The Money Illusion

The attention that the country’s still-emerging cricketer endorsement business gets is disproportionately greater than the monies involved.

The attention that the country’s still-emerging cricketer endorsement business gets is disproportionately greater than the monies involved. The opacity of the deals involved ensures that it is difficult to separate facts from self-fulfilling fiction peddled by canny managers. Almost no one in this business comes out on-the-record when it comes to numbers. Last week, quite predictably, there was much hype surrounding Mahendra Singh Dhoni, undoubtedly the biggest sports icon now, ‘overtaking’ Sachin Tendulkar with a Rs 210 crore endorsement deal with a little-known celebrity management consortium of Rhiti Sports Management and Mindscape One. While there are already questions about how such a new firm stitched together an expensive deal, even the most liberal estimates of the deal suggest that Dhoni, who already endorses more than 25 brands ranging from two-wheelers to up-and-coming low-cost apartment builders in Ghaziabad, would have to more than double his off-field work rate to deliver even breakeven returns for his paymasters. “I rubbed my eyes in disbelief when I heard about the deal. At a time when cricketers are playing almost 300 days of cricket, Dhoni would have to shoot ads on every single day of his off-season to justify the Rs 210 crore pay cheque. There aren’t many companies that can cough up Rs 5 crore for an ad campaign featuring superstars. Having been in this business for a pretty long time, I can confidently say that the sums mentioned make for very clever PR,” says a veteran manager who handles the business interests of three current India cricketers. Undaunted, Dhoni’s new handlers claim that they will look for limited but “high value” endorsements for their client. Expect the taxman to soon scream “howzzaat?”

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