Deciphering India’s major event plans; who will succeed Sally Bolton at Wimbledon?

0:04James Emmett:Hello and welcome to the Leaders Worth Knowing podcast, the sports industry show from leaders where we talk about what's worth knowing in the business of sport this week. I'm Leaders Editorial Director James Emmett in Bangalore, India.

0:17David Cushnan:And I'm Content Director David Cushnan in New York City on the show this week on the ground in Bangalore and New York. Sports media models and what the future holds. And tennis leadership in flux. This is Leaders Worth Knowing.

0:33James Emmett:David, good morning to you over there in the Big Apple. Do you have an extra large coffee

0:39David Cushnan:to hand? Sure do, sure do. Good morning to you. Good Wednesday morning to you from New York and good afternoon to you over in Bangalore, India.

0:48James Emmett:Good Wednesday evening to me over in Bangalore, India. Yeah.

0:52David Cushnan:Yes. How are you? How is it?

0:55James Emmett:Well, I don't mind saying, David, that I'm flat out tired, TBH. Quite a lot of travel and straight into events and whatnot. I've come to the end of a little stint here in Bangalore, flew out less than 48 hours ago to help put on the Indian Sports summit out here, the third iteration of an event that we help run with Royal Challengers Bangalore. Always a pleasure to be on the ground here in India and in Bangalore. I mean, it's obviously an explosion for the senses to be in India, but it's fantastic to be out of the kind of Western bubble and into a completely alien, foreign, exotic place that feels still like there's momentum, positivity, high growth opportunity in all sorts of verticals, not just sport.

1:56James Emmett:But obviously, we're here to talk about sport. And yeah, the sports industry continues to grow and professionalize over here. And yeah, we've just wrapped up, yesterday, we wrapped up the event at the Padacone Centre for Sports Excellence, the Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence. We've lost Padacone from the name of the venue.

2:16David Cushnan:And yeah, really, really great time. How about you? Yes, I am in New York where we're a little behind you time-wise. So right in the middle of a big old week of events for both leaders and our friends at Sports Business Journal. we're in the middle of Tech Week which is SPJ's big event at the Times Centre right here in the heart of Manhattan. I was also looking after yesterday our Attention Seekers workshop which was really good fun this is our private series of workshops for sports and media insiders so we had a really good gang of people together to discuss the packaging and monetization of content and how to do that effectively and actually what to avoid.

3:01David Cushnan:So that was yesterday morning. And then we've got the big awards night tonight, Sports Business Awards. What will you be wearing, David? I will be wearing a dark suit as befits the occasion. I always note, I love that event.

3:12James Emmett:I actually think the Sports Business Awards is one of the greatest sports networking opportunities in the whole of sport, business or sport itself. But I'm always struck whenever I go by the difference in sartorial standards between the American industry and, well, probably Americans and Europeans, to be honest. But I'd sort of assumed that you were going full James Bond, David, in a kind of tuxedo, maybe with a martini in the top pocket.

3:42David Cushnan:Well, I might well do. I actually brought and wore quite a snazzy new jacket yesterday to our attention seekers workshop and then realized it was pointed out to me later in the day that I'd sort of managed to actually sort of scribble pen all over myself at a certain point, making, you know, making notes. So yeah, demonstrating a little bit of Mr. Bean energy over here. But yeah, we'll give James Bond a go a little bit later. Tell me a little bit more about India, James, because we, as you said, have been over there for the last couple of years working on this event. This was the third edition of the Indian Sports Summit.

4:18David Cushnan:The first couple of years very much framed around what India can do, should do, must do to become a sport-forward nation. There's certainly been suggestions and very much the, you know, sometimes spoken, largely unspoken theme of the first couple of editions was how India could best prepare itself to mount an Olympic bid at some point in the future. Since we were last there, India has been handed the rights to the 2030 Commonwealth Games. But it feels like the story has maybe moved on and shifted a little bit. Tell us what were the main sort of talking points, I guess, on stage and, you know, critically, as we always say, in the margins?

5:01James Emmett:Yeah. Well, first of all, the idea of India as a potential future host of top level global sporting events. Yeah, you're right. The context now is that they have been awarded the rights to host the 2030 Centennial Commonwealth Games in Ahmedabad, which is the city that seems to be the focus of quite a lot of infrastructural development. It seems to be the focal point for a lot of the Indian government's strategy around where to host these major events. Ahmedabad seems to be the place that they want to focus on. It's Modi's city. It's Modi's city, exactly. And to be honest, coming into this event, the lead up to it, obviously we're based in the UK.

5:47James Emmett:We're not party to the ins and outs of kind of Indian politics and in the Indian kind of sports business scene for whatever it is until we're here. And I felt certainly my perception of what the mood music was around an Olympic bid, 2036, isn't it? The the Olympic bid that they had been lining up for Ahmedabad. I felt like the mood music had quietened down a little bit around that. Certainly that the drumbeat of momentum and, you know, serious figures in Indian government and in and around the Olympic movement talking about India as a genuine, realistic future host, I thought the tempo of that drumbeat had come down a bit.

6:29James Emmett:But being here on the ground, honestly, no change in terms of how people talk about it, certainly. Serious people at very large professional multinational businesses talking about it as a realistic prospect that they want to get behind. As far as people are concerned here, there still is momentum, there still is investment, there still is a realistic chance of doing this. Commonwealth Games viewed as a staging post, a really great test event in the lead up to a potential Games. And in terms of on-the-record chit-chat, one of the speakers that we had at the event yesterday was the Indian sports secretary, so a senior figure in the Indian government, a chap called Hari Ranjan Rao.

