Off-side: Feast for cricket, famine for rest
Where cricket enjoys a constant banquet of sponsorship and visibility, the rest of Indian sport survives on crumbs.
Updated : Sep 24, 2025 11:53 IST – 4 MINS READ
Apollo Tyres’ recent Rs. 579-crore deal for the Indian cricket team jersey, spanning until March 2028, tells us as much about the power of cricket as it does about the weakness of every other sport in the country. The company closed FY25 with Rs. 26,123 crore in revenue and Rs. 1,121 crore in profit, and will now spend nearly Rs. 230 crore a year – 21 per cent of its last year’s profit – on the only guaranteed billboard: the Team India jersey.
GroupM’s 2024 Sporting Nation report valued India’s sports sponsorship market at Rs. 16,633 crore, and Apollo Tyres now accounts for three per cent of that total with this one deal. The jersey has long carried a sponsor’s curse – Sahara, Oppo, Byju’s, Dream11 all walked away – yet each handover made it more expensive.Neeraj Kanwar, Apollo Tyres’ vice-chairman and MD, says: “When you get into a bidding process, you will add a premium, and the jersey commands that.” That premium, in this case, buys ubiquity – Tests, ODIs, T20s, men’s and women’s cricket, a full calendar year of constant exposure.
The exposure is unlike anything else in Indian sport. The 2023 ODI World Cup drew 518 million viewers, with the final reaching a peak of 300 million. The IPL’s 2023–27 media rights were sold for Rs. 48,390 crore, and the 2025 edition garnered a billion viewers. Indian cricket doesn’t just deliver eyeballs; it provides certainty.
However, every rupee spent on cricket can be seen as a rupee denied elsewhere. Indian football, whose Indian Super League was once heralded as the next big thing, had a Rs. 50-crore commercial guarantee from Football Sports Development Ltd. The deal, though, is no longer in place as the league struggles to reach 100 million viewers in a season. Hockey’s professional revival, the Hockey India League, relaunched only last year, has already lost two franchises. The “emerging sports” basket is worth Rs. 2,461 crore, as cricket accounts for 85 per cent of sponsorship revenue, according to the GroupM survey.
The loop is vicious. Sponsors chasing certainty pour into cricket. Broadcasters, following sponsors, pay more for cricket. Administrators, flush with cash, schedule more cricket. Audiences, with no shortage of content, stay locked onto cricket. Meanwhile, other sports struggle for investment, visibility, and scale. Without scale, they cannot attract sponsors; without sponsors, they cannot fund their scale. It is the classic chicken-and-egg trap, and it has trapped Indian sport for decades.
The government is aware of this imbalance and has attempted to intervene by introducing a 40 per cent GST on IPL tickets; however, gate receipts are not where the money is. The real rivers are sponsorships and media rights.
The solution, too, can come from cricket – forcing cricket to share. Should IPL franchises be mandated to invest in other sports leagues? Some already do – RPSG in football, GMR in kho-kho and kabaddi, JSW in football, kabaddi and hockey, Capri in kabaddi, kho-kho and rugby. But mandating such investment could finally broaden the base.
The BCCI could also turn up its generosity. In 2008, it contributed Rs. 50 crore to the National Sports Development Fund, Rs. 10 crore to India’s Olympic preparations for 2021, and extended financial assistance to the Indian Olympic Association for the 2024 Paris Games.
However, beyond financial considerations, the Board possesses unmatched expertise in marketing, branding, broadcast negotiations, and sponsorship packaging. If anyone can teach other federations how to sell sport, it is the BCCI.
As Kapil Dev reminded us at the recently concluded Sportstar-KPMG PlayCom Summit: “If you take Rs. 100 from the sponsor, you must deliver value worth Rs. 1,000. If you take Rs. 100 and give back only Rs. 10 in value, it won’t work.”
Cricket offers that multiplier because of its year-round fixtures, relentless broadcast distribution, and a captive fan base. But other sports can’t, because they’ve never had or created the same runway. Unless policy, BCCI muscle, and franchise obligations combine to widen the base, the imbalance will persist. Cricket will eat first, eat last, and eat almost everything available.
SPORTSTAR