believe [other potential bidders] did not participate, even though many were very interested, because they must have felt, rightly or wrongly, that they may be disadvantaged with the league owned by another broadcaster.”

Ronnie Screwvala, owner of U Mumba, launched a more scathing attack, saying, “Nepotism played out to a sham auction...It’s disappointing that by selling off a great Indian sport to a global media company the true potential has been capped forever.”

Will there be a déjà vu with the ISL?

“I won’t be surprised if Viacom18 picks up the ISL rights for ₹600 crore, 10% above the base price, just to show the franchises that there is some value in it,” a senior official working in the sports broadcast industry told The Playbook. They requested anonymity to protect business interests.

Photo credit: ISL

You might be thinking: if that’s the case, why have an auction in the first place? Can’t the league owner and the franchises agree upon a fee and get it done with? Well, PKL tried that, and it didn’t work out. The Sportstar report said that Star India had earlier offered the franchises around ₹15 crore a year, but the team owners felt they could get a higher value from an auction. As it turned out, the ₹905-crore deal works out to be worth only ₹12 crore per year for the teams.

Holding an auction would also avoid legal complications for FSDL. The teams could argue that they aren’t getting a fair market value without an auction. “Even if it doesn’t make sense, they have to hold an auction,” says Mondal. And if no one apart from Viacom18 indeed comes to the table, FSDL can then at least say that it went to the market and didn’t stop anyone else from bidding.

What’s also likely to happen is Star exiting ISL altogether, provided the valuation is right for both Star and Reliance. Because, in theory at least, 35% of the ISL’s losses over the last 10 years would be attributed to Star. “I think Star has come as far as they could with ISL,” says a second senior official working in the sports broadcast industry. “The ecosystem has been bleeding for a while, and it seems they’ve prioritised balancing their books immediately.”

Mondal also expects Star to sell its stake to Reliance if it doesn’t bid for the rights, but adds that it’s quite possible that Star will sell its stake to an organisation that is not owned by Reliance. FSDL and Star India did not respond to an emailed questionnaire.

I asked Mondal if there’s any other example globally where a broadcaster owns a sports league. He says, “If this was a western country, the league would never have taken off the ground owing to legal challenges around anti-competition and anti-trust laws. However, since no one in the broadcasting industry really cared about Indian football 10 years ago, this was allowed to happen.”

As the old Bollywood song goes, it happens only in India.

⚡️Quick Singles

🏏🏆🇮🇳 We finally know when the ICC Men’s World Cup 2023 tickets will be available! Hallelujah! Ticket sales will be organised in a phased manner from August 25 to September 5, reported The Indian Express. You can register your interest on www.cricketworldcup.com from August 15. The ICC will then send you updates on when you can book the tickets online. The report also confirmed that there won’t be any e-tickets for the tournament. However, fans who book tickets 72 hours before a match will be given the option to receive them via courier for an extra charge of ₹140 (within India). Meanwhile, the organisers on Wednesday also announced an amended itinerary for the World Cup, with the dates of nine games changed, including India versus Pakistan.

🏏📺📉 Disney+ Hotstar continues to bleed subscribers after losing out on the IPL rights last year. The streaming platform lost 12.5 million subscribers, nearly a fourth of its user base, in the quarter ended July 1, 2023. This is the third successive quarter in which the streaming platform reported a slide. It currently has 40.4 million subscribers, down from 61.3 million in October 2022. Globally, Disney+ lost 11.7 million subscribers in the quarter, taking its total to 146.1 million. However, if you exclude India, Disney+ gained 800,000 subscribers. Just shows the power of the IPL.

🐭🎰 The Mouse House is entering the world of betting and gambling. Disney-owned sports network ESPN has signed an agreement with casino company Penn Entertainment to create an online sports betting brand called ESPN Bet. It will be a rebranding of Penn Entertainment-owned Barstool Sportsbook. Penn will operate the sportsbook and pay ESPN $1.5 billion to use its branding, access to the network’s talent, and other promotional tools. The casino firm will also give ESPN options to buy $500 million in Penn stock. Family-friendly Disney has earlier resisted entering the world of gambling.

🎲💸 Mobile Premier League (MPL) became the first company to announce layoffs following the Indian government’s recent decision to increase the amount of indirect tax that online gaming and gambling companies have to pay. The Economic Times reported that MPL will let go of 350 employees, nearly half its workforce, with the company claiming that its tax burden will increase by 350-400% once it starts paying 28% tax on the full face value of the amount deposited by users.

🎮💰 South Korean game developer Krafton, which publishes the popular title Battlegrounds Mobile India or BGMI, has announced that it will invest $150 million in Indian startups over the next two to three years. The firm has already invested around $140 million in 11 Indian gaming and content companies, including NODWIN Gaming, Pratilipi, KukuFM, and Loco. This comes about two months after the Indian government lifted a 10-month suspension on the game, albeit on a temporary basis. ICYMI, in a previous edition of The Playbook, I had written about how the Indian gaming industry is reacting to BGMI’s return.

🏏📺 Even the mighty BCCI is not immune to macroeconomic headwinds. The Indian cricket board has slashed the base price of the title sponsor rights for bilateral series played in the country to ₹2.4 crore per match, down from ₹3.8 crore, reported The Economic Times. The total base price for the three-year rights cycle beginning September 2023 works out to be ₹134.4 crore. The BCCI had recently also lowered the base price for the bilateral media rights to ₹45 crore per match, down from ₹61 crore. The board has also valued digital rights higher than television rights (₹25 crore per match versus ₹20 crore per match).

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

It’s August 4 today. In two months, the ICC Men’s World Cup begins in India. But there’s still no sign of the tickets. When the tournament schedule was rather belatedly announced about a month ago, I immediately booked an Airbnb in Chennai for India’s opening match against Australia. Hopefully, I’ll still get to go. But considering there have been reports that tickets booked online will also have to be collected physically, I’m really wondering whether it’s all worth the effort. Luckily, my Airbnb is cancellable up to a week prior to the dates.

If we Indians ourselves are being inconvenienced to such an extent, I can’t imagine why any foreigners would want to travel to India to watch this World Cup. Especially with dates to some of the games, including the marquee India-Pakistan clash, still being changed.

In case everything does work out, I’ll have to figure what to wear for the game. A regular blue t-shirt won’t do. It’s the World Cup, after all! Adidas is selling the official India jersey for ₹4,999 ($60). There’s also a slightly watered-down replica at ₹2,999 ($36), and an even more watered-down “fan jersey” for ₹999 ($12).

But in case you don’t like any of the Adidas jerseys, there’s also other official Team India merchandise you can buy.

Merching on

Photo credit: Simon Reza/Unsplash

About a month ago, FanCode Shop, the merchandising arm of sports content and streaming platform FanCode, announced it had signed an exclusive partnership with the International Cricket Council (ICC) to curate fan merchandise and accessories for the World Cup. As part of the deal, FanCode will build and operate the ICC’s online store, along with managing retail outlets across all stadiums during the World Cup.

If you browse through FanCode Shop, you’ll find India-branded t-shirts, with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) logo, selling at ₹599 ($7) after discount (MRP ₹999). There are also polos, vests, sweatshirts, joggers, shorts, and accessories such as coasters, mugs, and fridge magnets. Since FanCode is an ICC partner, you’ll get merch of all participating teams in the World Cup, but the number of India products obviously far outnumbers the rest.

Screengrab from the ICC’s World Cup 2023 store operated by FanCode

FanCode, which launched in March 2019 as a sports content platform, set up a merchandising arm about 18 months later, just ahead of the 2020 Indian Premier League. It launched with a bang, signing up six out of eight IPL teams. Today, FanCode Shop sells merch of all 10 franchises. It’s also got contracts with local and international football clubs, NBA teams, and Formula One manufacturers.

FanCode isn’t the only player dabbling in this space. One of the early entrants was The Souled Store, an e-commerce platform that specialises in licensed merchandise. Starting with pop culture (superheroes, cartoon characters, movies, and TV shows) in 2014, the company expanded to sports merchandise around 2017, when it signed up with two IPL franchises. In the last six years, it has added merch of international football clubs and even esports teams.

But most of the action in this space has been in the last two to three years, with brands such as playR, Shop The Arena, and Dudeme popping up. They’re all trying to fill the gap in the market between original jerseys sold by brands such as Adidas, Nike, and PUMA for a few thousand rupees that are unaffordable to most Indians and the fake, low-quality counterfeits that are abundantly available outside all cricket stadiums on match days for as low as ₹200 ($2.4).

India’s sports apparel market was worth ~$580 million in 2021, and is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2029, per Maximize Market Research. In terms of licensed sports merchandise, it’s a $33.5 billion industry globally, per Grand View Research. India-specific figures aren’t available. North America currently commands a 52% market share.

“There was a large gap to serve customers designs that they liked with the quality they can trust,” says Harsh Lal, co-founder of The Souled Store, which is currently selling the Kolkata Knight Riders and Lucknow Super Giants replica jerseys for ₹899 (~$11) after discount (MRP ₹1,999). It also has t-shirts, polos, and vests that are cheaper.

Replicas, the watered-down versions of the jerseys that players wear, are the most popular item, accounting for around 80% of playR’s IPL business, according to co-founder Ravi Kukreja. playR, which has licensing deals with four IPL franchises, sells replica jerseys in the ₹999-1,799 ($12-22) range.

Kukreja says the only way to deal with the threat of fakes is to bring down the price disparity between them and the originals to whatever extent possible and, at the same time, offer decent quality. “You have to give fans performance fabrics at an affordable price. At the end of the day, they’re sitting in the stands in 35-40°C temperatures, so they still need technology in terms of sweat release, etc.”

Fake IPL jerseys selling outside Chepauk Stadium (Photo credit: Jaideep Vaidya)

Brands such as Adidas and Nike even sell the player jerseys. For instance, the Manchester United home authentic jersey, which is described as “identical to the one worn by the players during official matches,” is retailing at ₹7,999 ($97) in India. None of the IPL teams do this because it’s not affordable in India and unviable to make a business out of it.

“The player jerseys use different technologies and fabrics,” says Kukreja. “It’s more about tailoring and customisation than merchandising, so it’s a completely different structure.” He adds that replicas have almost the same design as the player jerseys, with only the fabric and construction being different. “As per BCCI guidelines, you need eight points of differentiation between a player jersey and a replica. For instance, the Mumbai Indians player jersey has a gold tipping on the collar, but the replica doesn’t have it.”

Screengrab from playR’s website

Indian brands mostly import performance fabrics and get the jerseys manufactured locally through partners. T-shirts and other merchandise are completely sourced and manufactured locally. “For garment and accessory manufacturing in India, there are more than enough companies that do a very good job,” says FanCode co-founder Prasana Krishnan.

While licences for the replica jerseys are mostly exclusive, contracts for other merchandise are largely non-exclusive. For instance, Mumbai Indians has 10 different merchandise partners, but the jersey rights are only with playR. “Our licences for jerseys and cricket equipment is global exclusive. Only certain fan merchandise is non-exclusive,” says Kukreja.

With non-exclusive contracts, it’s all about distinguishing yourself from competitors. The Souled Store tried to do this with customisation and creating a curated experience that goes beyond the transaction and gets fans genuinely excited about the product and the association, says Lal.

“For example, when we tied up with Chennai Super Kings, every jersey would come in a customised CSK box and you’d get a certificate saying, ‘Hey Jaideep, thank you for supporting our men in yellow and being a part of the #Yellove army. We hope to see you at the stadium soon.’ And it was signed by MS Dhoni.”

However, Lal believes that non-exclusive deals isn’t the right way to go, at least initially. He thinks IPL teams should first create loyalty and demand among fans by working with one partner and solving for consistency, quality, and fan experience. Once there is a large enough market, teams can then have a larger set of licensed merchandise partners covering different categories or distribution channels.

FanCode’s Prasana, on the other hand, says that licensed sports merchandise is still a nascent market in India, so having lots of partners is not a bad thing at this stage. “Do you really need full exclusivity for making coasters and notebooks? It’s difficult for a single company to manage the whole range of products, from premium garments to shoes to sports equipment to accessories.”

According to Prasana, design is a crucial distinguishing factor. While a category may or may not be exclusive, the designs are exclusive to a brand. FanCode has an in-house design team and also works with external designers. The second distinguishing factor is the platform itself. Since FanCode is primarily a sports content and streaming platform, Prasana believes its ability to reach out and connect with sports fans “is second to none”.

Some of these brands also help IPL teams manage their own online stores. FanCode does it for Kolkata Knight Riders, Rajasthan Royals, and Punjab Kings, while playR is the engine behind the CSK Shop. “We are catering and doing the logistical support for our merchandise that’s sold there, and we are promoting it,” says Kukreja. “We also have a supply agreement with FanCode. We manufactured for them during the T20 World Cup [last year]. For this World Cup, we have a distribution deal with Adidas for Team India, under which we supply their products to academies, institutions, corporates, etc.”

Screengrab of CSK Shop

playR’s parent company iCOREts is into tech solutions. It’s the licensing partner for a US-based POS (point of sale) and inventory management company called Retail Pro, and is also a distribution partner for other brands. iCOREts earned about $2 million last year and has already crossed $1 million in revenue in the quarter ended June 2023, per Kukreja. It made a gross margin of 40%.

Asked how it fared during IPL 2023, Kukreja says it “could have done better”. One of the things brands still have to figure out is how to keep customers returning to the platform once the IPL, which is a 45- to 60-day tournament, ends. “Teams are doing a lot to have connections with the fans throughout the year, but they could do more,” he says.

The Souled Store’s Lal concurs, saying that sales are almost entirely only during the IPL. This is because the IPL is structurally different compared with some of the other popular global leagues.

“One, the IPL is relatively younger than most of the other leagues, especially in football,” says Lal. “Two, team loyalty is a mixed bag. Some people are loyal to teams; others are loyal to players. And if every couple of years you have major changes in team composition, it becomes difficult to identify with the same team or players over an extended period of time. Three, the IPL is only for 45 days, whereas football leagues go on for eight to nine months. It’s a much shorter time span to build loyalty.”

However, the biggest gap lies in how the IPL teams approach merchandising, he adds. “When you have a 45-day season, there’s a lot of pressure and temptation for teams to maximise that window in terms of signing as many sponsorship deals as possible. Because of that, I feel there has been a misalignment in the larger objectives, where teams have signed shorter deals and change their merchandise partner on a yearly or biennial basis. Can you instead build a long-term aspirational brand with the help of the right merchandise partner so that, tomorrow, your fans want to wear your team jersey even in the off-season and when the team is not playing well?”

Kolkata Knight Riders merch on The Souled Store

I asked Lal how The Souled Store’s Premier League merchandise of clubs like Arsenal, Liverpool, and Manchester City is faring compared with IPL merchandise. He says it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison because, with the IPL, the most popular item is the replicas, whereas in football, the Indian brands only have the licence for fan merchandise. European football clubs have official kitting partners such as Adidas, Nike, and PUMA, which exclusively sell the jerseys. Also, the average selling price of match replicas is 2.5-3x of t-shirts and other fan merchandise.

“But, very interestingly, the numbers are comparable over a 12-month period,” says Lal. “The sales that you would do in a 45-50-day period of the IPL, which is about 90% of the total year’s sales, is comparable with what we would sell for an Arsenal or Liverpool over a 12-month period. Which is quite surprising because cricket has a significantly more important space in Indian fans’ minds.”

As for how sports merchandise overall compares with entertainment and pop culture products on The Souled Store, Lal says there’s no comparison. “Sports is in the low single digits. There is a long way to go for sports brands to create the loyalty and excitement that some of the older entertainment licences have. They have built their stories and characters over decades.”

Despite these challenges, Lal claims that The Souled Store has almost always beaten whatever sales projections it set and whatever minimum guarantee targets it had with the franchises for the IPL. “But it’s taken 10 years of building The Souled Store for us to make money off the IPL teams in the last couple of years,” he says. The Souled Store scaled down its IPL partnerships to two teams for the 2023 season from six last year.

I contacted a few IPL teams to understand how they approach merchandising, but didn’t get a response until this edition was published. According to industry estimates, licensed merchandise contracts can be worth as low as ₹5-10 lakh ($6,000-12,000) per year and go all the way up to ₹2-4 crore ($240,000-480,000) depending on the team and structure of the deal.

As for FanCode, the company saw substantial growth over the previous year since fans were back in the stadiums for the 2023 IPL, says Prasana, but he again points out that the market is still at a nascent stage. “A couple of years ago, when we started, some of the teams didn’t have an official [merchandise] partner at all.”

Prasana believes that cricket is a major untapped opportunity because the market is underdeveloped compared with other sports. Football merchandise has been more actively pushed because of global brands. But in the Indian market, there is nothing mass-market that’s available, he says. “So, extending this from India cricket to IPL teams to football and other sports, there is a substantial opportunity there.”

Whether there is indeed a substantial opportunity, we’ll know in a few years.

⚡️Quick Singles

🎲🎰💸 The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council has clarified that the tax of 28% will be levied on the deposit/entry amount for online gaming, casinos, and horse racing, and not for each individual bet. The decision was not unanimous, which is rare for the GST Council, but it would bring some relief to the industry. The new tax rate is expected to come into effect in October, and there will be a review of how things are faring six months after the implementation.

(PS: Almost 70% of you guys who participated in last week’s poll believe online gaming should be taxed at the same rate as gambling at casinos.)

🏏🇮🇳📺 The BCCI is wooing Amazon and Google to bid for the media rights of its bilateral series, reported Bloomberg. There has been a lukewarm response from media companies ahead of the auction due to the global economic slowdown and poor advertising revenues. Financial consultancy EY expects the winning bid for the next five-year cycle, which will comprise 102 India matches, to be at least $750 million (~₹6,200 crore), which is almost the same price at which the rights were sold five years ago. However, the BCCI expects the value to almost double to ₹12,000 crore, per The Economic Times, while industry experts believe ₹10,000 crore ($1.2 billion) is a more reasonable estimate.

🏏🏆📺 Meanwhile, Disney Star is hoping to mop up 80% of all advertising spends on television and digital in India during the upcoming Asia Cup and ICC Men’s World Cup. The two events will see the Indian cricket team play at least 10 matches, including a minimum of two and maximum of four games against arch-rivals Pakistan. However, industry experts believe the actual figure won’t be more than 50%, per Mint. Especially since online gaming companies, which have been heavy advertisers during the cricket season, are expected to cut back on spending given the increase in taxation.

⚽️🔴👕 Manchester United has signed a new 10-year kit contract with sportswear major Adidas, reportedly worth at least £900 million ($1.1 billion). Their previous 10-year deal was worth £750 million. The new deal is the largest in Premier League history in terms of the value per season, and the second-largest in club football after Real Madrid’s €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) 10-year contract with Adidas, signed in 2019.

⛳️⚔️ The PGA Tour has added golf legend Tiger Woods to its board of directors after facing major criticism from top players over how it handled its merger with Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf. As many as 38 top golfers who had stuck with the PGA Tour and turned down enormous sums of money to join LIV Golf had written to the former after the merger was announced, saying they learned about it around the same time as the public. Woods will be the sixth player director on the board, which also comprises five independent directors.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Yesterday, the International Cricket Council released the promo for the 2023 Men’s Cricket World Cup, which India is hosting. The promo, featuring Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, was super cool. But it also served as a reminder that we’re just over two months away from the showpiece event and there’s still no news of when ticket sales begin.

Come to think of it: how does it matter, right? Even if ticket sales begin a week before the tournament, we’ll all queue up for hours in blistering heat or heavy rain to buy them. International fans be damned, amirite?

Thanks to all of you who voted in our poll last week about cricket Twitter influencers. Rather ironically, “I’m not on Twitter” got the most number of votes, which again reminded me of how much of an echo chamber and a microcosm of the real world that platform is.

Reminder that The Playbook’s FPL mini league is up and running. We’ve already got 12 members and my favourite team name so far is Oxymourinho. Nice one, Rahul Venkat! In case you’re interested in joining, our league code is d5dh3d.