7:15James Emmett:He was a very, very articulate speaker. He spoke very well. And he talked about, as you'd imagine, the seriousness of the Indian government when it comes to sports policy. And he pointed to a development as a huge development that would definitely have gone unnoticed on the kind of wider international scene, but that here should be seen as a serious signal of intent and seriousness on the Indian government's part. So last year, towards the end of last year, the government passed something called the Sports Governance Act, which is the first piece of legislation aimed at supporting a sports industry, a professional sports industry and a participation ecosystem.

8:00James Emmett:It's the first bit of legislation that's been passed in 28 years. So that being the case, it's fair to say that the Indian government has largely ignored sport for the last 30 years or so. He went into detail about what this act does. And it, you know, obviously it's technical, it's legal. What it should result in is better governance structures around the power in sports federations across India, how elections work, also funding models, how funds should be raised and distributed across sport. So with the intention basically of professionalizing all sport across India aside from cricket. There is a realization and acceptance that cricket is an outlier in India and everything else needs building up to meet cricket.

8:49James Emmett:So that particular bit of legislation obviously comes into force. It came into force at the end of last year. It remains to be seen how it works and what the results are. But everyone in and around the Indian sporting space hopeful that it produces much more professional organizations who can build clearer pathways to success. Athletes in sports other than cricket can have good livelihoods, have a healthy ecosystem, and that these newly professionalized federations can start doing what sports organizations are doing elsewhere around the world, building fundraising, commercializing what they've got, putting on better events in better situations.

9:33James Emmett:So big signal, and he re-emphasized the Indian government's support of the idea of being a host at the very top level in international sport.

9:43David Cushnan:And it's worth noting with the Olympics specifically in mind that everybody who is thinking about or would ultimately be involved in bidding for the 2036 Summer Olympic Games is in a bit of limbo at the moment because both the process and the timelines have not been defined exactly how this is going to work as part of IOC President Kirstie Coventry's pause and reflect period. they're still working through what the future bidding process actually looks like. So I know I was speaking last week to somebody who has an involvement with one of the other prospective bids for that Olympics. And there is a, you know, it's limbo.

10:29David Cushnan:And there's also a little bit of a sense of frustration, actually, that some of this stuff can't move forward or can only move forward to a certain point at this stage. I guess the other thing to talk about with regards to India and our hosts, Royal Challenges Bangalore, is as we've talked about on the podcast, as we've seen in the news over the past few weeks, they are one of the two Indian Premier League teams who have been sold in recent times, along with the Rajasthan Royals. So a new ownership group coming in involving David Blitzer, involving Times of India, a number of other India-based stakeholders, big money, you know, multi-billion dollar transactions, Diageo giving up RCB as an asset.

11:18David Cushnan:They've owned it for a number of years. And the question is, of course, what this says about the Indian Premier League and its future. And we're in the middle of the season as well. So we were running this event in the thick of the men's IPL for 2026. Again, what was the mood? What's the sort of feeling? What's the assessment about the IPL? Because as we've touched on previously on the podcast, I think there is this suggestion that from a media rights standpoint, there's maybe a slightly more challenging period ahead. Yeah, lots of, as you can imagine, lots of great in-house content

11:55James Emmett:yesterday from the various facets of the RCB organization. It is now, after 18 years of competition in the IPL, it's now a champion. That was the story in the IPL for some time now. When is Royal Challengers Bangalore finally going to win? They have won and they're now the IPL and WPL reigning champions. They are playing on Friday, as we speak now on Wednesday, but they've already qualified for the playoffs this year. The first team to qualify for the playoffs, they're on something of a tear. And we heard from all sorts of the hierarchy actually yesterday, including Rajesh, who's the chief executive alongside Mo Bobat, who's effectively the performance director.

12:37James Emmett:He's the sort of sports operations lead and a really impressive character. And then later in the day, of course, we had quasi-deity Virat Kohli come along and speak. And he also speaks very well. elsewhere or more of a sort of business track. There was a fascinating session involving a couple of financiers, really. There's a chap in particular who was excellent called Sandy Agrawal, who's one of the, I think he's a partner at the Aditya Birla Group, or he's one of the lead execs at the Aditya Birla Group, which is one of the investors in this consortium that has bought Royal Challengers Bangalore.

13:19James Emmett:And he was fascinating on where the consortium and where he, as a finance person, sees future value in the IPL. You're right, David, to set the context of it currently being a challenging media market in India. All the conditions for growth are still there in India. It's still a rapidly progressing, growing middle class, a vibrant advertising market, rising GDP, all signs are sort of trending in the right way. But we're at an odd sort of point in time where the media market is dominated by one player that has been consolidation. And when it comes to selling sports rights, there really isn't competition in the market, which is resulting in quite a lot of behind the scenes consternation.

14:07James Emmett:First of all, at the IPL, where they are about to go to market for their next wave of media rights. They no longer have a

14:15David Cushnan:character like Lalit Modi who can make competition appear in the market with a wave of his magic wand.

14:21James Emmett:There are also other more global rights holders who are struggling to get significant deals done in the market. So FIFA had holdouts ahead of the World Cup in China and India. They did a deal in China last week, which looks to me, I mean, it was obviously sort of moved along politically, I would suggest, but it seems to be that it's a small amount on the front end with the promise of a large amount on the back end. And India is the next big territory, which FIFA has to solve ahead of the start of the World Cup. Some suggestions in the corridors here at the Indian Sports Summit that a similar model might be looked at in India, but suggestions that Rami Guy, the chief commercial officer at FIFA, is due in India next week to hopefully to finalize a deal.

15:09James Emmett:And people saying if it's Rami who comes, then a deal is there to be done. If it's someone more junior than Rami, then it's not necessarily there to be done. The IOC also not yet signed and sealed on a media rights deal for the next cycle, which would include the LA Olympics. