The year is 1989. Wunderkind Sachin Tendulkar breaks in on the Indian cricketing scene and a host of corporate number crunchers, making a beeline for the cricketing prodigy, are told to "back off". The miracle boy wished to concentrate on his cricket, and preferred to consult ‘Sir’ (former captain Sunil Gavaskar), before meandering into such snake pits.
Back to 1995. The boy is now man, he shaves, has a wife and has just hooked – man-to-man tough talk across the table – the biggest endorsement deal in the history of Indian cricket. So big is the deal that, in the words of Lokesh Sharma, India’s leading sports consultant, "Sachin would be earning thrice as much as all the cricketers combined in the history of Indian cricket."
The estimated US $7.5 million (Rs 27 crore) that Sachin is expected to earn from WorldTel, spread over five years, wouldn’t be quite enough for him to go in for a Lear jet to take him to St John’s Wood, London, next year for the Test series after the World Cup and pop peanuts along the way. But it certainly suffices to push him clear of Australia’s Shane Warne and West Indian batting sensation Brian Lara in current earnings (see box).
Sachin’s earnings in all likelihood will go up by another US $2.5 million (Rs 9 crore) over the next five years, if Mark Mascrenhas of WorldTel can work his magic resell act, since the amount above the guarantee money is split 85:15 in favour of Sachin.
Says Ravi Shastri, former Indian Test player and the Indian business partner of WorldTel: "For the first time in history, an Indian sportsman is getting the value he deserves. This is not a story about easy, big money, but of a guy who deserves every penny he has got." A guy who, according to the Little Master, Sunil Gavaskar, ""as the technical excellence of Greg Chappell and the savagery of Viv Richards."
While the deal itself owes largely to Sachin’s superstar status and the lack of rivals of similar stature, it was helped by the increasing entry of transnationals in the country. With the TNCS have come bigger advertising budgets – ad spend in India is growing at a rate of 50 per cent a year. The non-availability of any sport in India with as big a television audience as cricket was another plus point.
The Indian cricket board also marketed the game in an aggressive manner after the advent of night cricket. Says Siddarth Varma, general manager (marketing), Reebok: "As a result of the media boom, the visibility of the players has gone up tremendously. Years ago, if a Pataudi played a Test in Madras, only those at the stadium could watch him in action. Now, not only the whole country but even the rest of the world can see it live thanks to satellite and cable uplinks." Besides, with the coming of colour television, the country colours donned by players made a highly saleable proposition.
It also made the stars suitable vehicles for endorsing anything from shoes to cola. Says Pepsi marketing chief, Vibha Rishi: "Over the last year, the money earned by cricket stars has increased ten-fold. And it’s not only the superstars, it’s across the board." This year Pepsi alone has spent Rs 3 crore on sports endorsements and sponsorships, 50 per cent more than last year. The MNC has three Indian cricket stars on its rolls – Sachin, Mohammed Azharuddin and Vinod Kambli. And though only Azharuddin comes close to rivalling Sachin in terms of star pull and status, if the Indian skipper pulls off an Indian victory in the World Cup there would be nothing hotter than the Hyderabadi on the endorsement circuit.
The recent entry of sports goods giant Reebok has also been a bonanza for Indian sportsmen, particularly cricketers. This is notwithstanding the controversy regarding Azhar’s signing his name on the Reebok shoe. As the company’s marketing strategy the world-over is based on active endorsement, deals have been signed with Azharuddin , Venkatesh Prasad, Anil Kumble, Nayan Mongia, Navjot Singh Sidhu and Javagal Srinath. According to Sharma, consultant to the footwear giant, these players have been signed for amounts ranging from Rs 6 lakh to Rs 15 lakh. The one superstar they hadn’t been able to woo so far had been Sachin. While Reebok was willing to offer him Rs 1 crore a year, Sachin had been holding out for five times the sum.
According to Sharma, Sachin’s contract with WorldTel "has been entered keeping in mind that 60 per cent of WorldTel money could be recovered from a company like Reebok". While one can take that with a pinch of salt, what is really holding Reebok back is Sachin’s current contract with Action shoes which runs till 1999 and is reportedly worth Rs 80 lakh in its entirety. Since Action shoes dominate the lower end of the market, Reebok, with its Rs 2,000 to Rs 6,000 price range, isn’t willing to risk Sachin endorsing footwear products at both ends of the segment.