A bit of housekeeping: There won’t be an edition next Friday, July 28, as we have the day off for Muharram. So I’ll see you in August after this one.

Right, let’s go.

The GST game is afoot

Photo credit: Aidan Howe/Unsplash

If you work in India’s online gaming industry, I feel for you. The last 10 days must have been a real whirlwind. For those of you who aren’t aware (and/or haven’t been reading this newsletter 🤨), India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council has recommended that online gaming, casinos, and horse racing should be taxed at 28% on the full face value of the bets.

This means that if you bet ₹100, you’ll have to pay ₹28 as tax. If it’s an online gaming operator, there’s also a platform fee of 8-15%, apart from a 30% tax deducted at source (TDS) if you win anything.

So, for instance, if you enter a two-player contest on a fantasy sports platform with an entry fee of ₹100, assuming the platform fee is 10% (₹10) per player, the prize pool is ₹180. Now, with a 28% GST, that comes down to ₹129.6. And if you win, you’ll have to pay 30% TDS, which means you’re left with ₹90.72. You’re basically losing ~₹9 despite winning. Of course, the chances of taking home a higher amount increase if you enter a contest with a bigger prize pool, but that also usually involves more players, which reduces your probability of winning.

So far, firms that offer skill-based games have been paying an 18% GST on the platform fee, otherwise known as gross gaming revenue (GGR). The GST Council recommended that online gaming, whether skill-based or chance-based, should be treated at par with gambling at casinos and race courses. And all three will be taxed at a uniform rate of 28%.

Unsurprisingly, the online gaming industry has been up in arms over the council’s recommendation. In an open letter signed by 127 companies, the industry said that taxing the full deposit value would lead to “an unprecedented 400-500% increase in GST burden, which the industry will have no choice but to pass on to 400 million Indians”. Instead, if the tax is kept to the platform fee and increased from 18% to 28%, it would lead to a 55% rise in GST quantum, which would still be “challenging but the industry supports this to be a contributor to nation-building”.

They further made their case by saying that the industry employs 100,000 people and is projected to add 500,000 jobs over the next five years. “Any negative impact on the industry will lead to companies making cuts in their spending, a majority of which goes towards employing the Indian youth, thereby resulting in significant job losses.” They also warned that users would shift to black market operators, including illegal offshore gambling platforms.

Twitter tweet

It’s not just the companies. Around 30 Indian and foreign investors in the online gaming sector, including Tiger Global, Peak XV, and Steadview Capital have also written to the government. They said the industry has attracted $2.5 billion in global funding across ~400 startups. If the GST Council’s recommendations are implemented, it would “adversely impact prospective investments to the tune of at least $4 billion in the next 3-4 years.”

On its part, India’s finance ministry said during a press conference after the GST Council’s meeting that the intent was not to shut down the industry, but rather simplify the tax collection system. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said there was a lot of discussion about the impact and revenue generation potential of the online gaming industry. Ultimately, the GST Council decided that gaming and gambling could not be taxed lower than essential items such as food products.

It should be noted that the GST Council’s recommendation was made after a process that began in May 2021, when it formed a Group of Ministers (GoM) to examine the valuation of services provided by casinos, race courses, and online gaming portals. The GoM comprised ministers from eight states. It submitted its first report to the GST Council in June 2022, where the uniform tax of 28% was proposed. However, the council asked the GoM to re-examine certain issues regarding casino taxation after a request from the Goa government.

The GoM submitted its second report at the 50th GST Council meeting earlier this month, where it said that there was no consensus among members regarding whether online gaming, horse racing, and casinos should be taxed at 28% on the full-face value of bets placed or on the platform fee. The GoM asked the GST Council, which comprises the finance minister and ministers from all 28 state governments, to take a call.

Twitter tweet

In a press release following the meeting, the GST Council said it had deliberated on the issues and recommended the following:

• Suitable amendments to be made to the law to include online gaming and horse racing…as taxable actionable claims.

• All three—casinos, horse racing, and online gaming—to be taxed at a uniform rate of 28%.

• Tax will be applicable on the face value of the chips purchased in casinos, the full value of the bets placed with the bookmaker at race courses, and the full value of the bets placed in online gaming.

These three points, which I have quoted near verbatim apart from minor tweaks for brevity and punctuation, are the root cause of the whole saga.

Let’s start with the first point. An actionable claim refers to the legal right to receive payment for goods or services provided. Examples include unpaid invoices and rent. Generally, transactions that are actionable claims are not taxable except for lottery, betting, and gambling. The GST Council now wants to add horse racing and online gaming as taxable actionable claims.

In the case of online gaming, that becomes an issue if the tax is levied on the entry amount rather than the platform fee. As an indirect tax, GST is meant to tax the actual service fee received by the platform. That’s not happening in this case. The actionable claim, which is the entry fee, is returned to the user if they win. Does that mean the GST will be credited back to the user as well?

Point two: a uniform tax rate for online gaming, casinos, and horse racing. This is an issue for firms that offer skill-based games because they believe their services shouldn’t be treated on par with the other two sectors, which fall under gambling. Indian courts have ruled that games of skill are legitimate and shouldn’t be considered gambling.

“In horse racing and casinos, you’re betting against the house. In online gaming, it’s user versus user. That’s a key differentiator, and that’s where the conflict arises,” says Abhinav Shrivastava, partner at LawNK, a Bengaluru-based law firm that deals with sports, media, technology, and intellectual property laws.

As for point three, there is ambiguity regarding where the tax will be levied in the case of online gaming. The press release says the tax will be applicable on the “full value of the bets placed”. Does that refer to the amount users add to their wallets on online gaming platforms or is it the amount entered in each individual contest?

“In a casino, you’re only taxed at the entry point and not during every transaction,” says Shrivastava. Whether you play blackjack, roulette or slots with that money, it won’t be taxed separately. You’re taxed at entry and then there’s a TDS if you withdraw your winnings.”

Photo credit: Chris Liverani/Unsplash

If online gaming users are taxed each time they enter a contest, it’ll be a death knell for the industry, adds Shrivastava. “The unit economics won't work. The smaller players won’t be able to manage it. For the bigger players too, it’ll be a significant hit.”

The larger players such as Dream11, Games24x7, and Mobile Premier League (MPL) might be able to chug along by offering so-called mega contests, with prize pools of ₹1 crore ($122,000) and above. The returns for such contests would be large enough to justify the tax. But there aren’t too many platforms that can offer such mega contests.

“The number of users who participate in such mega contests doesn’t even compare with those who participate in one-to-one or one-to-four contests,” says Shrivastava. “The transaction volume that sustains platforms lies with one-to-one and similar small contests. That’s where the platforms get their critical mass.”

Interestingly, a different arm of the Indian government has acknowledged the ambiguity in the GST Council’s recommendations. “One of the problems is that there are many interpretations of this, and it’s not fully clear even to me,” admitted Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and information technology, at The Indian Express Adda, an event organised by the English daily, on Wednesday.

Ever since the recommendations were released, Chandrasekhar has made it a point to stress that the GST Council is not equal to the government of India, since it comprises representatives from all 28 Indian states. During the Adda event, he further explained that state governments tend to look at gambling as a social evil, and they extrapolate online gaming as a surrogate of gambling. Why? Because of the “bad actors” in the industry.

“There have been people who gamed the system as gaming companies. A lot of that is determining the response of state governments,” he said. Without taking any names, he gave an example of one such bad actor based in Karnataka who “gamed the system, made lots of money, and didn’t pay any GST.” Some of these platforms have masqueraded as gaming and offered gambling, he added.

The Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI), a law enforcement agency under the finance ministry, is investigating at least a dozen online gaming companies for tax evasion. In September 2022, the agency issued a notice to Bengaluru-based Gameskraft, which operates games such as Rummyculture and Gamezy, alleging that it had failed to pay ₹21,000 crore ($2.5 billion) in GST since 2017. The company was also accused of promoting online betting through its card-based and fantasy games. However, the Karnataka High Court quashed the GST notice in May, saying it was “illegal, arbitrary, and without jurisdiction”.

On a parallel track, Chandrasekhar’s ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) has been given a mandate to create a regulatory framework for online gaming. In April, MeitY formally notified The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The notification said the ministry “may designate as many online gaming self-regulatory bodies as it may consider necessary for the purposes of verifying an online real money game as a permissible online real money game under these rules.” It also specified that the self-regulatory bodies would have to ensure that online real-money games don’t involve “wagering on any outcome”.

According to The Economic Times, MeitY has received three applications for forming these self-regulatory bodies. Even as it considers these applications, Chandrasekhar has come out and said in multiple media interviews that once the regulatory framework allowing permissible online gaming is set, MeitY will request the GST Council to reconsider its recommendation. “On the non-permissible side, you can do whatever punitive taxation that you want. But on the permissible side, we hope [the GST Council] will consider a tax regime that encourages the growth of the industry,” he said at The Indian Express Adda.

Twitter tweet

Does this mean there’s still hope for India’s skill-based gaming industry? Jay Sayta, a technology and gaming lawyer, says that the GST Council can consider MeitY’s request, but it doesn’t have to. “Taxation is different from regulation. And the GST Council is a separate body comprising members from all the states. So, it doesn’t matter what MeitY says. They can totally disregard whatever request comes in, and they may probably do so.”

At the press conference following the GST Council meeting, the finance ministry was also asked whether it would synchronise with MeitY. Sitharaman replied that the ministries and GST Council will “make sure we’re in constant touch with each other.” But she also clarified that MeitY’s job is to look at regulation, while her ministry will look at it purely from the taxation standpoint. “Even as I say that, we will still align with whatever MeitY wants to bring in as the regulation.”

Sayta also pointed out that the GST Council’s recommendation has to be passed by the Parliament and all 28 states. Only then will it come into force. “Few states have also written to the council requesting a reconsideration, so we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out in the next few weeks and months.”

So, the status quo remains for now. If you’re a user of any of the skill-gaming operators, you’ll still only have to pay an 18% GST on the platform fee for the time being. But what’s clear is that the government wants to rein in the proliferation of platforms that push the boundaries of skill-based gaming. There are over 1,000 gaming startups in India, per market research firm Tracxn. Revenue from transaction-based games in the country touched ₹10,400 crore ($1.2 billion) in 2022, up from ₹7,500 crore ($914 million) the previous year, according to a report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry and consultancy firm EY.

It’ll be interesting to revisit these figures a year from now.

⚡️Quick Singles

🇮🇳💉 A four-year investigation by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) into India’s anti-doping programme exposed a slew of missed dope tests, a faulty result management system, and whereabouts failures, reported The Indian Express. WADA, in its report, said it monitored 13 “high-level” Indian athletes ahead of the 2022 Commonwealth Games and found that one of them tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Meanwhile, many star Indian male cricketers were not even tested in 2021 and 2022.

📺🏈🚴 Buoyed by the success of its latest sports docuseries Quarterback and Tour de France: Unchained, Netflix has reiterated that it’s sticking to “sports-adjacent programming” rather than getting into live sports streaming. For now. “We really think that we can have a really strong offering for sports fans on Netflix without having to be part of the difficulty of the economic model of live sports licensing,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

⚽️🇺🇸💰 Major League Soccer (MLS) could join the National Hockey League, or NHL, and National Basketball Association, or NBA, in allowing sovereign wealth funds to invest in its teams. MLS board members will discuss the matter at a meeting next week. It’ll be interesting to see if Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund takes up the offer after the country’s football league failed to convince Lionel Messi to join it. Messi chose the MLS instead, where he will play for David Beckham’s Inter Miami.

⚽️🌏🏆 FIFA fell short of its target to earn $300 million through selling broadcast rights for the 2023 Women’s World Cup, which began on Thursday, by about $100 million, reported The Wall Street Journal. This is the first time FIFA sold the Women’s World Cup broadcast rights separately. Earlier, it gave away the rights for free to broadcasters who purchased the rights for the men’s World Cup.

🎮🇺🇸🇯🇵 Microsoft and Sony patched up and agreed to a 10-year deal to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation, should the American tech behemoth’s $75 billion purchase of publisher Activision Blizzard go through. Sony had earlier declined to enter deals with Microsoft and publicly opposed the Activision acquisition. The Japanese company was worried that Microsoft would make the hugely popular Call of Duty game exclusive to its Xbox console. Microsoft has also signed 10-year licensing deals for Activision games with other companies, such as Nintendo.

🏋️🇦🇺 The Australian state of Victoria has pulled out of hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games because of a burgeoning budget. The state government said the cost of hosting the 12-day event had shot up from an earlier estimate of A$2.6 billion ($1.75 billion) to A$7 billion ($4.72 billion). This leaves the Commonwealth Games Federation less than three years to find a new host. Meanwhile, the Gujarat government denied media reports that it was interested in hosting the Games in Ahmedabad. It said that it’s focused on bidding for the 2036 Olympics.

If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Thanks to the dozens of you who voted in our poll last week about whether “violent” games such as PUBG and Fortnite should be included in events such as the Olympics and Asian Games. It was tight: “No” edged it with a 54% vote share. But I liked Yash’s response the best: “This is literally the same committee that has allowed Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin to host the Olympics. Not to mention China. Saying they won’t promote violence is a bit rich.” Needless to say, Yash voted “Yes”. 😄

Meanwhile, The Playbook’s FPL mini league is up and running. In case you’re interested in joining, our league code is d5dh3d.

So, are you on Threads yet? I signed up last week (@jaideepjourno) to check what the fuss was all about. It was fun at first seeing what others are threading posting about on Meta’s new hashtag-less clone of Twitter. But a week in, I’m already starting to get a bit bored.

If you’re already on Twitter and Instagram, the accounts you follow are mostly posting the same stuff. And the algorithm also dishes out posts from influencers you don’t follow, which can get a bit annoying. Although, I’m really digging the fact that my timeline is not full of hate, abuse, and trolling. Yet.

Right. Before this turns into a tech newsletter, let’s dive into today’s story. It starts with a thread.

How to be a fanfluencer

Photo credit: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

About a week ago, Indian Premier League franchise Rajasthan Royals opened a Threads account. Its first post was this:

“can’t promise that we’ll be faster than Johns or Mufa but we’ll try 👍”

In case you’re not on Twitter (in which case I really envy you), Johns and Mufa refer to Johns Benny and Mufaddal Vohra, two of the most popular influencers on cricket Twitter. They’ve got over 349,000 and 619,000 followers, respectively. According to social media analytics firm Notus, they’re the 58th and 53rd most influential people in the world. The only other Indian placed above them on this leaderboard is Prime Minister Narendra Modi (50th), who has 90 million followers on Twitter.

How did they manage to become so influential?

By tweeting relentlessly.

On July 12, the first day of the first Test between India and West Indies, Benny tweeted 52 times. His first tweet was at 7.52 am, which was about news agency PTI’s story rubbishing Pakistani media reports that Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) secretary Jay Shah would be travelling to the country for the Asia Cup. His last tweet for the day was at 2.43 am on July 13, with the final score on day one of the first Test. He was up tweeting again at 8.04 am.

On April 29, the day of the Indian Premier League (IPL) final, Vohra tweeted 150 times, starting at 7.41 am with a photo of the early morning sun in Ahmedabad, the venue for the final. His final tweet was at 5.28 am the following day: a photo of Chennai Super Kings (CSK) cricketer Ruturaj Gaikwad and his partner holding the IPL trophy. That was two-and-a-half hours after CSK captain MS Dhoni lifted the trophy at around 3 am, following a rain-delayed final.

What do they tweet about?

Anything and everything related to cricket: pictures, screenshots, videos, stats, news updates, press conference quotes… you name it. And the posts aren’t restricted to on-field action. Yesterday, Vohra posted a pic showing cricketer Dinesh Karthik with his family at Disneyland Paris, and another one with a group of kids wearing Sanju Samson masks at an ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup trophy tour event. Those tweets were liked by over 13,000 and 7,000 people, respectively.

A lot of their frivolous posts are also centred around stars such as Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni, and Rohit Sharma. If you scroll through Benny’s account right now, you’ll find a lot of Dhoni stuff. Dhoni fans would argue it’s expected, considering it’s the legendary cricketer’s birthday month. So, I picked a random month: November 2022. Johns and Mufa had posted 34 and 19 tweets, respectively, mentioning Dhoni in that month. These included videos of him dancing at someone’s birthday party, photos of him playing tennis, pics of Dhoni fans at the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Qatar, and one just with the caption “MS Dhoni’s latest picture”.

Twitter tweet

Of course, not all their posts are frivolous. If you’re a hardcore cricket fan and want to keep yourself updated with whatever is happening in the world of cricket without missing a single thing, just create a Twitter list with Johns and Mufa. But you don’t really need to follow both of them because there’s only so much anyone can tweet about one sport, and they eventually end up posting versions of the same stuff. In fact, there have been instances when Johns and Mufa posted the same screenshot or wrote about the same topic just seconds apart, which led to some followers speculating whether broadcasters send them content to tweet. There is also a conspiracy theory that Johns and Mufa are one person.

“No, no, nothing like that,” says Johns, laughing, when I ask him about this conspiracy theory. “When there is a live game, many people end up posting screenshots of the same moments. Broadcasters don’t send screenshots. If I need engagement, I need to do it myself.”

Johns, 25, hails from the coastal district of Ernakulam in Kerala. His Twitter bio describes him as a fan of the IPL, and actors Mohanlal and Vijay. And in what’s probably a self-deprecatory riposte to the haters, he describes himself as a “cringe guy”. His Twitter handle, @CricCrazyJohns, is pretty self-explanatory. “I’ve been crazy about cricket since I was 10-12 years old,” he says.

Like millions of Indians, Johns is an engineering graduate who found his calling in a completely different industry. He currently works at sports news portal Sportskeeda on the social media team. “I help update their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.,” he says. It’s the ideal job for a Twitter influencer with nearly 350,000 followers.

Johns joined Twitter in June 2016, when he was still studying. Prior to that, he used to be active in Facebook groups related to cricket. But he eventually realised that Twitter was a better and faster source of news since there were more journalists and media organisations active on it compared with Facebook. “It was also easier for people from across India and worldwide to discover you on Twitter, which was not possible on Facebook,” he says.

In the initial couple of years after joining Twitter, Johns wasn’t very active. His first tweet in November 2016 was, unsurprisingly, a stat during a Test series between South Africa and Australia. He started becoming more active in 2018-19 ahead of the men’s World Cup. “But the real boost came during the lockdown, when I became really active and started getting followers. I used to dig up stats before the match and then post them during the game.”

Twitter tweet

Apart from posting a lot more, Johns says that he didn’t do anything drastically different in terms of the content. “It’s just that many people joined Twitter during the lockdown, and I also posted more frequently. If you are really consistent in posting and interacting with people, you can easily get followers. Earlier, there were only one or two people in cricket Twitter who had over 100,000 followers. But in the last one year, many people have crossed 50k and 100k,” he says. Like @CricCrazyNiks (79,000 followers), @CricketMAN2 (120,000), and @FarziCricketer (151,000).

Johns first realised that he had become an influencer when a brand approached him to post a sponsored tweet during IPL 2020. Brands usually pay a few thousand rupees per tweet. Some of them offer bulk packages for 10 or 20 tweets (₹5,000-₹20,000 per tweet) during a big event like the IPL or World Cup.

“Brands use influencers not to ‘amplify’ campaigns but for a larger narrative-framing exercise leading up to a key event,” says Siddharth Raman, deputy CEO at Sportz Interactive, a Mumbai-based sports content and technology solutions firm. “It’s not like they just get them to post one tweet. It’s about using the influencer to build a narrative over a period of two to three months that’ll help achieve the brand objective.”

Another way in which broadcasters, teams, and sports event organisers use influencers is by feeding them exclusives. The influencers then “break” the news on Twitter, which helps them build their credibility. And the client is also ensured that the information they’ve released is reaching that particular sport’s or team’s community of hardcore fans, rather than a traditional vanilla press release. The exclusives could include news about ticket sales, squad announcements, captain announcements, player purchases, etc.

For instance, Johns “broke” the news about batter Evin Lewis joining the Royals for IPL 2021.

Such collaborations usually do not involve any payment, although clients have been known to send the influencers gifts and merchandise.

Twitter tweet

A similar collaboration is when broadcasters take some of these influencers on all-expenses-paid trips to an overseas tournament. Johns travelled to Qatar for Legends League Cricket with Star Sports earlier this year, and to the Caribbean for the India-West Indies T20 series last year with FanCode.

“We’ve always believed that these influencers are much more closely connected with fans,” says Yannick Colaco, co-founder of FanCode. “Creating content with them is more likely to engage fans than doing it in a silo. So, for the India tour of West Indies last year, instead of sending a full crew, we partnered with a number of these influencers and took them for the games. We worked with them to figure out how to create content for fans in the digital universe outside what is standard: short-form video content pre-match, post-match, and during the game.”

Such collaborations help a broadcaster achieve two objectives, explains Colaco. One is awareness: to make their community aware that the content they want to watch is available on FanCode. And two, it’s about engaging with those fans and figuring out what excites them. “We’ve even used influencers to get feedback about some of our product development. Do they like six-minute highlights or three-minute highlights? Do they like X feature or Y feature?”

Twitter tweet

I ask Colaco whether collaborating with influencers is more impactful than doing a promoted tweet, which can cost anywhere between $10 and $5,000 per day. He says there’s no comparison. “Working with influencers is not about paying them to put up a post. It’s about working with them and creating value for their community of deeply engaged and core fans of the sport. If we are able to do that, those fans automatically become more engaged and it automatically creates value for our property.”

A senior official working for an Indian sports broadcaster adds that Twitter’s ad tech is quite poor compared with Facebook and Google, so it doesn’t make much sense to do a sponsored ad on the microblogging platform. “If you ask any chief marketing officer what’s their budget allocation for Twitter sponsored posts, it’ll be like less than 1% of what they spend on Facebook and Google,” says the official, who requested anonymity as they wanted to protect business interests.

Moreover, users have a natural tendency to scroll past a promoted tweet, which isn’t as visual or interactive as, say, an Instagram ad. Twitter ads might work well for marketing campaigns during a big launch, when brands are focusing more on traditional media metrics like reach and frequency, and want to reach out to as many people as possible. But the kind of content that influencers usually put out is very different.

After the 2023 IPL, Sportz Interactive did an analysis of the IPL social media ecosystem. There were two billion engagements on social media, out of which 1.8 billion came via Instagram, says Raman. “Twitter just gets that share of mind space because it’s breaking news, and tweets very easily become a source of millions of articles and listicles.”

Instagram has its own bunch of cricket influencers, such as @cricsledges, @cricketcringe, and other creators who collaborate with cricket brands, such as Danish Sait, Karan Sonawane (@focusedindian), Viraj Ghelani, and Sourabh Ghadge. But unlike Twitter, there aren’t any core fans who are popular on the platform, says Raman.

“Given the visual nature of Instagram and popular formats (Reels, Stories, etc), it is more conducive for entertainment and meme-worthy content. So, if you see how brands use influencers on Instagram, it’s very different from what they do on Twitter. It’s not about access journalism and narrative framing; it’s about having fun and sometimes even taking a jibe at yourself as a brand with them,” he adds.

Johns has an Instagram account, with over 4,300 followers. But he hasn’t posted anything there in the last seven days. It’s not like he really needs to, considering he earns anywhere between ₹30,000 ($365) and ₹80,000 ($970) a month from his Twitter account. That’s over and above his full-time job.

Even if he wants to be more active on Instagram, it’s unlikely he’ll find the time. “On most days, I am online from 8 am to around midnight,” he says. Where does he get the drive and energy to tweet so much? “I’m getting paid for it, so it’s not a big deal,” he says, laughing.

I ask him if he has seen posts from users who criticise influencers such as himself for stat-padding and posting too many random things. He replies, rather matter-of-factly, “If you don’t post, you won't get engagement and reach. It’s not like Instagram where even if you post one video, it gets thousands of views. That’s not the case on Twitter, unless it’s a post about someone like Virat Kohli or MS Dhoni.” His response to haters and trolls is present in his bio, too: “When people hate me, I find happiness through the hate.”

How long does Johns plan to carry on being an influencer? He says he’s living in the present and concentrating on his job right now, and hasn’t thought about what will happen after five years. In five years, he might even reach a point where he won’t need a full-time job, considering how his Twitter account is growing. But that’s not how he sees it.

“Having a job is a must,” he says. “After all, you can’t predict when you’ll get suspended from Twitter, so you need to have a backup.”

⚡️Quick Singles

🏏♂️♀️💰 The International Cricket Council (ICC) has announced that its men’s and women’s events will now have equal prize money. The total prize money for the 2022 Women's Cricket World Cup was $3.5 million, while the 2019 Men’s Cricket World Cup winners England alone took home $4 million. The gap was narrower in the most recent T20 World Cups, with 2023 women’s champions Australia receiving $ 1 million, while England got $1.6 million for winning the men’s edition in 2022.

🐭🇮🇳📺 It’s looking unlikely that Star India will retain the media rights for Indian bilateral cricket after The Wall Street Journal reported that parent Disney is looking to either sell the business or get into a joint venture. Star India was among the businesses Disney inherited when it paid $71.3 billion for the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox in 2019. The valuation of the network back then was about $15 billion, but Business Standard reported that Disney is unlikely to get more than a third of that amount.

🎮🇮🇳💸 All hell has broken loose in India’s online gaming industry after the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council announced that companies will be taxed at 28% on the “full face value of bets”. Earlier, gambling attracted 28% GST, while platforms offering skill-based games were taxed 18% on their commissions only. It’ll be interesting to see whether this decision impacts the process of setting up self-regulatory bodies for online gaming. Or, for that matter, even fantasy sports giant Dream11’s new ₹358 crore ($43 million) jersey sponsorship deal with BCCI.

🏏🇺🇸 Yet another franchise cricket league was born today as the Texas Super Kings beat the LA Knight Riders by 69 runs in the opening match of the inaugural edition of Major League Cricket. There are six teams in total, out of which four are owned by IPL franchises. According to reports, the league has been infused with $120 million in funding from influential backers, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. However, the new league, broadcast in India by Viacom18, will fight for eyeballs with India’s tour of West Indies and the Ashes.

🏀🏒🇶🇦💰 Sovereign wealth fund money has finally made its way to US sport. The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) bought a minority stake in Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the owner of the Washington Capitals (NHL), Washington Wizards (NBA), and Washington Mystics (WNBA). QIA is paying $200 million for a 5% stake in a deal that values Monumental at just over $4 billion, reported the Financial Times. The NBA amended its ownership rules to allow sovereign wealth funds to invest in its teams just last year. However, they’re not allowed to buy the teams outright. For now.

If you enjoy reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Fantasy Premier League, or FPL, is back. I can’t believe it. Wasn’t it just yesterday that the Premier League season ended? Anyway, with over a month to go before the 2023-24 season begins, the makers of the popular fantasy sports game have already opened up registrations. And after vowing that I wouldn’t open the FPL app until the day before the season begins, I couldn’t help myself yesterday. I’ve already created a first draft of my FPL squad 🙈. Terrible, I know.

Anyway, if any of you are interested in joining an FPL mini league with me and other readers of The Playbook, just email me at jaideep@thesignal.co. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, apologies. Let’s get into this week’s edition, which is also about gaming.

Stretching the boundaries of ‘esport’

Photo credit: IOC Media/Flickr

It was all down to the men’s climb. Lou Bates had put Team Fuego in a strong position in the six-race final by attacking the last ~400m of the 2.7km women’s climb up the Scottish Highlands. It meant that her teammate in yellow, Martin Maertens, needed to just avoid finishing last among the four cyclists in the men’s climb to secure the top prize.

It was a short but scenic route that started in the city of Glasgow, crossed the River Clyde, and then meandered into the Scottish Highlands. It ended with a steep climb to the summit of the Sgurr, which is Gaelic for “high sharp-pointed hill”.

Just like the previous five races of the cycling final, the men’s climb saw multiple attacks and counter-attacks, with Maertens even falling to the back of the pack with ~500m to go before recovering ground in a mad dash in the final 300m.

In the end, Team Lava’s Lionel Vujasin won the race, while a photo finish had to decide the remaining three places. As it turned out, Maertens finished second, which secured his team the top prize at an Olympic event. “It’s insane, insane, cannot believe it,” said Maertens, as he finished his cool-down before getting off his stationary bike in the air-conditioned Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre.

Confused?

This was what actually happened in the final of the Zwift cycling event at the Olympic Esport Series 2023 last week. Zwift is a multiplayer online cycling game that allows users to compete in a virtual world using indoor training bikes and a screen of their choice (smartphone, tablet, TV). The Olympic Esports Series (OES) is a global virtual and simulated sports competition organised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), in collaboration with international federations and video game publishers.

Singapore hosted the first ever OES from June 22-25. It featured 10 games picked by the IOC: Zwift, Tic Tac Bow, WBSC eBaseball: Power Pros, Chess.com, Just Dance, Gran Turismo, Virtual Regatta, Fortnite, Virtual Taekwondo, and Tennis Clash.

If you’re not into gaming at all, you’ve probably never heard of any of these games, except perhaps Chess.com. If you’re a casual gamer like me, you probably know of Fortnite and Gran Turismo. More serious gamers perhaps know some of the other titles. But you’re probably wondering: where are some of the popular games? Where’s PUBG, Dota, Valorant, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike?

Well, they weren’t there because the IOC didn’t want them there. The organisation wanted only electronic versions of sports that are played in the Olympics—like Tic Tac Bow (archery) and Virtual Regatta (sailing)—and those that have recognised international federations, like Gran Turismo (motorsport) and Chess.com.

Another crucial factor in picking the games was the absence of any sort of violence. The IOC has been clear on this ever since it first discussed the possibility of including esports in the Olympics at an official forum, back in 2018. IOC President Thomas Bach had said that “killer games” or ones that promote “violence or any kind of discrimination” would never be suitable for the Olympics. “They would be contrary to our values and our principles.”

This eliminated popular first-person shooter and battle arena games such as PUBG, Counter-Strike, Valorant, Dota, and League of Legends, which are hugely popular esports titles worldwide. Fortnite, a Battle Royale game where up to 100 players compete to be the last person or team standing, was only included at the eleventh hour, in May, with some key changes: the Battle Royale element was completely eliminated. A special version of the game was created to reflect only the shooting aspect, where players had to shoot at targets instead of other players.

It made a huge difference: here’s a video of the actual Fortnite and here’s the OES version.

Unsurprisingly, this dialled-down version of Fortnite barely got any viewership during the OES. The most popular title by far, per esports analytics service Esports Charts, was Rocket League, a game where you can play football with cars 🤪. You might have realised that Rocket League wasn’t in the list of 10 games picked by the IOC. That’s because the OES also included exhibition matches for popular titles such as Rocket League, NBA2K23, and Street Fighter 6.

Rocket League, which is very popular in the esports circle, garnered a peak viewership of >22,000 during the OES and was the only game that crossed five digits, per Esports Charts. Chess.com and Virtual Taekwondo, which were actual trophy events, were a distant second and third. Exhibition games Street Fighter 6 and NBA2K23 rounded up the top five. Not many people cared about the other games.

Photo credit: Esports Charts

So, can we call the inaugural Olympic Esports Series a success?

Officials and athletes from India’s esports industry prefer to see the bright side, and believe it was a positive first step to legitimise esports. Lokesh Suji, director of the Esports Federation of India and vice president of the Asian Electronic Sports Federation, says the IOC has done a great job in democratising esports, which is an important first step in legitimising it.

“They picked games that the general public can relate to. For instance, in Tic Tac Bow, there’s a bow and arrow, and you have to shoot the targets. It’s easy to understand. As is Rocket League, where you have cars playing football instead of humans. But games like Dota and PUBG are complex to understand if you’re not a gamer,” adds Suji.

Animesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of esports talent management agency 8Bit Creatives, says he was disappointed with the choice of games for the OES, but adds that the positives definitely outweigh the negatives.

“It’s unfortunate that games that are played across the globe in tournaments with millions of dollars in prize pools are not accepted in their current form,” he says. “However, an organisation like the IOC will always have some internal policies. It’s a good stepping stone, though. Eventually, gaming is coming into the limelight, which will help the ecosystem in some way. You are also nudging the government to recognise that there is something in this industry.”

Photo credit: IOC Media/Flickr

This is also why India’s esports industry is pinning its hopes on the upcoming Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, where esports will be a medal event for the first time. The Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) has picked eight games: FIFA, Dota 2, League of Legends, Three Kingdoms Dream 2, HearthStone, Street Fighter V, and “Asian Games versions” of PUBG Mobile and Arena of Valor.

As you can see, the OCA has been far more liberal in its choice of games, although, like OES’ Fortnite, it has also asked developers to create non-violent versions of PUBG Mobile and Arena of Valor. The PUBG Mobile Asian Games version, for instance, will highlight real-sport game experiences like parachuting, cross-country shooting, and racing, rather than Battle Royale.

“The Asian Games have been truer to the spirit of esports,” says Anurag Khurana, founder and CEO of esports company Newgen Gaming. “Although, I wouldn’t say they have been liberal. I’d rather say the IOC has been very conservative (laughs).”

He also points out that the Asian Games has a fair headstart over the Olympics in terms of warming up to esports. At the 2018 Asian Games, esports was a demo event, a sort of trial run before becoming a medal event for the 2022 Asian Games, which were postponed by a year due to the pandemic. So, the OCA was far better prepared than the IOC, which reflects in the games they picked.

This has worked in India’s favour, too. Unlike the OES, where there was no representation from the country, 18 Indian esports athletes will be flying to Hangzhou: Charanjot Singh and Karman Singh Tikka (FIFA); Mayank Prajapati and Ayan Biswas (Street Fighter V); Shikhar Choudhary and Karthik Varma (Hearthstone); Akshaj Shenoy, Samarth Arvind Trivedi, Mihir Ranjan, Aditya Selvaraj, Aakash Shandilya, and Sanindhya Malik (League of Legends); and Moin Ejaz, Krish, Abhishek, Ketan, Darshan, and Shubham (Dota 2).

Esports in India is booming: it’s expected to be a ₹1,100 crore ($137.5 million) by FY25, according to a report by Ernst & Young. The total prize pool for esports tournaments in the country will be worth ₹100 crore ($12.5 million) by that year. ICYMI, in a previous edition of The Playbook, I had written about the return of BGMI and what it means for India’s esports industry.

So, with esports already becoming a lucrative career option in India, does participating in events such as the Olympics and the Asian Games matter for Indian professional gamers?

It matters a lot, says Akshaj Shenoy, captain of India’s League of Legends team at the Asian Games. “Earlier, I used to play for fun and competitively in tournaments. But now that I’m representing my country, it’s a completely different feeling: the opportunity to win a medal for my country. Every second I spend on the game, I focus on improving myself and ensuring I make my country proud,” he says.

Photo credit: Asian Electronic Sports Federation

I ask Shenoy what he thinks about the decision to disregard or modify games because of their violent nature. The 21-year-old says that the youth find these games attractive, but it depends on how each person describes esports. “I don’t think excluding such games makes sense. And if you modify them to remove the Battle Royale aspect, it does take away from the essence of the game. But then, there have been incidents where people get wrongly influenced by such games, resulting in tragedies. So, maybe the publisher can do more to make sure there is a disconnect between the game and reality.”

Overall, though, everyone I spoke to believe the OES and Asian Games are helping promote esports. They’re helping change people’s perspectives about video games, which is important in a country like India, where one of the biggest challenges for esports is getting parental approval, says Suji. “If the Olympics starts including esports, parents will also think that their children can go and win medals for the country.”

In the 2018 Asian Games, where esports was a demo event, India’s Tirth Mehta won a bronze in Hearthstone, an online digital collectible card game. “Back then, nobody used to play Hearthstone. But because of that medal, people started playing it,” says Khurana.

That medal didn’t count in India’s overall tally, but it will during the 2022 edition. And the good thing for Indian esports is that the five games we’re participating in are all proper esports titles. “If everything goes well at the Asian Games, I think it will give a huge boost to the industry. It could lead to a huge influx of players, which directly affects the viewership and audience,” says Shenoy.

No pressure.

⚡️Quick Singles

🏏🇮🇳👕 Fantasy sports giant Dream11 will be the Indian cricket team’s new lead jersey sponsor, replacing beleaguered edtech company BYJU’S. According to reports, Dream11 bought the rights for the next three seasons at the base price of ₹358 crore ($43 million), which is 40% less than the previous winning bid. The firm will pay ₹3 crore for every bilateral match and ₹1 crore for India’s matches at the International Cricket Council’s and Asian Cricket Council’s tournaments. Broadcaster Disney Star was the only other company that had bought the tender document for the auction.

🏏🌏👕 FanCode, the streaming and e-commerce platform owned by Dream11’s parent company Dream Sports, has become the official merchandising partner for the upcoming 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup. FanCode will sell official fan merchandise and accessories for all 10 teams participating in the tournament via retail outlets at stadiums and online. The platform also sells merchandise for teams and leagues such as Rajasthan Royals, Manchester City, Liverpool, and the NBA.

🏏🇮🇳💰 The 2023 season of the Indian Premier League attracted advertising revenue worth ₹10,120 crore ($1.2 billion), according to a report by market research firm Redseer. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), franchise owners, and broadcasters earned 65% of this amount directly, while the remaining was gathered indirectly. Broadcasters Star Sports and Jio Cinema had the highest share (₹4,700 crore), followed by the franchises (₹1,450 crore) and BCCI (₹430 crore). The same report also said that Indian fantasy sports platforms’ revenue grew by 24% year-on-year to ₹2,800 crore during the two-month-long tournament.

🇸🇦⚽️⛳️ Saudi Arabia, which has gone all guns blazing in golf, football, tennis, and Formula One in the last 18 months, now wants to really spell out that it means business in the world of sports. The Financial Times reports that the kingdom is set to launch a multibillion-dollar sports investment group that will be a part of its sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. Meanwhile, the Saudi Pro League, which has attracted footballers such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, and N’Golo Kante, is considering opening itself up to foreign private equity, according to Bloomberg.

🏏🇺🇸📺 The inaugural season of the US-based Major League Cricket (MLC) will be shown on Sports18 and JioCinema in India, with broadcaster Viacom18 winning the media rights. MLC features six teams, out of which four are owned by IPL franchises: MI New York, LA Knight Riders, Texas Super Kings, and Seattle Orcas (Delhi Capitals). The two other teams are the San Francisco Unicorns and Washington Freedom. The first season of MLC begins on July 13.

🏏🇮🇳🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 RISE Worldwide, the sports marketing and management agency owned by India’s largest conglomerate Reliance Industries, has signed a deal with the England and Wales Cricket Board to monetise virtual sponsorship inventory in the ongoing Ashes series for the Indian market. This type of sponsorship will allow Indian companies to advertise their brands on the field and in the stadium during the Ashes virtually on air. Another Reliance company, Jio, had used this mode of advertising during the Premier League last season.

🏎️🇺🇸 After his football club Wrexham’s memorable promotion to the English Football League, Hollywood actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds has set his sights on Formula One. Reynolds’ investment group, which includes other celebrity American investors, has bought a 24% stake in the parent company of the UK-based Alpine team for $218 million. The deal will value Alpine, which is owned by French automaker Renault, at around $900 million.

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Quick programming note: there won’t be an edition of The Playbook next Friday, June 30, as we at The Signal are taking the day off for Eid.

Two weeks after that blue team in Manchester did something historic, I’m ready to talk about football again. Well, more like I had to. Because every time you open Twitter or check the news, there’s something bonkers happening in the football world.

The Saudis are here to stay

Photo credit: Saudi Pro League

On June 21, sports broadcaster and former footballer Gary Neville went on a bit of a rant, which isn’t uncommon. He told BBC Sport that the Premier League “should put an instant embargo on transfers to Saudi Arabia” to make sure the game’s integrity isn’t damaged.