Another disturbing factor for companies wanting to ride the Sachin bandwagon, is the quantum of resell World Tel would have to do to recover their investment in Sachin. Sachin has six product endorsements even before the contract— Pepsi, Boost, Action shoes, Gillette, Band Aid, Sunny Bajaj and V I S A. Sports stars abroad generally limit themselves to a maximum of three product endorsements. And though World Tel has promised to be choosy about just what their prize catch would plug on the idiot box, it could work in reverse too— with companies hesitant to use Sachin due to the overkill and overexposure.
A rough estimate of the time Sachin would have to devote in front of the camera is around 50 days a year. This, if the number of new products doesn’t go into double digits. The more product endorsements there are, the less time there would be for Sachin to train or be with his family. Also, since the contract has performance clauses, the most basic of them being his continued presence in the Indian team, it could add to the pressure. And besides time in the studio, there are social obligations also. Says Varma: "Previously it was enough for sports stars to don the sponsors’ logo or just use their equipment. Now they have to be media savvy, give time to the sponsors’ television shows, apart from commercials. Also charity causes."
With the superstars now realising the premium on time, contract negotiations use it as a major factor. Also the level of exposure. Reebok, for instance, would have had a much lower cost of entry if it had stepped into the Indian market in 1997, but what they would have saved on cost they would have lost out in exposure. Says Va rma: "The cricket World Cup and the Atlanta Olympics are next year. We didn’t want to miss out on the exposure even though the signing amounts of individuals went up because of this."
Amounts that aren’t restricting themselves to cricket alone. In fact, the cricket phenomenon has started to rub off on other sports. Three-time world billiards champion Michael Ferreira felt the trickle-down-effect first hand when a Bombay-based "multimedia company" approached him, Geet Sethi and Nalin Patel to endorse products. Says Ferreira: "The deal is going to be in six figures for each of us."
However, the sport next to cricket that is getting the maximum sponsorship is golf. Prize money alone on the Indian golfing scene has increased by over 75 per cent in the last year, touching Rs 72.45 lakh.
This should cross the Rs 1 crore mark by next season. While only 13 players topped Rs 1 lakh in earnings in 1993- 94, the last season saw 23 of them notch up higher figures. The formation of the Asian Professional Golfers’ Association last year, a 20-week Rs 18 crore circuit, has also helped boost the earnings of Indian golfers. And since increase in prize money precedes endorsement, the future of the sport looks assured in India.
Especially since companies have taken to sponsoring individuals in the game. For instance, JCT sponsors Rohtas Singh while the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) has taken Amandeep Johl and 14-year-old Zai Kipgen under their umbrella. SAIL alone has a budget of Rs 5 crore for sports and apart from the Davis Cup team and Kipgen, they also sponsor the women’s weight-lifting squad and chess player Saheli Dhar. Says Ashok Khanna, SAIL’s senior deputy director (sports): "Our’s is not a business proposition. We are just helping a cause." Of course, the nobility of the cause doesn’t stop SAIL from using the sportsmen in their commercials.
The only popular sport losing out on the whole trend is hockey. There’s no player endorsing any product and players weren’t even allowed, till very recently, by the Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) to play at the club level in Europe. It’s only now that a few of them have tried cashing in on their individual talent. The national team’s inside left, Dhanraj Pillai, for instance, is currently playing for a club in Lyons, in France, and Jude Felix is organising and playing in a tournament in Singapore. But Pillai is earning just around Rs 1.80 lakh for the two to three months he is on contract and at the cost of missing his place on the Indian team currently playing in Malaysia. So frustrated are former hockey players at missed opportunities, that getting vitriolic against the hockey board comes naturally. Says Vece Paes, father of Indian Davis Cup sensation Leander Paes, and a member of the 1972 Olympics hockey team: "In my days, whatever commercial opportunities existed were suppressed by the board in the guise of imposing discipline." Ajit Pal Singh, former captain and coach of the Indian hockey team and hero of the victorious 1975 World Cup team at Kuala Lumpur, feels that the IHF didn’t do enough to sell the sport commercially when the Indian team was chalking victories. Says Singh, rather poignantly: "Nothing much happened to us after the 1975 victory. Nobody got any endorsements. I remember that the only prize we got was a scooter each from the Uttar Pradesh government."
In fact, the nostalgia extends even to a sport like cricket. Says Sandeep Patil, former Indian Test player who is slated to be the Indian team’s next manager after Ajit Wadekar: "In my time, modelling and endorsing products were just a pastime. We did it just for the heck of it. I remember doing an advertisement for just Rs 1,000. The most I got was for a Thums Up campaign— Rs 25,000.Obviously things have changed. And how!"
While product endorsement first started on the Indian scene in the early ’70s when Farrokh Engineer extolled the merits of Iodex and Bry l c ream, and Eknath Solkar apparently stayed fit by riding Hero bicycles, the real punch came when the two Indian cricket superstars, Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev came of age.
Says former captain Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi: "While endorsements initially started off with prize money, they got a big fillip only when we discovered two world-class cricketers in Sunny and Kapil. Sportsmen in India still have a clean image free from drugs. Besides, in the cricket case, aside from the Packer interlude in Australia, the players were helped enormously by a series of court judgments that went against the board."
But while the various sports boards have mellowed a bit in recent years realising the futility of player-management confrontations, what has undergone a sea-change, and perhaps forms the basis of all endorsement deals, is the professional attitude of the boards. No longer are boards content with just player upmanship. They are now intent on getting the best possible deals for their sport from television. While the Board of Control for Cricket in India went into a deal with E S P N for five years, last year, the All India Football Federation signed a decade-long deal recently with Prime Sport s. India’s ace footballer, incidently, signed up with Reebok on an endorsement deal worth Rs 1.5 lakh to him annually. Even the All India Tennis Federation has gone into a tie-up with Doordarshan and the I H F has appointed the Sports Management Group to act as its agent to negotiate with Prime Sport s and E S P N.
Some like Leander feel that the big names are still feeling their way around and it will be a good six months before they make their presence felt. Leander feels that while the cricket board has had a head - start over the others, the consequent effect of other boards tying up with television channels on sport endorsements and sponsorships still lies in the future.
Leander himself, who is the only Indian tennis player to have a racket (with Prince) and apparel contract, is negotiating with Reebok International, now that his Lotto deal has expired. Says Leander: "There is also a deal in the pipeline with an international television company which earlier had Michael Chang on its rolls."
Squash, the other racket sport, is doing poorly in comparison. Since the game is not based on a television viewership scenario but sustains itself largely because of the support of top level executives, sponsorship is rare and endorsement unknown. The women’s national squash champion, Misha G rewal Jahangir, has moved to Dubai to sustain herself on the Asian circuit after a disheartening experience this year in trying to get a sponsor to finance her travel and board to four Asian circuit tournaments. Since she had sent in her entry forms and subsequently pulled out, her world ranking fell from 30 to 38. She is slowly working her way up.
But apart from Leander, the only Indian sportsman with an international draw is chess wizard Vishwanathan Anand. His recent runner-up status to Gary Kasparov in the Professional Chess Association championship on top of the World Trade Tower earned him Rs 1.8 crore on paper. But the actual amount that Anand netted after taxes and paying off his seconds was only in the region of Rs 72 lakh. That is still the biggest, single individual pay-off for an Indian sportsman. But in spite of this, his visibility in the endorsement segment has been virtually non-existent apart from appearing in Raymond advertisements a couple of years ago.
Inevitably, Sachin’s success has been drawing flak in some sectors. Journalist Behram Contractor, for instance, believes that Sachin’s genius is being over-rewarded. Says Contractor: "He is not worth what is being said and written about him and the money that is being paid. Not in terms of runs at least." The fact that six years after his debut he has still to do something as spectacular as Lara weighs him down. Besides, consistency of the kind that Gavaskar and Vijay Merchant displayed is not his forte. Some like Sadanand Viswanath, former Indian wicketkeeper, even hope that the sudden influx of money doesn’t affect his performance. Says Vishwanath: "I hope the big money turns him into an even better player and not otherwise."
In fact, that’s what Shastri thinks is going to happen. "The money is going to make him more motivated. He doesn’t have to bother about marketing himself anymore." And even as Mascarenhas does a Don King to Sachin, let’s hope that commercial exigencies don’t push WorldTel to go for an overkill in Sachin’s case. A talent punctured isn’t going to help any party in question, least of all the game itself.
Members of the Indian cricket team should be buoyed by Sachin’s success seeing that it’s a clear signal to them of the future that could be theirs too if they played to their full potential. But what essentially matters to the millions of Sachin fans in the country is that he continues to perf o rm in the way he always has— electrifying stadiums with a quality of strokeplay few contemporaries can match. His millions of admirers can take reassurance from the fact that within a few days of signing the contract, Sachin blasted the bowlers in his inimitable style on his way to two consecutive centuries in the Wills one-day tournament in Gujarat. Obviously, the genius in him sees no room for words like ‘pressure’.
But for him to stay on course, it’s imperative that his head remains on level shoulders. And what better proof do we need of Sachin’s maturity than brother Ajit’s answer when asked if the Tendulkars celebrated after the signing of the deal. "We don’t even celebrate his centuries," said Ajit. "Why would we celebrate a thing as mundane as a contract?"
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