Later that day, Neville’s colleague Jamie Carragher tweeted this:

Twitter tweet

Essentially, they’re both calling for the authorities to investigate the recent spurt in the world’s top players leaving the Premier League and joining Saudi Arabian clubs. But for two different reasons.

Before we get to them, here’s what has happened over the last few days: Premier League players such as Ruben Neves, N’Golo Kante, Edouard Mendy, Hakim Ziyech, and Kalidou Koulibaly have either already signed deals with or are close to joining Saudi Arabian clubs. The last four are all Chelsea players, while there have been reports that fellow Blues Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Romelu Lukaku have also been approached. Earlier this month, French striker and Ballon d’Or winner Karim Benzema moved from Spanish giants Real Madrid to Al-Ittihad. The Jeddah-based club beat Al-Nassr, where Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo plays, to the Saudi Pro League title last month.

Now, let’s take a look at why the two English pundits are upset over these moves.

Neville, a former Manchester United captain, is suggesting that Premier League club Chelsea may be cheating financial fair play (FFP) rules by selling its surplus players—and there are a lot of them—for inflated fees to Saudi clubs. His concern arises from recent reports linking Chelsea with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which recently bought majority stakes in the Saudi Pro League’s four biggest clubs. It also owns Premier League club Newcastle United since late 2021.

Here’s what we know: a consortium led by American billionaire Todd Boehly bought Chelsea for £2.5 billion ($3.2 billion) last year. But while Boehly was the face of the consortium, the majority shareholder is an American private-equity firm called Clearlake Capital. And the PIF has invested in Clearlake, which was reported by The Daily Mail last year itself.

Chelsea then spent £600 million on buying players over the last two transfer windows. And it didn’t have too many outgoings, which led to a highly inflated squad with over 30 senior players. Unsurprisingly, the club finished 12th in the league—the lowest since the mid-1990s—in a season that saw it have four head coaches and ended with one win in its last 14 matches.

Ahead of the 2023-24 season, Chelsea needs to trim its squad and balance its books to meet FFP regulations. And now, just like magic, the PIF-backed Saudi clubs have come and said, “Hey, we’ll help you cut your flab and pay you for it.”

Twitter tweet

So, are Chelsea and the PIF cheating? It’s surely a conflict of interest, at least? That’s what Neville wants investigated. And until then, he wants a ban on player transfers to Saudi Arabia. He also said this on Instagram:

This is why the UK government’s recent white paper on football governance includes a requirement for clubs to declare their ultimate owners. And Chelsea have done this. On the website of the UK registrar of companies, the names of Boehly, Clearlake’s co-founders, and other individual investors are all present, per The Athletic. Chelsea isn’t hiding anything about its ownership.

Which brings us to the PIF-Clearlake connection. Clearlake is the 14th-largest PE firm in the world, per Private Equity International, a data provider for the industry. Founded in 2006, Clearlake has raised nearly $44 billion so far and has $72 billion of assets under management. Reports suggest it has 300 institutional investors, including sovereign wealth funds, spread across six continents. The firm also reportedly doesn’t allow any investor to account for more than 5% of a fund, and its average investor owns less than 1% of a fund.

So, even if PIF has invested in Clearlake, it doesn’t mean the sovereign fund can do what it pleases. As a partner at a US-based private equity firm told The Athletic, “Wouldn’t PIF be using Newcastle United if this was their plan, not Chelsea? The reality is all the sovereign-wealth funds are in all the big, global private-equity funds, from Australia to Abu Dhabi, Canada to PIF.”

Also, as CBS Sports journalist Ben Jacobs pointed out in a Twitter thread, Chelsea wanted to keep Kante but lost him on a free transfer. It also “sold Koulibaly and Ziyech for pretty modest fees and at a loss. Mendy turned down a new deal last year so was always likely to leave.”

He added that no one has forced the Chelsea players to pick the Saudi clubs, while some like Lukaku have turned down an offer. As did Lionel Messi, who’s never played for Chelsea, but we’ll come to that later. And none of the reported transfer fees for the Chelsea players who want to go to Saudi are anywhere close to the £47 million ($60 million) Wolverhampton Wanderers got from Al-Hilal for Neves.

Twitter tweet

So, it seems like Neville and others talking about the PIF-Clearlake links and conflict of interest are reading a bit too much into it. However, there’s no denying that the optics of the whole thing aren’t great.

Now, if something like this happens…

Twitter tweet

…then it’s a whole different story. And honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen. Football is, unfortunately, broken.

Which brings us to what Carragher, the former Liverpool defender, tweeted. He’s got a problem with Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing, referring to the notion that the oil-rich kingdom is using its wealth to invest in sports to whitewash its global image. Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticised for its human rights record, especially the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate.

It’s great that Carragher, who has 2.2 million Twitter followers, is talking about Saudi’s sportswashing. But the timing is suspicious. There was hardly any hue and cry about sportswashing when Gulf states with poor human rights records started buying Premier League teams, starting with Manchester City by the UAE in 2008, and bringing the best players in the world to England.

But now that the world’s best players are leaving the Premier League and going to Saudi, it’s time to cry sportswashing? Note that Carragher and Neville are both contracted with Sky Sports, which is an official broadcaster of the Premier League in the UK. If the best players in the world start leaving the Premier League, Sky is directly affected.

Neville also spoke a lot about Qatar’s sportswashing ahead of the 2022 Fifa World Cup, but that didn’t stop him from taking on a commentary contract from a Qatari broadcaster during the tournament.

Whatever said and done, there’s no denying that the Saudis are here to stay. The country has the money to sign any player it wants. It’s just a matter of whether the footballer wants to go play there. It’s kind of reminiscent of the Chinese Super League attracting world-class players with lucrative contracts a few years ago. In 2016, China unveiled a plan to make the country a “world football superpower” by 2050. Eventually, it didn’t last very long due to poor financial decisions, corruption, and the pandemic.

However, unlike China, the Saudi Pro League is more centralised. The league, and not the clubs, negotiates player transfers and assigns them to the teams. It’s a model similar to the MLS. And what’s more, four of the biggest Saudi clubs are now owned by the PIF, which has a seemingly bottomless war chest.

The GOAT goes west

One footballer who has turned down a very lucrative contract—reportedly €400 million ($438 million) per year—to play in the Saudi Pro League is Lionel Messi. Two weeks ago, the footballing 🐐 confirmed his decision to leave Europe, where he was playing for Qatar-backed Paris Saint-Germain, and join Major League Soccer (MLS) club Inter Miami in the United States.

Earlier this week, sports business portal Sportico reported that Messi’s two-and-a-half-year deal with Inter Miami, which is owned by fellow footballing legend David Beckham, is worth up to $150 million, including his salary, signing bonus, and equity in the team. It does not include the revenue-sharing agreements the 35-year-old has signed with MLS partners Apple, Adidas, and Fanatics, which are still being negotiated, per the report. The deal also does not include the option for Messi to buy an MLS club, as was the case with Beckham in 2007.

As reported by Forbes, Messi was smart to pick a team based in the state of Florida, which has no income tax. As a result, it also doesn’t have a “jock tax”.

Messi wouldn’t want any tax-related complications after what happened to him a few years ago. In 2013, when he was playing for Spanish club FC Barcelona, the country’s tax authorities alleged that Messi’s father used a series of shell companies in tax havens to evade taxes related to royalties and income his son earned from deals with brands such as Adidas, Pepsi, and Procter & Gamble. Messi used the “I’m a footballer, I don’t know anything about taxes” argument, but the court didn’t buy it and sentenced him and his father to 21 months in prison in 2016. Of course, the sentence was only on paper.

Now, Messi might have rejected a move to Saudi for a seemingly less lucrative contract in the US, but that doesn’t mean he’s not getting any money from the Gulf state. As you might be aware, Messi is also a Saudi Arabia tourism ambassador since last year. He even has his own landing page on the Visit Saudi website.

Instagram post

Last week, the New York Times revealed the details of this multimillion-dollar deal. Messi could earn as much as $25 million over three years “for little actual work: a few commercial appearances, a handful of social media posts and some all-expenses-paid vacations to the kingdom with his family and children. He is expected to share images of those trips — marked with a Saudi-approved hashtag — with his vast online following.”

And, of course, Messi is not allowed to say anything that could “tarnish” the reputation of Saudi Arabia.

Since when did “charitable work” include compensation, that too $2 million?

Like I said, football is broken.

⚡️Quick Singles

🏏🇮🇳 Stung by the premature exit of BYJU’S, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has reportedly set a low base price of ₹350 crore ($42.6 million) for its lead sponsor rights. In per-match terms, it’s ₹3 crore ($366,000) for bilateral series and ₹1 crore ($122,000) for global tournaments, including World Cups and the Asia Cup, per The Economic Times. BYJU’S, which was paying the BCCI just over ₹5 crore ($610,000) and ₹1.56 crore ($190,000) per match for the same categories, pulled out before its contract expired at the end of 2023 due to financial constraints.

🏏🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇦🇺 The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) sold more than 80,000 advance tickets for the women’s Ashes series, which started on Thursday. That’s more than 2x the total in the 2019 women’s Ashes. This is also the first time the women’s Ashes is being marketed jointly with the men’s series, which started last week. In recent months, women’s teams in England have broken attendance records at tournaments such as Euro 2022 and Six Nations Rugby.

🏀🏒💰 The NBA, WNBA, and NHL are about to become the first American sports leagues to get investment from a sovereign wealth fund. According to reports, the Qatari Investment Authority is close to buying a small stake in Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the parent company of the Washington Wizards, Washington Mystics, and Washington Capitals. The deal will value Monumental at ~$4 billion, per The Athletic. The NBA changed its rules last year to allow sovereign wealth funds to invest in its teams.

🏀🇺🇸🇫🇷 Victor Wembanyama, regarded as the most exciting prospect to enter the NBA since LeBron James, was picked up by the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday as the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft. A generational talent with a wingspan of eight feet, the 19-year-old Frenchman’s entry into the NBA comes at a time when the league’s current media rights agreement with ESPN and Warner Bros Discovery is nearing its expiry, at the end of the 2024-25 season. It’ll be interesting to see how the next media rights battle plays out if Wembanyama lives up to the hype.

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🎮👨‍🔧🍄 Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach are all set to return in a new Super Mario RPG (role-playing game) later this year, which will be a remake of the 1996 superhit Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. It’s expected to provide a further boost to developer Nintendo, which is having a great year thanks to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which sold 10 million copies in the first three days after its release in May.

🎮🇺🇸 Electronic Arts is splitting up its game studios into two organisations, EA Sports and EA Entertainment, in a major rebranding and restructuring. With EA Games being renamed EA Entertainment, it suggests that the American company plans to expand beyond games. “We’re building the future of interactive entertainment on a foundation of legendary franchises and innovative new experiences, which represents massive opportunities for growth,” CEO Andrew Wilson said.

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

How’s it going, folks? It’s great to be back after a short vacation, during which I completely switched off and opened Twitter a grand total of zero times. I have no clue what happened in the last couple of weeks. I heard some chatter about a treble, but I think it was a silly rumour. I also heard Sunil Gavaskar got upset about something, but I didn’t bother looking it up. I’ve never been happier. Life is good! 🙃

While I catch up with what has happened in the last two weeks (and avoid all mentions of the word ‘treble’), I thought I’ll write about something that happened a few weeks ago too.

Enter the Tiger

Photo credit: IPL

Late last month, The Economic Times reported that American investment firm Tiger Global is in talks to buy a stake in Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Rajasthan Royals. The company is reportedly looking to invest $40 million in the Royals at a valuation of $650 million. The investment could be direct or through an existing shareholder of the team.

Tiger Global is among the growing list of foreign investors who want a piece of the IPL, which is worth nearly $11 billion, per a report by consulting firm D&P India Advisory. Another US-based private investment firm, RedBird Capital Partners, had bought a 15% stake in the Royals in 2021 at a valuation of over $250 million. That same year, Luxembourg-based CVC Capital Partners became the first private equity firm to own an IPL franchise outright. CVC paid a whopping ₹5,625 crore ($745 million) for the Ahmedabad-based franchise, which was later christened Gujarat Titans.

Private equity firms have been increasingly investing in sport, especially since the pandemic, which dealt a huge blow to sports organisations around the world. With teams and leagues forced to play matches in empty stadiums for months, they were forced to look for new sources of funds.

The IPL was a natural fit, with its valuation growing by 75% since 2020, per the D&P India report. This was on the back of the league fetching over $6 billion for its latest five-year media rights cycle last year. And in 2021, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which organises the IPL, earned $1.6 billion by auctioning two new franchises.

“The IPL is among the leading assets in the sports ecosystem across the world right now,” says a senior sports investment executive who requested anonymity. “There is no other sports property that has grown at this pace and cracked the top five of the most valuable global sports leagues in a span of 15 years. It’s completely unprecedented.”

What’s more, all IPL teams, apart from perhaps the two newest ones that were formed in 2021, are profitable. The league has reached a stage where teams will make a profit regardless of on-field performance.

“Even if you don't sell a single sponsorship or ticket, you are profitable,” says G Srinivvasan, an Indian sports industry veteran who’s currently CEO of Sporjo, a sports edtech and employability platform. “The BCCI gives you approximately ₹240 crore per year from the media rights kitty. If you spend ₹100 crore on players and another ₹15-20 crore on operations, you’ve still made at least a ₹100 crore profit without selling a sponsorship or ticket.”

Apart from growing at a rate of knots and being highly profitable at both a league and franchise level, the IPL also brings with it scarcity in terms of team ownership. There are only 10 teams, and it’s unclear if and when more will be added. There is a long list of potential buyers, which was clear when the last team auction was held, and none of the current owners are looking to sell.

Most of the franchises are owned by big conglomerates: Mumbai Indians (Reliance Industries), Chennai Super Kings (India Cements), Lucknow Super Giants (RPSG Group), Royal Challengers Bangalore (Diageo), Delhi Capitals (JSW Group and GMR Group), and Sunrisers Hyderabad (Sun Group). Their owners have deep pockets and don’t really need to divest. “That leaves you with only three or four teams owned by consortiums that would be open to external investment,” says Srinivvasan. This includes the Rajasthan Royals, Punjab Kings, and Kolkata Knight Riders.

Photo credit: IPL

And even these owners don’t necessarily need to dilute their stakes, with the IPL only scratching the surface in terms of potential valuations. “The IPL is only 15 years old. With India becoming the centre of the world in the next 10 years, with Jio expanding the reach of the tournament digitally with free streaming, I think the valuations can double in the next five to 10 years. There’s no need to sell right now,” says a senior sports industry executive who has worked with IPL teams.

Which brings us to two questions: why are Rajasthan Royals looking for external investment? And why is the franchise seemingly such a hit among private equity firms?

The Rajasthan Royals, which are majority-owned by United Kingdom-based sports investment platform Emerging Media Ventures, did not respond to my request to participate in this story. The senior sports industry executive says that Manoj Badale, managing partner of Emerging Media, is a seasoned entrepreneur who has built and exited businesses. So, perhaps, he also has the same vision for the Royals. However, they also point out that owning an IPL team is very different from a regular business in terms of getting an exit.

“The IPL is starting to make some serious money, so I don’t see why anyone would want to exit unless their other businesses are in a tough position and they’d want to use the funds there. When GMR sold a 50% stake in the Delhi franchise to JSW in 2018, it was because they needed the cash and not because the money was going into growth. But even if Manoj doesn’t need the cash, maybe there are other smaller investors who do need it and they’re selling their equity.”

That said, there is also a school of thought that since the IPL has already achieved a pretty decent scale, it’s a good time to bring in a private equity firm as a minority stakeholder.

“PE firms do bring a lot of value in terms of corporate governance, discipline, management structures, global expertise from other markets, setting a valuation benchmark, and aligning your organisation to more long-term thinking. All of this helps you build a brand rather than just an IPL team,” says the senior sports investment executive quoted earlier.

The Royals have built a decent brand over the last few years, especially since the RedBird Capital investment. Apart from the IPL franchise, Emerging Media also owns teams in the Caribbean Premier League and South Africa’s SA20. It operates the Rajasthan Royals Academy in five locations across three countries: India, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates. It has an edtech platform that offers 16 programmes (ICYMI, I’ve written about India’s sports edtech scene). And it has a nonprofit arm that focuses on women empowerment, among other things.

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“The Royals today are very different to what they were a few years ago,” says the senior sports industry executive. “They have a good management, they’ve made the right hires, they have a big focus on digital and tech, they’re doing reasonably well on the field and in terms of developing their academy, they were one of the first movers in sorting out first-party data, which is crucial for marketing. They have a more progressive mindset than some of the other franchises, which makes their business more appealing.”

The advantage of private equity involvement is even clearer when you look at the Gujarat Titans, owned completely by CVC Capital. The franchise won the IPL in its debut season last year and lost in the final in 2023—a rather remarkable beginning to its IPL journey. Now, of course, on-field performance in a sporting competition depends on a number of factors, including a degree of probability and luck. Having said that, the Titans have done a lot of things right in the last two years.

Photo credit: IPL

“For one, they have recruited well and, more importantly, empowered the people they recruited. There is no meddling from the ownership,” says the senior sports investment executive. That’s how the typical private equity business model functions: there is a complete layer of separation between the management and the ownership. The PE firm would have representation on the board and ensure the funds are being utilised properly, but the rest is up to the management.

“At Gujarat Titans, you won’t ever find the owners talking about on-field matters, sponsorship, etc. That’s the management’s job. And this is the biggest distinction between a professionally-run organisation versus a family-run organisation, where the ownership and management are often muddled up,” says the senior sports investment executive. The Gujarat Titans did not respond to my request to participate in this story.

The executive added that the Titans have also focused on ensuring they’re a cohesive unit with no ego tussles. They also made some bold choices that paid off, including the appointment of former India cricketer Ashish Nehra as a first-time coach and all-rounder Hardik Pandya as a first-time captain. “They also trust their players and don’t randomly chop and change, which has helped the likes of Wriddhiman Saha, who has been a revelation this season.”

Photo credit: IPL

At the end of the day, private equity firms have to deliver handsome returns to their limited partners. If they do that, they can make good money for themselves. It’s all about creating value. The PE firm comes in at a certain price, and the onus is on them to demonstrate consistent value creation so that they can exit at a price that’s significantly higher, which is what delivers value to all stakeholders. So, you could argue that this value- and commercials-oriented ownership model is better than just ultra-rich individuals and families snapping up sports teams as trophy assets.

However, it’s not like this model has no concerns attached to it. A major one is that PE firms would be driven by commercial interests rather than those of the fans, and their only objective is to secure a successful exit and not contribute towards the growth of the sport. In fact, CVC Capital itself was accused of these things during its 10-year ownership of Formula One.

But a PE firm still doesn’t own an entire league in India. And early evidence from the IPL, with both Rajasthan Royals and Gujarat Titans, would suggest that the PE team ownership model is working well here. For now. The senior sports investment executive even believes that family-owned teams might soon start warming up to PE investment looking at the success of the Titans and the Royals.

Meanwhile, the senior sports industry executive believes that the likes of Tiger Global coming in with a 5-6% stake in teams and exiting in a few years will be normalised. “It’s going to become a cycle because a Tiger is not going to stay in forever. It’s a 10-year game, similar to CVC. So, a few of the franchises might play the PE game. But what it does do is bring in more professionalism, with a harder performance matrix. That can only augur well for the franchise and the league.”

As of now, the opportunities for PE firms to enter the IPL are limited for the reasons mentioned above. However, exits and divestments aren’t unprecedented, as we saw with Delhi Capitals. And it’s not necessary that you exit only when you need the cash. Typically, you’d want to exit when the fundamentals are good, which is when you will get a good price for your stake. You don’t want to exit when the growth slows down. “Exits should happen over time in the IPL, but it’s difficult to point out when,” says the senior sports investment executive.

Interesting times lie ahead.

⚡️Quick Singles

⛳️🇺🇸🇸🇦 The PGA Tour’s stunning merger with Saudi Arabian upstart LIV Golf, announced last week, will be reviewed by the United States Department of Justice for antitrust concerns, reported The Wall Street Journal. The Justice Department had already been investigating the PGA Tour and other golf bodies, including the Augusta National Golf Club, for anticompetitive behaviour. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan was previously quoted as saying that it would be good for the Tour “to take the competitor off of the board, to have them exist as a partner, not an owner.”

⛳️📺 Speaking of golf, Netflix is in talks to live-stream its first sporting event later this year: a celebrity golf tournament. According to The Wall Street Journal, the celebrities will include the athletes featuring in its two docuseries on golf and Formula One, Full Swing and Drive to Survive. Netflix has been considering entering live sports streaming for a while. This exhibition golf tournament would allow it to sample live sports streaming without actually paying for the media rights.

⚽️🇬🇧🇪🇺 Europe’s top five football leagues—the Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1—saw their revenues grow by 10% year-on-year to €17.2 billion ($18.8 billion) in the 2021-22 season, according to financial consultancy Deloitte’s annual review of football finance. This figure usurped the pre-Covid benchmark of €17 billion in 2018-19. The Premier League continued to be the dominant force, with English clubs reporting a 12% rise in overall revenues in the 2021-22 season to a combined €6.4 billion ($7 billion). LaLiga revenues were half that of the Premier League—€3.3 billion—despite increasing by 11%.

🏏🇮🇳🏖️ Sports streaming platform FanCode has sub-licenced the digital rights of the upcoming West Indies-India series to JioCinema. This means the series, which includes two Tests, three one-day internationals, and five Twenty20 internationals, will be streamed on both FanCode and JioCinema. The series starts on July 12.

🎮📺 Video game live-streaming service Twitch has announced a new partner programme that will give streamers with at least 350 monthly paid subscribers a 70:30 revenue share on net subscription revenue (revenue from recurring monthly subscriptions and gift subs), for 12 months up to $100,000. This comes after the previous 50:50 revenue split was criticised a lot. Meanwhile, Sony is testing a cloud streaming feature that will allow PlayStation Plus Premium members to play PS5 games online without having to download them onto their consoles.

🏀👟 The sneakers that Michael Jordan wore during the infamous game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals—popularly known as the “flu game”—were sold for $1.38 million in an auction earlier this week. This is despite Jordan’s trainer revealing in the Netflix documentary The Last Dance that the basketball legend didn’t actually have the flu during that match. Jordan scored 38 points, seven rebounds, and five assists in the game.

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening,

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

A quick programming note: There won’t be an edition of The Playbook next Friday, June 9, as I’m going on leave for 10 days. The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Friday, June 16.

Earlier this week, I was served a cruel reminder of how much of a fossil I am. For the purpose of writing this edition, I downloaded Battlegrounds Mobile India, popularly known as BGMI. For the uninitiated, it’s the Indian version of the hugely popular online battle royale game PUBG Mobile, in which up to 100 players are parachuted onto an island and have to kill each other until there’s only one individual or team standing.

BGMI, published by South Korean developer KRAFTON, is back in app stores in India after a 10-month suspension. The Indian government forced KRAFTON to take it down in July 2022 after it was reported that the game was exchanging data with Chinese servers. It was the second time the game, either in the form of BGMI or PUBG Mobile, was banned in India since mid-2020, ​​when Indian and Chinese soldiers had a skirmish in the Himalayas. India has since banned several Chinese apps citing national security concerns.

On May 19, KRAFTON announced that the Indian government had allowed it to resume operations. India’s Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, then tweeted that the government had approved a three-month trial period for BGMI after it complied with issues of server locations and data security. The government would monitor the game closely and take a final decision on its reinstatement after three months, he added.

The return of BGMI is a big deal for India’s esports industry, which was worth ₹1,100 crore ($133 million) in 2022, according to a report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) and consultancy Ernst & Young. The game crossed 100 million users just a year after its launch in mid-2021, per KRAFTON. In June 2022, it became the first game to be shown on Indian television, when esports and gaming major NODWIN Gaming signed a broadcast deal with Star Sports for its tournament, the BGMI Masters Series. The event attracted 24 million peak concurrent viewers and a total of 200 million viewers.

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To understand how the industry is reacting to the return of the game, even if on a temporary basis, I spoke to various stakeholders. This was after I failed rather spectacularly at playing the game myself. After being dropped on the island, I just couldn’t find any guns and walked around aimlessly until another player shot me down and put me out of my misery.

But there are several great BGMI players in India who have made a successful career out of playing the game, and who are all hoping there are no more bans. Like Yogesh Yadav, aka Roxx.

‘The Taylor Swift of games’ is back in India. For now

Photo credit: Amanz/Unsplash

Yogesh Yadav was first introduced to PUBG Mobile in late 2019. He was 18 at the time and studying for the Common Law Admission Test, a national-level entrance examination for Indian law schools. He used to be buried in books for 12-14 hours a day and needed something to take his mind off academics during his free time. A friend suggested he try out the latest game that was making waves all over the world.

Launched in March 2018, PUBG Mobile had crossed 100 million downloads in record time: four months. It was the mobile version of the popular PC and console game PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds, popularly known as PUBG, launched by Chinese internet giant Tencent in late 2017.

With India being a mobile-first market, it was no surprise that PUBG Mobile did well. The game was easy to understand, unlike some strategy-heavy PC titles such as Dota, and was optimised for low-end smartphones. It wasn’t long before Yadav was hooked. “Soon, it became a daily habit,” he says. “But I also got detached from my friends. That’s one of the negative aspects of gaming.”

Within a few months, Yadav started acing the game and climbed up the ranks in India. Professional gamers from the Indian esports industry began noticing him and he got invited to tournaments. “Then, I met a guy who was studying at the Vellore Institute of Technology and was also a professional gamer. He and I started practising together. Eventually, we decided to form a PUBG team called Celtz.”

Team Celtz soon entered PUBG Mobile Club Open (PMCO), an open qualifier tournament to get into the professional circuit. Celtz reached the final and finished in ninth place, which was enough to earn it a spot in the PUBG Mobile Pro League (PMPL) South Asia, held in Gurugram. The tournament had a prize pool of $200,000.

“At the time, we didn’t have any sponsors unlike other teams, which were equipped with high-end iPhones. We did pretty badly in the league stage but somehow made it to the final. There, we built an early lead, shocked everyone, and won the tournament. My parents watched that tournament on YouTube. That was when they realised I was good at it,” says Yadav, whose family hails from Etawah, a small town on the banks of the Yamuna in western Uttar Pradesh. “That’s when my life changed,” he adds.

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Celtz was eventually acquired by Galaxy Racer, a Dubai-based esports company. Yadav, who was 19 at the time, and his teammates were all given the latest iPhones, along with a monthly salary. Winning PMPL South Asia got them an entry into the PUBG Mobile World League East. It was an online tournament because it was held in August 2020, a time when the world was just learning to grapple with a global pandemic.

“Playing from home in India was a disadvantage because the internet is slower,” says Yadav. “Galaxy Racer also couldn’t organise a bootcamp (esports lingo for a training camp, usually at a house, where teammates live and play together) for us because of Covid restrictions. We also had to deal with problems like power cuts in the middle of matches. There were so many instances where I got killed in the game after getting disconnected because of a power cut.” Celtz finished 14th out of 16 teams in the finals.

Almost immediately after the PMPL World League East ended, PUBG Mobile was among several apps the Indian government banned because of their links with China. In PUBG Mobile’s case, it was because the game was published and distributed in India by Tencent. It had more than 40 million monthly active users in the country at the time, per TechCrunch. India also accounted for more than a quarter of the game’s lifetime installs, the report said.

“I somehow managed with my savings for three-four months, but I know players who had their roofs snatched from over their heads,” says Yadav. “Sponsors or organisations supporting you can pay your salary for at most a couple of months without anything to play for, but the game didn’t return for almost a year. The players were all aged between 16 and 24. Many of them had left their studies to become professional gamers.”

Luckily for Celtz, Galaxy Racer managed to move them to Dubai, where they played a couple of PUBG Mobile events. The team returned to India only after the mid-2021 launch of BGMI, a rebranded version of PUBG Mobile that’s only available in India. This time, the game would be published by South Korea’s KRAFTON, which was backed by Tencent. However, it seemed KRAFTON had managed to convince the Indian government that there were no data security concerns.

A year later, though, the concerns returned for some reason. There was no publicly available order from the government, but BGMI disappeared from app stores in India in July 2022. Reuters reported an unnamed government source saying it was again because of concerns about data sharing and mining in China.

This was despite KRAFTON saying that it had cut ties with Tencent. The South Korean developer had also invested over $100 million in Indian startups such as NODWIN Gaming, game-streaming platform Loco, online self-publishing platform Pratilipi, and audio content platform Kuku FM. BGMI had 16.5 million monthly active users in India at the time, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

Yadav says he was more prepared this time around. He had invested in a couple of businesses and had also launched his own smart gadgets brand called Roarx, which sells white-labelled chargers for smartphones. “I’m quite conservative with my spending, so I had a lot of savings. One of my relatives owns a factory that makes chargers for brands like Oppo and Vivo, so I got them to make for us too. When the game was banned for the second time, I focused on Roarx.” India’s top esports athletes earn anywhere between ₹1 lakh-2 lakh ($1,200-2,400) per month.

Some BGMI players pivoted to other games such as New State, Valorant, and Grand Theft Auto or GTA, but it takes three to four months to learn a new game, says Yadav. Also, there is no other game in India that can match BGMI in terms of viewership. “BGMI to the game-streaming ecosystem is like what cricket is to video-streaming platforms,” says Anirudh Pandita, founder of Loco. “Prior to the ban, BGMI would account for 50-70% of watch time on Loco.”

So, if a gamer was getting 20,000-30,000 concurrent viewers for BGMI, they would get 3,000-5,000 at most for other games. “It’s like watching MS Dhoni playing golf. You might watch it once, but after a point you’ll be like, ‘Yeah bro, but you’re not a golfer,’” adds Pandita.

During the ban, gamers could still stream BGMI, but most of them were hesitant to do so because the government’s order wasn’t out in the public. Also, BGMI as a game is more aligned with competitive e-sports than streaming. For instance, broadcasters of an officially licensed BGMI tournament get access to a “god view”, where they get to pick between different camera angles.

“In a battle royale game, where players land in different locations on a map, showing different points of view to the audience is important. When you stream scrims (esports lingo for practice matches), you only get the POV of the person who’s playing,” says Pandita.

Games such as Valorant, GTA, Clash of Clans, and GTFO helped Loco and Rooter cover up a part of the hole left behind by BGMI. “GTA really picked up a lot of the load,” says Pandita. “Our watch hours per monthly active user almost doubled during this last year, which is pretty crazy.” Piyush Kumar, founder and CEO of Rooter, also claims that the platform has grown in the absence of BGMI. “Our users are up 1.3-1.4x, and our revenue has grown 4x.”

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The biggest impact of the suspension was perhaps felt by tournament organisers such as NODWIN Gaming, Skyesports, and Penta Esports. The PUBG Mobile ban in 2020 occurred bang in the middle of the Skyesports Championship 2.0, which had prize money of ₹11 lakh ($13,000). “The game was banned after the quarterfinals,” says Shiva Nandy, founder and CEO of Skyesports. “But the tournament also had other games like Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars, and World Cricket Championship, so we managed to pull it off.”

During the second ban, the problem was that BGMI and another popular battle royale mobile game with Tencent links, Free Fire, were both pulled just months apart from each other. And no other mobile games were good enough to fill in their shoes. “There were some like New State and Pokemon Unite that did well, but not anywhere close to BGMI,” says Anurag Khurana, founder and CEO of Newgen Gaming, the parent company of Penta Esports.

PC and console games didn’t stand much of a chance because the devices’ penetration in India is nowhere near that of mobile phones. Around three million PCs, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, were sold in India in the quarter ended March 2023, compared with 31 million smartphones, per market research firm IDC.

That’s what Tencent picked up on when it first brought PUBG Mobile to India in 2018. It had a firm belief in the Indian market and decided to organise as many PUBG Mobile events as possible. As Yadav’s story shows, the competitive landscape had a tiered and structured professional circuit, which allowed organisations to create a sustainable revenue plan around an annual calendar.

“Tencent started giving licences to every tournament organiser in the market,” says Sharang Naicker, CEO and managing director of Mumbai-based Yuvin Esports. “Every week, there would be a new company coming in and organising PUBG Mobile events. The prize pools used to range from a lakh to tens of lakhs. Slowly, PUBG Mobile caused the demise of the PC gaming industry in India. We also shut down our PC division and focused on PUBG Mobile.”

Photo credit: Screen Post/Unsplash

So, when the game got banned, tournament organisers had no choice but to focus on other titles. Penta, for instance, held tournaments for 14 other games across mobile, PC, and console during the second ban. Skyesports, which launched in 2018 as a tournament organiser solely for PUBG Mobile, also diversified its offerings to include other games.

The big companies weren’t impacted much, but smaller organisers that had built their entire operation around PUBG Mobile and BGMI bore the brunt. According to Naicker, only a handful of the 100-150 tournament organisers in India in 2020 survived the first ban.

Even without BGMI, India’s overall esports ecosystem continues to grow in revenue on the back of games such as Valorant and GTA, says a senior executive from the gaming industry who requested anonymity. But nothing really compares with the size of the whale.

“BGMI is like the Taylor Swift of games. People are playing other games only because there’s no choice and not because they’ve voluntarily picked another title. If you assume the benchmark is 100 million users, other titles might get 30-40 million at most,” the executive adds.

The overall sponsorship money in India’s esports industry is currently just about a third of what it was a year ago, says Khurana. This is despite the number of brands investing in esports growing from 72 in 2021 to 80 in 2022, according to a survey by NODWIN Gaming. As a result, the total prize money in Indian esports events also dropped from ₹22 crore ($2.6 million) in 2021 to ₹15 crore ($1.8 million) last year. “BGMI is the only game that can pull non-endemic sponsors to the industry,” adds Khurana. “During the ban, most of the sponsors were like, ‘Please talk to us when BGMI is back.’”

Now that BGMI is back, even if temporarily, the industry is optimistic there won’t be any more hiccups. Some companies are going gung-ho and are back to business as usual. Skyesports, for instance, has already announced that one of its BGMI tournaments, the Skyesports Champions Series, is “coming soon”. KRAFTON’s own tournament, called BGMI: Rising, has already started on June 1.

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BGMI streaming has also begun on Loco and Rooter. Kumar from Rooter says the platform is expecting good traffic. But since the game is on a three-month trial period, he isn’t sure about how aggressive the growth will be on the esports side. A lot of organisations would have dismantled their teams during the ban, so they’ll take time to get things back up and running. “Teams have been struggling for a long time, so they will be over-cautious [before jumping into BGMI tournaments],” he says.

Yuvin Esports, for instance, has hired a BGMI team on a three-month probation period with lower-than-usual salaries. “We have signed a contract which says that if the game is still online after three months, we will raise your salaries to a pre-decided amount. If it gets banned again, we’ll exit the BGMI ecosystem,” says Naicker.

Naicker is hopeful that KRAFTON gets things right this time with respect to the government’s concerns. “Having invested so much in India, it’ll be foolish of them to neglect the government guidelines. They’re being extremely careful and aware, based on what I’ve heard,” he adds. KRAFTON India CEO Sean Hyunil Sohn did not respond to my request to participate in this story.

Professional BGMI players are also slowly getting back on the circuit. Yadav, who turns 22 next month, is positive the game won’t be banned again and has already started playing scrims seriously. “I’ll start streaming by the end of this week. Most of the streamers have already started.”

However, he doesn’t expect international esports companies that had invested in India previously to be in any rush to return to the country. After investing so much in properties, production, equipment, and player salaries, they were left hanging due to two bans in the last three years.

“What if the game is banned again after three months?” says Yadav. “Organisations are in wait-and-see mode. Things are slowly starting up again, but the ban has pushed us back by 10 months. We can only hope there are no more bans and things return to normal soon.”

- With reporting inputs from Soumya Gupta.

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again in a couple of weeks!

Good evening,

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Earlier this week, I attended my first-ever Indian Premier League (IPL) match: the playoffs eliminator between Mumbai Indians and Lucknow Super Giants at Chepauk, Chennai. And I saw first-hand how much of a hero-worshipping lot we Indians are!

The only jerseys on sale outside the stadium—knockoffs costing ₹150 ($1.8), if you bargain well—were those of MS Dhoni, Rohit Sharma, and Virat Kohli, only one of whom was playing that day.

Photo credit: Jaideep Vaidya/The Signal

The MA Chidambaram Stadium is usually a sea of yellow, the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) colour, during the IPL. But with CSK not playing that day, the sea had turned blue. Imagine Liverpool fans supporting Manchester United during a match at Anfield where Liverpool isn’t playing. But as the match progressed, I realised the support was largely because of Rohit Sharma, the India captain, who received the loudest cheers while batting and fielding.

Then, despite the famed rivalry between Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore, Chepauk loudly chanted Kohli’s name whenever Afghan pacer Naveen-ul-Haq was bowling and while he was fielding at the boundary. Naveen’s spat with Kohli is now infamous. Credit to Naveen, he took it very well and even egged the crowd on while fielding.

There was also a fleeting moment when Sachin Tendulkar, sitting in the Mumbai dugout, was shown on the big screen. It was for barely two seconds, but that was enough for Chepauk to erupt. Of course, Tendulkar and Chepauk have a fabled history.

No wonder then that Dhoni, when asked about his retirement plans after CSK’s final match in Chennai this season, said that he’ll always be there for the franchise, whether as a player or in any other form. CSK knows his value, both commercially and otherwise.

If only there were a parallel universe where Dhoni ends up coaching/mentoring another IPL franchise. It would be interesting to see the number of defections from CSK’s yellow army!

This is why official sports jerseys aren’t a lucrative business in India. Cheap knockoffs are abundant, as fans only want to wear the jerseys on match days. And then, they only care about their heroes rather than the team they play for.

So, it will be interesting to see how Adidas does as the Indian cricket team’s new official kit sponsor. Yes, the news has finally been confirmed. ICYMI, in a previous edition of The Playbook, I had written about why Adidas would be interested in such a sponsorship, especially after what happened with the Indian team’s previous two kit sponsors—Nike and MPL Sports.

Right, so let’s get down to this week’s edition, which is not about cricket, but football.

Man City: greats or cheats?

Photo credit: Manchester City/Twitter

On May 21, as the Manchester City players walked out onto the pitch at their home ground, the Etihad Stadium, their opponents Chelsea gave them a guard of honour. City had been officially crowned Premier League champions for the third time in a row—and an incredible fifth time in six seasons—a day earlier, as second-placed Arsenal’s defeat to Nottingham Forest meant the Gunners were mathematically out of the title race.

City would be awarded the Premier League trophy after the match against Chelsea. But as the two teams lined up for the Premier League anthem before the pre-kick-off ritual of shaking each other’s hands, boos began to ring out at the Etihad. City fans were booing the Premier League, the very organisation whose trophy their team was going to lift very soon.

This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened this season. The first instance was on February 12, ahead of City’s home game against Aston Villa. The boos were a lot louder than those heard on Sunday. That’s because, on February 6, the Premier League accused Manchester City of breaching its financial rules between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons.

There were 115 alleged breaches, including not providing accurate financial information, particularly “with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue), its related parties and its operating costs”, breaking the Premier League’s rules on profit and sustainability, and not complying with European football governing body Uefa’s club licensing and financial fair play (FFP) regulations, which forbid clubs from spending more than they earn.

Uefa had banned City from its competitions, which includes the lucrative Champions League, for two years for alleged breaches of its FFP regulations in 2020. However, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned the ban later that year after City appealed. CAS ruled that most of the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred, which means they were too old to investigate 🤷🏽‍♂️.

Uefa started investigating City after German newspaper Der Spiegel in November 2018 published a four-part series featuring leaked documents alleging that the club had inflated the value of sponsorship deals and used back-dated contracts with companies from Abu Dhabi “at will”. The Abu Dhabi royal family owns City.

The newspaper wrote that the club’s financial reports “were a web of lies”. It also revealed that Roberto Mancini had two contracts: one as the manager of Manchester City, and the other as a consultant with the Al Jazira Sports and Cultural Club, which is also owned by Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour. Mancini was reportedly earning a higher annual base salary at Al Jazira (£1.75 million) than he was at City (£1.45 million).

The Premier League then began its own investigation in March 2019, and it’s unclear why the organisation took almost four years to release its findings. The timing of the release, which was days before the publication of the UK government’s white paper on football governance, was also questioned. “It is felt that bringing this case is likely to be used by the Premier League as evidence of them being able to deal with governance issues itself,” wrote BBC Sport’s Simon Stone.

The potential punishment for City can be as lenient as a reprimand to as severe as expulsion from the league. The Premier League has left it to an independent commission to decide what to do. City, of course, denied the allegations, as it did with Uefa. “The club welcomes the review of this matter by an independent commission, to impartially consider the comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that exists in support of its position,” it said in a statement.

So, that’s why City fans both booed the Premier League and then invaded the Etihad pitch to celebrate winning it on Sunday. The irony metre would rise further later that day when Premier League CEO Richard Masters handed out medals to players of the club his organisation believes cheated.

Which brings us to the question of how this Manchester City juggernaut should be perceived. The club is on course for a record-equaling treble, winning the Premier League, Champions League, and FA Cup in one season. Pundits are gushing over current manager Pep Guardiola, calling him the best thing since sliced bread, while others are labelling this City team the greatest of all time.

In normal circumstances, you’d need extremely solid arguments to counter all this praise. But then, these aren’t normal circumstances, are they? I mean, how bonkers is it that the Premier League itself believes that its most successful team in the last decade—one that has surely helped boost the image of the Premier League globally and helped make it the richest and most-watched league in the world—cheated?

If you’re a cricket fan, it’s akin to the IPL investigating Chennai Super Kings. Yes, I know, the IPL had also banned CSK for two years after the 2013 spot-fixing scandal, but not before the police started a criminal investigation.

In the UK, sports broadcasters are tiptoeing around the matter. Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football programme spent three-and-a-half minutes discussing whether City’s success will be tainted if found guilty. The BBC’s Match of the Day spent a grand total of 25 seconds on it, although its news analysis editor Ros Atkins did a six-minute explainer during his show.

As The Athletic’s Adam Crafton wrote, “This debate is largely confined to courtrooms, as well as pages of broadsheet newspapers or social media baiting.” In The Times, Owen Slot did an excellent, balanced analysis of how this City squad has been built on the success and foundation of previous teams and regimes that are part of the Premier League’s investigation period of 2009-18. It’s also worth noting that Guardiola joined City in 2016.

Now, it could be argued that City is innocent until proven guilty. Yes, that is true, but should we ignore the charges before there is a final ruling on the matter? What about clubs that lost out on titles and substantial Champions League qualification revenue because their rival may have broken the rules?

That’s arguably a more serious concern as you go lower down the table. City isn’t the only club the Premier League has referred to an independent commission over alleged breaches of FFP regulations. In March, it happened to Everton, regarding the club’s spending last season. Everton finished 16th last season, narrowly avoiding relegation. Do the three relegated clubs—especially Burnley, which finished just four points behind Everton—have no reason to protest? At the time of writing, Everton is struggling to stay up this season too.

It would certainly help if the independent commission in both cases announced a verdict soon. Guardiola himself advocated for it during a press conference after winning the title.

But does Guardiola know that the Football Leaks investigation by Der Spiegel also had a leaked email where a City lawyer wrote that club chairman Khaldoon al Mubarak had said that “he would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years” than agree to any financial settlement or penalty?

There have been various reports stating that it could be months or maybe even years before we get a final verdict.

City is also not helping its own case, despite what Guardiola says to the press. The Daily Mail reported last week that the club objected to the fact that the barrister heading the independent commission’s investigation is an Arsenal fan. Even if he is, shouldn’t the club still be confident of winning, considering it has a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence”?

On February 12, the same day City fans first booed the Premier League anthem, they also unfurled a banner at the Etihad, which read: “Pannick on the streets of London”. It was a pun on the lyrics of a song by a Manchester-based band called The Smiths, and referred to David Pannick, a famous lawyer who the club hired to represent it.

Twitter tweet

Guess what? Pannick is an Arsenal fan too.

⚡️Quick Singles

🎰🕵️ The Enforcement Directorate (ED) raided 25 locations across India earlier this week regarding an investigation into alleged Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) violations by offshore online gaming companies operating in the country. The ED said these companies are registered in small island countries like Curacao, Malta, and Cyprus, but “all of them are linked to Indian bank accounts opened in the name of proxy persons who have no links with online gaming activity”. The statement added that ₹4,000 crore ($483 million) has been remitted “in the guise of payments for import of goods and services”.

🎲💸 There won’t be any Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) for users of online gaming platforms provided their winnings are under ₹100 ($1.2), according to the Income Tax department’s new guidelines. Above that threshold, tax will be deducted at the time of withdrawal as well as at the end of the financial year. The IT department also specified that net winnings will be calculated after subtracting the total deposits and opening balance in the user account from the amount withdrawn.

🏏🇮🇳👕 The BCCI’s deal with Adidas is worth ₹250 crore ($30.2 million) for five years, ending in March 2028, reported The Economic Times. The sportswear company will pay ₹75 lakh ($90,750) per match and a royalty of ₹10 crore ($1.2 million) per year on the merchandise sold. Nike, which was the BCCI’s kit sponsor until September 2020, was paying ₹85 lakh ($102,850) per match and a royalty of ₹12-15 crore ($1.4 million-$1.8 million). The total deal was worth ₹370 crore (~$45 million) over four years.

🏏🐯🇮🇳 New York-based investment major Tiger Global is reportedly looking to invest ~$40 million in 2008 IPL champions Rajasthan Royals at a $650 million valuation. The investment could be direct or through an existing shareholder. Another US-based investment firm, RedBird Capital Partners, had bought a 15% stake in the Royals in 2021 at a reported valuation of $250-300 million. UK-based venture capitalist Manoj Badale’s investment firm Emerging Media owns a majority stake in the franchise.

🏓📺 Viacom18 has acquired the broadcast rights to season four of Ultimate Table Tennis, which is scheduled from July 13-30 at the Balewadi Sports Complex in Pune. The tournament will be broadcast on sports channel Sports18 and streaming platform JioCinema. Viacom18 also has the rights to the Diamond League (athletics), MotoGP, NBA, LaLiga, Serie A, Ligue 1, and select BWF (badminton) tournaments.

⚽️🇮🇹📺 Meanwhile, Serie A champions Napoli’s owner Aurelio De Laurentiis has called for the league to go direct to streaming and ditch the traditional broadcast model, reported Financial Times. He believes the Italian league should take control of broadcast production and distribute it via platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Spain’s LaLiga offers such a service via Prime Video in the UK, as does the Premier League via Disney+ Hotstar in India.

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening,

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Last weekend, I watched Air, the Ben Affleck-Matt Damon movie about how Nike pursued and eventually signed Michael Jordan when he was still a rookie. If you haven’t seen it yet, please do so first thing after you finish reading this newsletter. It’s super!

There’s a quote in the movie by Nike’s former director of marketing, Rob Strasser, played by Jason Bateman: “A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it.” I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but Jordan’s mother, played by the powerhouse Viola Davis, tweaks that quote brilliantly towards the end of the movie.

For the purposes of this week’s edition of The Playbook, I’d like to tweak the quote too, if I may. Ahem… a shoe is just a piece of rubber and plastic until someone makes it. #sorry

You might have noticed I didn’t mention leather. There’s a reason for that.

Why Nike, Adidas, PUMA, and Co. are making in India

Photo credit: Luis Villasmil/Unsplash

Do you have a pair of sneakers or sports shoes from a global brand like Nike, Adidas, PUMA, Decathlon, ASICS, etc. that cost less than ₹4,000 (~$50)? If you do, check the label. There’s a good chance they’re made in India.

India’s sports footwear industry is at a crossroads. There’s a lot happening, and the next few years could define the country’s stature in the global footwear market. In terms of the current size, India’s overall footwear industry is worth ₹82,000 crore ($10 billion), according to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Non-leather footwear accounts for 75% of it—that’s ₹61,500 crore ($7.4 billion). This includes all kinds of non-leather footwear, including flip-flops, sandals, and shoes.

And this figure could rise very soon.

In recent months, there have been reports that the top manufacturing partners of global non-leather footwear brands such as Nike, Adidas, PUMA, and Reebok are setting up units in India. In April, the Indian subsidiary of the world’s largest branded athletic and casual footwear manufacturer, Taiwan-based Pou Chen Corporation, signed an agreement with the Tamil Nadu government to set up a ₹2,302 crore (~$280 million) unit in the state.

At least six other Taiwanese majors are also in the process of setting up units in Tamil Nadu, reported Business Standard. These are Feng Tay, Hong Fu, Dean Shoes, Oasis Footwear, Sports Gear, and Zucca.

The Pou Chen investment is expected to generate more than 20,000 jobs over 12 years. Earlier this month, Deccan Herald reported that Pou Chen, Feng Tay, and the Chennai-based Phoenix Kothari Footwear have pledged investments worth ₹6,000 crore ($727 million) for setting up non-leather footwear manufacturing units in Tamil Nadu, which will employ ~80,000 people. The ultimate aim is to attract investments worth ₹20,000 crore ($2.4 billion) in the sector by 2025, the report said.

Now, India has a fabled history of manufacturing leather footwear and goods. The country accounts for 13% of the world’s total leather production. States like Tamil Nadu are known to produce high-quality leather footwear for global luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Ferragamo. India exported leather footwear worth over $2 billion in the year ended March 2022.

Photo credit: Engin Akyurt/Pexels

In comparison, India’s non-leather footwear exports in the same year were worth just $214 million. The country has never really been known as a hub for making non-leather or sports footwear. Why then are all these suppliers of the world’s top sportswear brands coming to India?

None of the Taiwanese companies responded to my request to participate in this story except Feng Tay, which declined to comment. Nike, Adidas, PUMA, and Decathlon also did not respond. I then spoke to several senior executives from India’s footwear and sportswear industries to understand what’s happening. Some of them requested anonymity because they’re either not authorised to speak with the media or wanted to protect business relationships. They told me there are multiple reasons behind this growing interest in India.

Primarily, what we’re seeing is the “China plus one” strategy at play. Western companies have been looking for backups to China to manufacture their products, for various reasons: rising labour costs in China, pressure from the Xi Jinping government to transfer technology to Chinese competitors, growing geopolitical tensions between the US and China, and stringent Covid lockdowns.

India is the only country with a labour force and market size comparable with China. Since coming to power in 2014, the Narendra Modi government has also introduced various initiatives to boost local manufacturing, such as production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes, free trade agreements, and easing foreign direct investment (FDI) rules. Just earlier this week, The Economic Times reported that the government is considering rolling out a PLI scheme for the footwear industry.

India has also sought to improve the ease of doing business in the country, and overhauled its customs rebates. As a result, companies from various industries—electronics, semiconductors, solar panels, wind turbines, toys, and footwear, to name a few—are making India their plus-one. India recorded its highest-ever FDI inflow of $84.8 billion in the year ended March 2022.

“India fits the bill pretty well because the government consciously doesn't allow a lot of Chinese investment in Indian companies,” says Dhirendra Lodha, director of sourcing and marketing at Fashinza, a tech platform that solves manufacturing for fashion brands. “Many Chinese companies have opened or acquired big manufacturing setups in countries like Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. So, if you go there, you’re still indirectly sourcing from China. In Vietnam, 40-45% of the investment is from Chinese companies. In Myanmar, it is 70-80%. So, India stands out in a big way.”

A footwear factory in Cambodia (Photo credit: Marcel Crozet/ILO/Creative Commons BY-NC-ND-2.0)

The Indian government has also been increasing import duties on footwear. “During my time, it was 10%; now, it is 35%,” says Rajiv Mehta, managing director of PUMA South Asia from 2005 to 2014. He’s currently the managing director and general partner at Athera Venture Partners, an early-stage venture fund. “Imported footwear has become more expensive. Indirectly, the government is saying ‘make in India’. It wants to promote local manufacturing of sports footwear, like in apparel, and wants it to have export potential, like leather footwear,” he adds.

Another reason why brands are moving manufacturing to India is the Indian consumer’s shift towards athleisure, especially since the pandemic. In December 2022, Mehta’s successor at PUMA, Abhishek Ganguly, told The Economic Times that “athleisure has become the go-to outfit” in India. “Nearly half of the Indian population is below 25 years old, and things such as fashion consciousness, per capita footwear consumption, and aspiration in tier-2 and tier-3 [cities] will only grow,” he said.

The shift towards athleisure caught the attention of not only the major global suppliers of the top sportswear brands, but also Indian leather footwear manufacturers. “Global luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci started making sneakers and athleisure even before the pandemic,” says Mehta. “As a result, the orders that Indian leather manufacturers were getting from these brands started declining. Now, the same manufacturers who make leather footwear for Louis Vuitton and Co. are taking orders from Decathlon for flip-flops and sports shoes.”

Photo credit: PxHere

A worker at a leather footwear factory can be trained to make non-leather footwear in six months, according to N Mohan, director and CEO of the footwear business at Kothari Industrial Corporation Limited (KICL), a Chennai-based conglomerate.

“Making non-leather footwear is a large-scale, volume-based, mechanised production, where you can make 50,000-100,000 pairs a day. In comparison, leather footwear employs a boutique manufacturing approach, with only 2,500-3000 pairs a day,” says Mohan, who was previously the CEO of Clarks India.

“This large-scale mindset is very well understood by the Taiwanese and Koreans because they created the industry around the world—in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Cambodia. Now, they’re looking at India as a consumption market and a manufacturing base,” he adds.

That’s not to say the Taiwanese manufacturers are new to India. The likes of Feng Tay and Apache Footwear, which are one of the main suppliers to Nike and Adidas, respectively, set up shop in the country in 2006. “Today, these two companies together export 50 million pairs of shoes from India,” says Mohan.

And it’s not just Taiwanese companies who make shoes for these top brands in India. New Delhi-based sportswear company SSIPL has been making shoes for Nike for over 20 years. It also manufactures footwear for PUMA, ASICS, and Lotto. According to its website, the company makes 2.4 million pairs of shoes a year. Other prominent Indian manufacturers for global sportswear brands include the Farida Group (Chennai), Mochiko Group (Dehradun), and Lakhani Footwear (Faridabad).

Looking at the success of the likes of SSIPL and Mochiko, many casual-wear brands like RedTape and US Polo started getting into sports footwear in the mid-to-late 2010s, says the senior footwear industry executive. “Meanwhile, international brands like Skechers took the lead in capturing the walking shoes segment, making the slip-on shoe a rage. Most of the domestic brands copied them left, right, and centre. This was when most of the brands were doing semi-knocked down or complete knocked down programmes.”

Then, as Covid struck and brands scampered to shift their manufacturing base from China, Indian manufacturers sniffed an opportunity and started beefing up their operations. “They imported the required machines, etc. and geared up to decrease the dependency on importing raw materials. Some of them did strategic tie-ups with top brands, which included either a long-term order commitment or mutually co-investing in the factory,” the senior footwear industry executive adds.

However, it’s one thing to create a manufacturing ecosystem in the country. Finding quality raw materials is the hard part.

India has the raw materials for the sub-₹3,999 segment, which are less design-focused and largely for the domestic market. The raw materials include polyurethane (PU), mesh, insole, midsole, outsole, laces, reinforcement, glue, and trims, which are all available in India.

But above that price point, you need better-quality PU, ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), and textiles. The shoes will have more foam and less rubber, so that they become lighter. The laces are lighter and more premium as well. These raw materials are more difficult to source in India. “We import the mould for the outsole, glue, EVA granules, and TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) films,” says the senior footwear industry executive.

Instagram post

Importing raw materials makes the end product expensive. With every imported component, you’re paying a duty of 18-30%. That’s where India is still far behind China, where footwear factories have built design and product development capabilities over decades. This is why any shoe from a top global brand priced above ₹5,000-6,000 ($60-70) is likely to be made in China.

As a senior official from a global sportswear brand says, “Brands would prefer working with a supplier who’s constantly doing research and development, and giving them solutions that will work for the next seven-eight years. It can be a very small thing like a differentiated mesh, or improving the PU’s performance by 10% every year or right up to the full design.”

In India, however, companies are content with duplicating what China is doing and building super-factories that assemble products, the official adds. “That helps in terms of giving employment to Indian labourers, but labour is just 8-9% of the product cost.” A second senior executive from a global sportswear brand says that when China gets new technology in its factories, “Indian manufacturers buy the old tech and call themselves high-tech companies.”

Having said that, Indian factories working with Taiwanese suppliers are getting many insights into the functioning of the sports shoe industry. The owners of the factories will start understanding the margin levels at which the industry works, while their workers imbibe the soft skills required. “And once the local supply of raw materials improves, these factories could start creating their own setups and getting direct POs (purchase orders) from the brands,” says Fashinza’s Lodha.

While the Taiwanese suppliers are largely assembling footwear in India, most Indian manufacturers make the shoes end-to-end. But that’s also because they’re making cheaper shoes and largely catering to the local market.

“In India, over 50% of footwear sold costs less than ₹500,” says KICL’s Mohan. “Another 30% is up to ₹1,000. Between ₹1,000 and ₹3,000 is 10%, while the remaining is for over ₹3,000. But slowly, the price acceptability is improving, thanks to the younger generation.”

Photo credit: PxHere

Most industry executives I spoke to say that Indian factories can make more expensive shoes, the ones priced above ₹3,999, but the availability of raw materials is limited. Vendors are unlikely to set up shop in a region where there isn’t sufficient demand.

“For manufacturing, you need certain volumes,” says Rishab Soni, chairman of SSIPL. “As you go higher up the price scale, the MOQs (minimum order quantities) decrease. You need a few thousand pairs per style to justify the entire manufacturing process. Brands are able to get those quantities in the entry and mid-segment pricing, so they rely on Indian manufacturing. Wherever they feel it’s challenging to get the MOQs, that’s when they rely on imports.”

As mentioned above, the Indian government is reportedly considering launching a separate scheme to boost local manufacturing of raw materials for the footwear industry. The government has also issued guidelines under a Quality Control Order (QCO) for footwear made from leather, rubber or polymers, which will be enforced from July 1. Once implemented, retailers will have to procure Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-compliant footwear from manufacturers.

Footwear retailers have sought more time to implement the norms since the existing infrastructure and testing facilities at most factories are not sufficient to cater to the stringent BIS certification requirements. They added that BIS has still not published product manuals for some standards, testing equipment, testing methodologies, and procedures.

Photo credit: Central Footwear Training Institute

What’s clear is that India is gearing up to join the big league of sports footwear manufacturing, but there are several hurdles on the route. The experts I spoke to all concurred that India should aim to become a true manufacturing alternative to China in the next three years and replace it within seven years.

Mehta from Athera Venture Partners says a lot will depend on the work ethics and attitude of Indian factory officials. “Indians will always try to find a jugaad, which ultimately reflects in the product quality. Are the owners of the factories on the shop floor ensuring that things are up to speed? Are people getting pulled up if shipments get delayed or rejected? Are you ensuring the stock for India consumption is not being compromised in terms of the quality of the packaging, etc.?”

If all goes to plan, in the next five to seven years, Indian factories should reach a stage where the workers won’t know whether they’re making a shoe for the Indian market or for export until it reaches the packaging stage. “That’s how it happens in China—they just know that they have make 10,000 pairs of the same shoe. Only then will we see a flywheel effect,” says Mehta.

KICL’s Mohan and SSIPL’s Soni are both bullish about the near future. Mohan expects India’s footwear consumption to grow from 2.6 billion pairs a year to 5.5 billion pairs in the next five years. That’s about four pairs per person per year. He also expects exports to increase to at least 600 million pairs a year in the next seven years, up from the current 60 million.

“India is what China was 20 years ago,” he says. “Once these international players set up shop here and create competition, the domestic industry will improve.” And with BIS coming into play, imports will be curtailed, which will help Indian manufacturing, says Soni.

If things go to plan, who knows, perhaps five to seven years from now, you’ll see a made-in-India Nike shoe worth ₹10,000.

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening,

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Sometime last month, while cycling past one of Puducherry’s main traffic junctions, I noticed an ad on a huge billboard that featured five celebrities: cricketers Eoin Morgan and AB de Villiers, singer Badshah, and actors Jacqueline Fernandez and Sanjay Dutt. It was an ad by online betting company Fairplay.

The ad copy—oddly enough written in Hindi in a region where the language is barely spoken—said users stand to win lakhs of rupees daily. It also offered a “300% deposit bonus” and a flat 5% “lossback bonus” on every match. Whatever that means.

Right next to it was a slightly smaller ad for a brand called Fairplay News, advertised as “India’s biggest and most trusted platform”. It featured actors Ranbir Kapoor and Kiara Advani, and cricketer Mithali Raj. As you might have guessed, Fairplay News is the surrogate advertising brand of Fairplay.

Now, this isn’t the first time I have seen Fairplay ads on billboards. I spotted one in Chennai last month as well (this time, the ad copy was in Tamil). And I’m pretty sure you have seen versions of it too, perhaps in your local language. Ironically, the Tamil Nadu government had passed a law against online gambling around the same time.

Now, earlier this month, the chief secretary of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) wrote to his counterparts in all state governments and union territories regarding outdoor advertisements by betting and gambling platforms. The letter first reminded the states that the ministry had issued three advisories since June 2022 regarding such advertisements appearing in print, electronic and online media, asking companies to refrain from publishing them.

“While such advertisements have been largely curbed in mainstream print, electronic and digital media, it has now come to the notice that some betting and gambling platforms have started using outdoor media such as hoardings, posters, banners, auto rickshaw branding, etc. to promote their websites/apps in India. Accordingly, it is requested that appropriate action may be taken to curb outdoor advertisements of betting and gambling platforms,” the letter said.

This letter was dated 2 May, 2023. On Wednesday, 10 May, I passed by the same junction in Puducherry. The Fairplay ad was still there. Puducherry is a union territory, which is administrated by India’s president via a lieutenant governor. It also has a legislative assembly, which is currently ruled by an alliance of the All India NR Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP, of course, is also ruling at the Centre.

It’s been nearly a year since the MIB started issuing advisories regarding these betting ads. And just last month, when the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) amended the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics code) Rules, 2021, it said that intermediaries such as hosting providers, news websites, and social media platforms cannot host any game or publish any ads of a game that isn’t approved by a self-regulatory body. The new rules also paved the way for the swift blocking of online betting and gambling platforms.

Yet, these platforms and their ads continue to be in your face wherever you go. I’ve also seen them in a national English daily, a prominent news website, and on social media recently, which raises questions over the MIB’s statement that they “have been largely curbed in mainstream print, electronic and digital media”.

Why is this happening?

A lot of it has to do with the fact that the online betting and gambling industry is caught between two central government ministries (MIB and MeitY) and multiple state governments. At the end of the day, gambling is a state subject in India. That’s why Tamil Nadu went ahead and banned online gambling, including rummy and poker with stakes, despite the Centre stating in the amended IT Rules that self-regulatory bodies should take a call on whether a real-money game should be allowed in India.

The issue of whether online gaming can be regulated by the Centre or states is pending before the Supreme Court in appeals filed by the Tamil Nadu and Karnataka governments. Until the Supreme Court passes a judgement, there’s unlikely to be much clarity on the matter, and states can continue to make their own legislation for online gaming, betting, and gambling.

And with respect to the ads by these betting companies, there’s also the small matter of the revenue they bring in. According to the All India Gaming Federation, an industry body, online betting platforms spend ₹3,500 crore ($426 million) annually on ads across media. Are a few government advisories going to be enough for companies to pull the plug on such a steady and lucrative source of ad revenue?

There’s an interesting parallel here with the United States. If you’re watching any live sports content there, it’s impossible to do so without being bombarded with betting ads, some of them featuring big celebrities such as actor Jamie Foxx.

In fact, betting odds are an integral part of sports broadcasting, with presenters and commentators on sports networks even analysing the games from a betting perspective. One sports network is now even named after a gambling company. Top athletes and teams are also paid handsomely to promote sports betting—some teams even have betting parlours in their stadiums.

Now, the difference is that sports betting is legal in the US. Well, to be more precise, the US Supreme Court in May 2018 cleared the way for states to take their own call on the matter. Almost exactly five years since then, 33 states and the District of Columbia have legalised sports betting. And Americans have reportedly spent over $220 billion on legal sports bets in these five years. In the first three months of this year, they wagered over $29 billion, according to SportsHandle, a trade publication. That’s nearly $10 billion per month. By 2026, analysts predict it could touch $20 billion a month.

Before the Supreme Court ruling, things were quite similar to what’s happening in India. Betting was prohibited in a majority of the country, except Nevada (“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”) and a few venues in other states. There was no real interest from the sports industry to legalise betting, especially after the Black Sox Scandal in 1919, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team were accused of throwing a World Series game against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from an illegal gambling syndicate. In 1989, another baseball player, Pete Rose, was banned from the game for life after it was found he bet on matches, including those of the Cincinnati Reds, for whom he played. Rose recently placed his first legal sports bet.

It all changed about a decade ago, with the rise of two tech startups called DraftKings and FanDuel. They pioneered the business of online fantasy sports involving real money, where users could pick virtual teams comprising real-life players of a sport and get points according to how they performed on the field. More importantly, they could stake money on the performances of their fantasy sports teams. Indian fantasy sports players, I’m sure this rings a bell?

If this business model sounded like pseudo-betting to anyone, DraftKings and FanDuel spent the next few years hiring a team of lawyers and lobbyists to convince state lawmakers that fantasy sports is a game of skill. By the end of 2017, 19 US states had legalised fantasy sports. The two companies even tried to merge before antitrust regulators stepped in to block it, saying a merged entity would control more than 90% of USA’s paid daily fantasy sports market.

Then, in May 2018, the US Supreme Court completely changed the game. It all stemmed from a case that had begun four years prior, when New Jersey governor Chris Christie signed into law a bill that legalised sports betting in the state. His objective was to boost the struggling fortunes of Atlantic City, a casino town. Sports leagues and organisations went on to sue New Jersey, with the state law being in direct conflict of a federal law, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), 1992.

Eventually, the case landed up in the Supreme Court. And the top court ruled in New Jersey’s favour, striking down PASPA as unconstitutional and leaving it to the states to decide whether they wanted to legalise sports betting.

The floodgates were now partially open for DraftKings and FanDuel. The only thing left to do was to get all the sports leagues and state lawmakers on board.

Convincing the leagues wasn’t very difficult, especially since sports like baseball were struggling in terms of viewership. Despite their concerns about sports betting impacting the integrity of the game, they figured they might as well use it to increase fan engagement and make some money off it via sponsorships. NBA commissioner Adam Silver had written an opinion column in The New York Times back in 2014 advocating for the legalisation and regulation of sports betting.

To convince the states, the lobbyists of DraftKings and FanDuel argued that sports betting is already rife illegally through offshore sites and local bookies, and there aren’t too many safeguards to check if people are gambling responsibly. So, why not legalise and regulate it, and also make some money off it via taxes? The lobbyists also “wildly inflated” the estimated amount of money states could earn via sports betting taxes, reported The New York Times.

One by one, the states started coming on board. Today, sports betting is legal in two-thirds of the country, with bills pending in many of the remaining states. Once states legalise betting, the operators launch aggressive marketing campaigns, including offers such as:

Free bets. Ring a bell?

Many states even funded these promotions themselves. The betting operators were allowed to deduct the cost of free and promotional bets from the amount they paid to states in taxes. In 2021, these promotional bets amounted to nearly $1 billion, with states losing more than $120 million in potential taxes, according to an analysis by The New York Times and Vixio, a gambling industry compliance company. Many states have since either capped or started phasing out these promotions.

Meanwhile, the lobbyists even managed to convince some of the states to keep taxes as low as 10%, saying that higher rates would suppress interest from the sports betting companies. Like Kansas. In the months after it legalised sports betting in September 2022, the state collected less than $271,000 in taxes on $350 million worth of bets, according to the NYT report.

Other states, such as New York, were smarter about it and rejected the lobbyists’ advice. New York set a tax rate of 51%. Within a year of legalising sports betting in January 2022, the state collected over $700 million in taxes on over $16 billion worth of bets. It’ll soon pass the $1 billion mark.

Then, of course, there’s the human cost of betting and gambling.

Some of the people with gambling problems told the media that they didn’t know where to turn for help. And even if they did, the tools available were not really effective in addressing their addiction. A New York Times investigation found that states have often turned to the gambling industry to help shape consumer protection regulations. While some states require self-exclusion lists, where people voluntarily ask to be barred from gambling more, they weren’t quite effective.

And then, of course, there’s the matter of integrity.

In April, the NFL suspended five players for violating its gambling policy. Three of them were banned for at least the 2023 season, while the other two were suspended for six games. Last week, the University of Alabama fired its baseball coach, Brad Bohannon, over suspicious bets involving one of its games. The university said he violated “the standards, duties, and responsibilities expected of university employees,” but didn’t share any more details. The Associated Press reported that no evidence indicates athletes were involved.

Now, while all this is happening, you might think the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel are laughing all the way to the bank. Well, not quite. In fact, surprisingly, most operators haven’t turned a profit. DraftKings, for instance, reported a net loss of ~$1.4 billion for 2022 against $2.2 billion in revenue. FanDuel’s revenue for the year was $3.2 billion, with a core loss of $313 million. Its parent Flutter, however, expects FanDuel to become profitable for the first time this year.

One of its main avenues to achieve profitability could be iGaming, which is essentially the online version of casino gambling—users can play casino games such as blackjack, poker, and slots on their mobile phones. iGaming is already legal in six US states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut, Delaware, and West Virginia.

So, just like these companies used fantasy sports as a stepping stone towards the more lucrative industry of sports betting, they’re now using betting as a stepping stone towards the even more lucrative iGaming. Slot machines and casino table games across the US generated ~$44 billion in revenue in the first 11 months of 2022, a 6.7% jump over the same period in 2021.

It’s not hard to imagine Indian fantasy sports and online gaming majors such as Dream11 and Mobile Premier League looking wistfully at what’s happening in the US. It also explains why there’s a strong lobby against offshore online betting companies from operating and advertising in India. After all, they’ve essentially jumped the queue and are illegally offering sports betting and gambling services to Indian users, while local companies are barred from doing it.

But considering the challenges the US, a far more mature market, has faced in the five years since the door to legal sports betting was opened, I can’t help but think it’s still way too soon to do something similar in India. Check out this story in ThePrint about how Indians are addicted to real-money online gaming, including rummy, poker, and fantasy sports, and how they’re losing lakhs of rupees.

What do you think?

You can also write to me at jaideep@thesignal.co.

⚡️Quick Singles

🏏🇮🇳🤑 The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is set to rake in nearly 40% of the International Cricket Council’s (ICC’s) net surplus earnings from its next four-year commercial cycle, according to ESPNcricinfo. This is per the ICC’s new revenue-distribution model, which is currently at a proposed stage. The BCCI stands to earn ~$230 million annually between 2024 and 2027, which is 38.5% of the ICC’s annual earnings of $600 million. England and Australia’s cricket boards are a distant second and third at $41.3 million and $37.5 million, respectively. Big Three? More like Big One.

👟🇩🇪🇮🇳 German sportswear major PUMA has confirmed recent media reports that Karthik Balagopalan, its global director for retail and e-commerce, will be the new managing director of PUMA India. Karthik replaces Abhishek Ganguly, who is leaving the company after 17 years to start his own venture, which, according to reports, will be in the larger sportswear space. Two other senior PUMA India executives are also joining him—Atul Bajaj, head of sales and operations, and Amit Prabhu, CFO.

👟🇩🇪 PUMA’s rival Adidas will not destroy €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) worth of unsold merchandise from its now-defunct Yeezy partnership with rapper Ye, previously known as Kanye West. The brand will instead look to sell the stock and donate the proceeds to “organisations that help us and that also have been hurt by Kanye’s statements,” CEO Bjorn Gulden told investors. Adidas cut ties with Ye in October over his antisemitic comments. The unsold Yeezy inventory led to Adidas’ first annual loss in 31 years.

⚽️🔵🇧🇷 Manchester City’s parent, the City Football Group (CFG), has completed the acquisition of Brazilian top-flight club Esporte Clube Bahia. It’s the 13th club to join the group, which includes New York City FC, Melbourne City FC, and Mumbai City FC. CFG is reportedly spending R$1billion ($200 million) for 90% of Bahia’s shares, making it the group’s second-largest investment in a football club after Premier League champions Manchester City.

⚽️🔴🇬🇧 British tabloid The Sun has reported that Manchester United’s owners, the Glazer family, have picked Sir Jim Ratcliffe as the preferred bidder to sell the club. The Glazers will give Ratcliffe’s Ineos Sport majority control of the club, while two of the six Glazer siblings, Joel and Avram, will retain small stakes. Ratcliffe is reportedly okay with this arrangement, while his rival Sheikh Jassim wanted to take over the entire club. Ratcliffe’s valuation was also closer to the Glazers’ demand of £6 billion ($7.5 billion). Fair warning: it’s The Sun.

🎮🏆 The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has added Fortnite to the line-up of the Olympic Esports Finals, an invitational event that will be held in Singapore in June. “A specially designed Fortnite Creative Island made to reflect sport shooting competition will put the target aiming accuracy of sharpshooters to the test,” the IOC said. The Olympic Esports Series includes nine other games that are roughly aligned with real sports organised by international federations, such as Just Dance, Gran Turismo, and Zwift (cycling).

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening,

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

In one of the early editions of The Playbook, back in November, I had written about the murky concoction of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and fantasy sports. Platforms such as Rario and FanCraze offer fantasy cricket games involving NFTs, where users need to buy digital cards of the players they want in their fantasy teams in order to participate. Unlike a regular fantasy sports game, the points these NFT player cards earn depend on various factors such as their rarity.

That edition was about how this format of fantasy sports doesn’t really produce a level playing field, which skews the game towards being a game of chance rather than a game of skill.

Last week, a judgement by a single-judge bench at the Delhi High Court brought forth another important aspect of this web 3 version of fantasy sports.

Whose personality rights are they, anyway?

Photo credit: Striker

On April 26, the Delhi High Court dismissed a plea by cricket NFT platform Rario seeking an interim injunction to prevent rival Striker from offering its services. While this judgement will have no bearing on the final adjudication of the suit, which could take years, it’s still a significant development for the industry.

Here’s what happened:

In February, Rario, a platform that allows users to buy, sell, and trade officially licensed digital cards of cricketers via blockchain technology, filed a petition with the Delhi High Court. The petition said that Striker, an NFT-based fantasy cricket platform, allows users to buy, sell, and trade digital player cards with caricatures of cricketers that have licensing deals with Rario.

Apart from Rario, the petition included five cricketers as plaintiffs: Harshal Patel, Arshdeep Singh, Shivam Mavi, Umran Malik, and Mohammed Siraj. Rario said that it had spent over ₹148 crore (~$18 million) in the last year alone to get exclusive licensing deals with these cricketers for making their digital cards. And by using caricatures of the same cricketers, Striker is unlawfully using the “player marks and other attributes”, leading to unfair competition, unjust enrichment, unlawful interference with economic interest of the plaintiffs, and breach of the cricketers’ personality rights.

In its response to the petition, Striker said that its NFT cards are just an

entry requirement to play its online fantasy game and they can’t be traded or used outside the platform. It added that it had commissioned independent artists to create original artworks of the cricketers and didn’t use their photographs. Its cards also “do not suggest any kind of endorsement or association” with any player.

Photo credit: Striker

The company also pointed out that it’s standard industry practice to use player identifiers, including, names, images and statistics in fantasy games as they’re all available in the public domain. “The player identifiers claimed to be owned by the plaintiffs are in the nature of factual information not protectable under any law in India,” Striker said.

In response, Rario said that it’s not necessary for Striker users to participate in a fantasy game after purchasing an NFT player card. They can simply trade the card on its marketplace to earn money. Furthermore, the value of NFTs on Striker is “derived from the identity/personalities of the players” and isn’t a function of the artwork. As a result, Striker is “commercially gaining from the sale/trade of such NFTs without authorization from the players.”

Striker replied that the outcome of its fantasy game is based on four factors: a player’s on-field performance, the card’s rarity, and two game features called experience points and health points. Out of these, a player’s on-field performance is available in the public domain and the remaining three factors are not related to their identity/personality.

As for the purpose of buying cards on Striker, Maanav Kumar, an independent intellectual property rights lawyer who represented the company, told The Playbook, “In theory it’s possible for someone to just buy the card for bragging rights and not use it in the game. But if I want the value of the card to go up, I need to keep playing it in the game since the value is dependent on in-game features like the experience points and health points. So, if you want to buy a card only for bragging rights and put it on your digital mantlepiece, it makes sense to go to a platform that has official player-licensed cards, like Rario.”

Photo credit: Rario

Those were the arguments from both sides. Now, let’s get into what the court said.

In his judgement, Justice Amit Bansal said that the right to publicity cannot be an absolute right in India since there’s no statutory basis for it—basically, there’s no specific legislation that deals with it. As a result, the violation of the right of publicity in India “has to be considered on the touchstone of the common law wrong of passing off” and also weighed against the right to freedom of speech and expression, which is a fundamental right under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution.

“Passing off” refers to a case where, for instance, the identity or the image of a celebrity is used to promote the sale of a product or a service without their consent. Consumers would be misled into believing a celebrity is endorsing that company. This would be an infringement of the celebrity’s right to publicity.

The court said that fantasy sports platforms use the names, images, and other public information of all players, rather than select ones, for the purposes of identification. This “obviates any possibility of confusion” that a player is endorsing the fantasy sports platform.

As for the right to freedom of speech and expression, the court said that the use of celebrity names and images for purposes such as satire, parody, art, and news is allowed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution and would not infringe the right to publicity. And hence, the use of players’ names, images, and other public information by fantasy sports platforms is also protected under this section, even if it is being done for commercial gain.

The court also noted that the original artwork used by Striker on its cards contained “creative elements that distinguish them from the actual image of the players in question”. The artwork would, therefore, be protected under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.

It’s also worth noting that Rario conceded it doesn’t have exclusive rights over the players’ names, images, and statistics that are used in a regular fantasy game. The company’s grievance was just with the use of the NFT-enabled digital player cards that can be traded. However, the court ruled that there is no difference between a fantasy game with NFT-enabled player cards and a regular fantasy game as far as the use of the player’s name or image/artistic impression is concerned.

It also agreed with Striker’s argument that the primary purpose of its digital cards is to use them to play its fantasy game. “A collector or a fan of a player would be less inclined to buy such a card as memorabilia when other NFTs using the actual photograph/video moments of sportspersons are available to purchase on the Rario platform,” it said.

Considering all these things, the court ruled that Rario has failed to make a valid case for the grant of an interim injunction against Striker.

Now, what?

Rario is expected to appeal the judgement considering the finances involved. But as things stand, this ruling brings forth a fundamental question that could alter the functioning of the industry: is there any point in NFT platforms signing exclusive deals with players?

Because, if using images of players in digital cards—whether they’re actual photographs or artistic impressions—is not an infringement of the right to publicity, then why spend crores of rupees on exclusive contracts with the players?

Kumar, the intellectual property rights lawyer who represented Striker, says that’s a valid question. However, it depends on what the platform plans to do with the exclusive contracts.

Rario’s fantasy game—or “strategy game” as the company refers to it—D3 is a big part of its proposition. Incidentally, the other defendant in this suit, Mobile Premier League, which has backed Striker in terms of providing tech support and hosting the game on its platform, said that Rario has “deliberately not disclosed” that it also offers a fantasy game. The court noted in its judgement that Rario did not rebut this submission.

Photo credit: Striker

As I wrote in a previous edition of The Playbook, Rario’s D3 is particularly skewed towards a game of chance, which is illegal in India, because it allows you to pick fantasy cricket teams of only three players. And one of those three players need not even be playing in that match or tournament.

In fact, whether it’s Rario or FanCraze or Striker, I’m still failing to understand how an NFT-based fantasy game would work in a market like India. Unlike a regular real-money fantasy game, where you can put in as little as ₹1 to play in a contest, NFT-based fantasy platforms require you to buy individual player cards. If the game requires you to pick five players in a team, you need to buy five cards. In Rario’s marketplace for the Indian Premier League, a single player card can cost anywhere between $1 and $299, while match packs can be bought for $5 and upwards.

Such a model would perhaps work better in a season-long fantasy game, where you have to pick a squad of, say, 15 players for the entire season, with a limited number of transfers/trades allowed between matches. Fantasy Premier League, the official fantasy game of the Premier League, follows this format, although it’s a free-to-play game and doesn’t involve NFT cards.

In India, though, the prevailing format is daily fantasy sports, where you have to pick a different team for every match. The country’s per capita income is ₹1.72 lakh ($2,100). How many Indians can afford to spend even $5 per match to participate in a fantasy contest? Rario did not respond to my request to participate in this story.

Anyway, the legality and affordability of NFT-based fantasy sports are separate matters. Coming back to the suit, as mentioned earlier, Rario could appeal the single-judge bench’s decision to dismiss its plea for an interim injunction. If that happens, the matter will go to a division bench, which could agree with the single judge or reverse the judgement. Depending on which party is unhappy with that decision, the matter could then go to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the original suit will continue on a parallel track until there is a final relief, which would include other reliefs such as damages. There will be detailed pleadings from both sides, with evidence and witnesses. Realistically, nobody expects a final judgement on the matter for at least a few years, says Kumar. “That’s why you have interim applications and hearings, because commercial realities are such that you can’t wait five years for a final decision. An interim application is filed with more or less every intellectual property suit.”

And so, we wait…

⚡️Quick Singles

🏏🌏 Rajasthan Royals lead owner Manoj Badale believes the future of Test cricket could be short, once-a-year events like Wimbledon, given the cramped calendar that includes international cricket and franchise-based T20 leagues. “We can make Test cricket work if we make it more of an event,” Badale told the Tailenders podcast. “We should have it at the same time every year, played between a small set of nations that can actually afford it and Lord’s becomes like a Wimbledon...” Thoughts?

⚽️🐐🇸🇦 Lionel Messi could be reunited with his arch-rival Cristiano Ronaldo in the Saudi Pro League if he accepts a bumper $400 million annual contract offered by the Al-Hilal club. Messi is reportedly unlikely to renew his contract with Qatar-owned Paris Saint-Germain, especially after it suspended him for two weeks after an unauthorised trip to Saudi Arabia. Messi is already Saudi Arabia’s tourism ambassador.

🏏📺📱 Indians are largely watching the IPL on both television and digital. According to market research company Hansa Research, dual viewership (TV + digital) comprises 57% of the total pie this season, followed by television-only (33%), and digital-only (10%). Looks like TV still rules in India. Meanwhile, Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians, and Royal Challengers Bangalore are the most popular teams in the IPL, the report added.

👟🇺🇸 German sportswear major Adidas plans to play to its strengths and focus on sports to boost its business in the United States, as it seeks to recover from recent setbacks. This includes the failure of some of the brand’s most high-profile celebrity partnerships, including the Yeezy line with rapper Kanye West. Adidas also suffered setbacks in Russia and China. Meanwhile, the brand with three stripes is being sued by investors who claim the company knew about the risks of associating with West long before his anti-Semitic comments were made public.

🎮🇯🇵📈 Sony expects to sell 25 million PlayStation 5s in the year ending March 2024. That’s six million more than it sold in the previous financial year and would be a record. Sony posted rising quarterly unit sales for the PS5 in the same week Microsoft announced a 30% year-on-year drop in sales for its Xbox console.

⚽️🔴💰 British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe has reportedly submitted the highest bid for Manchester United in the third round of bidding, offering more than £5 billion ($6.2 billion), according to the The Daily Telegraph. It was later reported that Ratcliffe’s main rival, Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, also bid bid over £5 billion and promised to erase Manchester United’s debt of $620 million. Meanwhile, United’s current owners, the Glazer family, are now reportedly seeking at least $7 billion to sell the club, per the Independent.

🎮🎞️ The Super Mario Bros. Movie became the first film to cross the $1 billion milestone at the global box office this year. Nearly half of that collection came from North America. It’s the fifth movie to join the $1 billion club since the pandemic, after Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic World Dominion, and Avatar: The Way of Water.

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already.

You can reach out to me at jaideep@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!

Good evening,

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

In October 2021, the Indian cricket team took the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States before a crunch ICC Men’s T20 World Cup game against Pakistan. Skipper Virat Kohli later said the team was asked to do so by the “management”.

Unsurprisingly, the management seems to have said nothing about supporting Indian wrestlers who are protesting in Delhi against the inaction of authorities after several women grapplers, including a minor, accused Wrestling Federation of India chief and Member of Parliament Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexual harassment and criminal intimidation.

A majority of India’s top sportspersons, with the exception of a few like Abhinav Bindra, Neeraj Chopra, Kapil Dev, and Jwala Gutta, have remained silent so far. As Vinesh Phogat, one of the protesting wrestlers, aptly put it, “They may be concerned that this could affect their sponsorship and brand endorsement deals. Maybe that’s why they are afraid to associate themselves with athletes who are protesting. But it pains me.”

Remember that the next time you see your favourite athlete endorsing a brand or supporting a foreign cause.

Anyway, before this gets too political, let’s dive into this week’s edition.

How Star Sports, JioCinema made IPL commentary analytical

Screenshot from JioCinema

Earlier this week, I was watching the Indian Premier League (IPL) match between Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) and Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR). Jason Roy, the KKR opener, was taking the RCB bowlers to the cleaners. And his former England teammate Eoin Morgan, commentating on air, was talking about his technique of playing sweeps and reverse sweeps.

Morgan explained how Roy gets into the best position—with his feet and head—to play these shots so that he can adjust to the length of the ball, even against bowlers who get variable bounce. And then, his co-commentators Anil Kumble and Graeme Swann, both former international spinners, talked about how to bowl against such aggressive batters. They warned spinners against bowling quicker to stop the flow of runs and said they shouldn’t fall into the trap of getting defensive even if they’ve been smacked for 20 runs in an over.

Later, Swann all but predicted Roy’s dismissal after the Englishman became increasingly frustrated if he didn’t find the boundary because his opening partner, Narayan Jagadeesan, was struggling to score at a decent clip. Roy was eventually bowled out after trying to play an unnecessarily cheeky shot.

If you love the science and strategy behind cricket, it was great broadcasting. But in case you too watched this match and have no clue what I’m talking about, I wouldn’t blame you. That’s because Morgan, Kumble, and Swann are not on the commentary panel of the IPL’s world feed, which is the default English-language feed you get on both Star Sports (television) and JioCinema (digital). The world feed is produced by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, and its commentary panel includes the likes of Harsha Bhogle, Ravi Shastri, Sanjay Manjrekar, Danny Morrison, Matthew Hayden, and Ian Bishop.

Morgan, Kumble, and Swann are on the panel of the IPL’s digital broadcaster JioCinema’s separate English commentary feed called The Insiders. Other commentators in this panel include former international cricketers such as Zaheer Khan, Robin Uthappa, Scott Styris, Brett Lee, Graeme Smith, AB de Villiers, and Chris Gayle.

Photo credit: JioCinema

But this isn’t a regular commentary feed. If you watch it, you’ll realise it’s skewed towards analysis, strategy, predictions, and storytelling, as opposed to the more generic world feed. There’s also a lot of banter between the commentators, who have all played in the IPL before and some of whom have also captained or coached teams. And unlike the world feed, where the commentators are present at the match venue, The Insiders panel is sitting in a studio in Mumbai.

I’ve largely been watching the IPL on The Insiders feed because I enjoy the analysis and storytelling on it. During one of the games earlier in the season, Morgan talked about the time when the KKR dugout used secret codes to communicate with him on the field during the 2021 season. Morgan was the captain of KKR at the time. Other interesting segments I remember were: de Villiers talking about deciphering Rashid Khan’s googly, Gayle and Morgan on what happens during the strategic timeout, and Uthappa on how MS Dhoni gets into the minds of batters with his field placements.

Now, if this sounds familiar to you, that’s because The Insiders isn’t exactly a novel idea. JioCinema’s rival Star Sports had pioneered the concept of an analysis-focused cricket commentary feed in India with the Select Dugout, launched ahead of the 2018 IPL season. That was the first season of Star Sports’ IPL broadcast journey.

Select Dugout’s commentary panel in 2018 featured some of the same former cricketers who are now The Insiders—Kumble, Styris, Lee, and Smith—along with others such as Damien Fleming, Brad Hogg, Dean Jones, and Mike Hesson. Over the next few seasons, the likes of Swann, Brian Lara, Kumar Sangakkara, Darren Sammy, and Dominic Cork also joined the panel.

The rise and fall of the Dugout

While the Select Dugout was launched in 2018, the seeds of the idea were sown three to four years prior. Cricket programming until then was structured so as to include analysis only during pre- and post-match studio shows. That changed with the 2015 men’s ODI World Cup, when Star Sports started including analysis in the commentary.

“It’s something we were thinking of doing since 2013-14,” says a Star Sports executive, who requested anonymity as they aren’t authorised to speak with the media. “We wanted to give the commentary a direction. Otherwise, cricket commentary was just people talking generic stuff and calling the action, but not really adding any value. The viewer knows it’s a boundary. Why do you need an A-list commentator to tell you that?”

Star Sports figured that getting analysis into the commentary would keep viewers hooked. For example, a batter’s weakness against a particular bowling type, a pattern of dismissals, a flaw in the technique, or venue-centric stories. “We wanted to get into what the teams are thinking in the dugout, what their plans against particular batters could be, etc. That’s where the idea of the Select Dugout was germinated,” adds the executive.

Then, after Star won a five-year deal to broadcast the IPL starting with the 2018 season, it executed this idea. It signed former captains and coaches as commentators to present a feed full of analysis and the kind of discussions that happen in the team dugouts. “The commentary became predictive and engaging. They would predict that X bowler will be asked to bowl the next over. They used to call ‘big over alert’ and ‘wicket alert’ live on air, and they were right on most occasions,” says the executive.

Apart from the commentary, the Dugout panel also did demonstrations of proper cricket techniques in the Star Sports studio, which was a larger space than a typical commentary box. Sangakkara would do a wicketkeeping masterclass, Lara explained how to play a perfect pull shot, while Lee talked about what makes a great yorker.

While the Star Sports production team helped the cricketers make their packages, some of them would just do stuff on the fly, the executive says. “Brian Lara once asked us to keep the camera rolling and did a demo on how to face mystery bowlers. He did a 20-minute piece all by himself. You just had to figure out what gets them going.”

As a result, the production team needed to have people who understood the game and had the authority to tell former cricketers what works and what doesn’t on the broadcast. As a producer, you can’t be afraid to say no to the cricketers. The Star Sports executive remembers an incident when a foreign former pace bowler complained that the piece he was supposed to do was also being done by an Indian bowler for the Hindi commentary feed. “We had to explain to him that the producer has made the piece for both feeds. It’s for the network.”

All in all, producing the Select Dugout was a great learning experience for the Star Sports crew. “It was like doing a two-year MBA course in cricket. People used to fight not to take their days off. How often do you see that?” says the executive.

Star Sports eventually took the Select Dugout beyond the IPL to tournaments such as the World Cup and Asia Cup. It even managed to get some of the panellists, largely comprising foreigners, to commit to being part of the Dugout during the Covid seasons of 2020 and 2021. But then, ahead of IPL 2022, reports emerged that there would be no Select Dugout during the season. Star Sports did not make any official comment about it. The broadcaster also did not respond to my request to participate in this story.

Twitter tweet

“We were all expecting it to return, but it just didn’t,” says the executive. “I think it was because the foreign cricketers couldn’t travel due to Covid, and there weren’t too many Indians on the panel. But I’m not sure.”

Select Dugout was likely one of the victims that fell by the wayside as Star Sports parent Disney India began to scale down its sports business beginning late 2020. This was after Disney’s Asia Pacific chief Uday Shankar quit the company, followed by four other top Star Sports executives: CEO Gautam Thakar, regional sports chief Ashok Namboodiri, marketing head Rajiv Mathrani, and emerging sports leader Rupali Fernandes. In June 2022, months after the scrapping of Select Dugout, Disney Star also lost the digital rights of the IPL to new rival Viacom18.

In a way, it wasn’t surprising that Select Dugout wasn’t a priority for Disney. Because it was a show for cricket nerds. “It wasn’t really watched by the masses,” says the Star Sports executive. “It was for purists, of which there are very few in the country. It was like fine dining. The viewership was lesser than some of our pre-match shows. After all, nobody likes gyaan, especially with fantasy sports taking centre stage. Not many people have the time or inclination to watch an entire game filled with educative commentary.”

As a result, there were very few ads on Select Dugout, if any. You’d see a branded bat placed in the studio and a sponsor board behind the panel’s desk, but that’s about it. Because of the largely spontaneous nature of the analysis during the commentary, Star also couldn’t really commit to many brand placements or plugs. And then, with the company turning its focus towards achieving profitability by 2024, it quietly dropped Select Dugout.

Enter The Insiders

As it turned out, this wasn’t to be the end of analysis-focused cricket commentary in India. Viacom18, backed by India’s largest conglomerate Reliance Industries, owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, bought the five-year digital rights of the IPL for ₹23,758 crore (~$3 billion) last year. It then disrupted sports broadcasting by offering the IPL for free on its streaming service JioCinema for the 2023 season. It announced that it would offer IPL commentary in 12 different languages, including Bhojpuri, Punjabi, and Oriya. And it launched a lookalike of Select Dugout, called The Insiders, featuring many of the same panellists.

Siddharth Sharma, executive vice president, Viacom18 Sports, takes umbrage to suggestions that The Insiders is inspired by Select Dugout. “As a philosophy, we’ve attempted something different,” he says. “We’re not doing masterclasses or getting overly analytical. We are storytellers. Data and stats can be found on the internet with the click of a button, but stories can’t be found like that. Stories have to come from these people who have shared dressing rooms with our heroes, who’ve been a part of winning cultures—they have the insider’s view on the sport.”

Sharma is a broadcast industry veteran. Prior to joining Viacom18 in November 2021, he spent eight-and-a-half years at Disney Star as the head of kabaddi and then overall sports content. Before that, he was at Hindi news channel ABP News for nearly 11 years, starting off as an anchor and then being promoted to sports editor. He had also worked as an anchor at ABP News rival Zee News for four years prior to that.

Sharma’s experience in the Hindi broadcast industry is apparent when I ask him to elaborate on The Insiders’ storytelling focus.

“Sabse achchi kahaniyaan humare dada-dadi sunaya karte the (Our grandparents always told the best stories),” he says. “That’s what I tell my commentators when I’m briefing them. Because back in the day, we did not have visual stimuli. They told stories through their voice. That sentiment...Bohot pehle ki ek baat thi. Ek raja tha, aur uske rajmahal ke bahar sone ki sadkein hua karte the, doodh ki nadiyaan baha karti thi (Once upon a time, there lived a king, whose palace was surrounded by streets paved with gold and rivers of milk). If I start imagining this, it’s a win for the storyteller. When you’re jostling for attention spans, you can captivate viewers with compelling story threads.”

Sharma adds that while there is room for analysis in cricket commentary, it cannot be the focus. “The fulcrum has to be storytelling because it aggregates the largest number of people. Not everybody would want to dive deep into analytical things. Some audiences like it and we offer a bit of that too, but if you want to expand the funnel, you have to do it through stories. Because stories endear everyone. You have to call the action, you have to be on the ball, but how you call the action and tell a story matters.”

JioCinema has tried to imbue this philosophy in all its 12 language feeds. For instance, its Marathi feed features former cricketers and coaches such as Kedar Jadhav, Dhawal Kulkarni, and Kiran More. Tamil has Abhinav Mukund, R Sridhar, and Baba Aparajith. Punjabi has Sarandeep Singh, Rahul Sharma, and VRV Singh. At the same time, it’s not a one-size-fits-all philosophy.

“For example, the story I’m going to tell in the Bhojpuri feed would be different to how I would call it in English,” says Sharma. “Bhojpuri is a new audience set that would not necessarily be a cricket core. The conversations or analogies they need to be more geared towards a cricket intender—someone who is on the fringes but hasn’t necessarily understood the nuances of the game. We wouldn’t want to throw these viewers off by getting into too many technicalities. Tamil, on the other hand, is an out-and-out cricket-core audience set. They like their numbers and analysis, so we give them a lot of that in healthy doses. We take calls depending on the audience cohort.”

That’s the advantage of having multiple language feeds. The broadcaster can tell more nuanced and diverse stories based on the region or catchment area, something the world feed in English can’t do because it goes out globally and has to be universal.

Even Star Sports has been imbuing Select Dugout’s philosophies in its eight Indian language feeds, says the executive quoted earlier. “You can’t incorporate everything, but the approach is always analytical and predictive. If you say on air that the next over will produce a battle between X and Y, people won’t tune out. Of course, you also have to talk about what’s happening in the moment. You have to maintain a fine balance between storytelling, calling the action, and taking breaks at the right time. It’s a bit of harakiri, but we were always bullish on that as a network.”

So, essentially, the difference between Star Sports and JioCinema’s IPL broadcast philosophies is that the former leans towards analysis more than the latter. But both networks place immense value on the art of storytelling.

Is The Insiders working out in terms of viewership? Sharma declines to reveal the numbers, but says it is “one of the stickier feeds” in its lineup. “Graeme Smith has just joined us; we’re going to get AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle back for the playoffs, so that gives you an indication of the reception it has got.”

Apart from The Insiders and the Indian language feeds, JioCinema also has three other commentary feeds for the IPL called Hangout, Fantasy, and Fanzone. Hangout is a lighter, entertainment-focused feed, with commentators including comedian Danish Sait, radio jockey-turned-actor Mantra, India cricketer Veda Krishnamurthy, and former England cricketer Owais Shah. It also regularly features the family members of cricketers as guests.

Hangout is targeted at women aged between 15 and 30, says Sharma. “The idea is to get to know the lives of IPL heroes beyond the field. There are also a lot of rule explainers, fun banter, and common-world analogies. We try to endear an audience set that isn’t into heavy cricket understanding.”

The Fantasy feed, as the name suggests, is designed for fantasy sports fanatics. It pits former cricketers such as Aakash Chopra against successful fantasy sports players from across the country. This is just a pre-match, mid-innings, and post-match show—the commentary feed is The Insiders.

Meanwhile, each IPL match also has two team-specific Fanzone feeds—each Fanzone features three fans of a particular team. It’s a “watchalong” feed where you only see the fans chatting about the match on air while the game is on. It’s a second-screen experience, as Sharma calls it, where you can watch the actual game on another screen. “Some of the fan reactions are priceless, like when Rinku Singh hit those five sixes in a row to win the match for KKR. Or the CSK Fanzone when Dhoni walks out.”

In its first season of broadcasting the IPL, JioCinema has clearly gone all guns blazing. And each of these feeds have their own ad delivery, although Reliance brands such as JioCinema, JioMart, AJIO, and the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre feature heavily in the mix.

It’ll be interesting to see how many of these commentary feeds are still on air towards the end of the current IPL media rights cycle in 2027.

If you have any additional thoughts, feel free to write to me at jaideep@thesignal.co. If you’re reading this online, you can post a comment below.

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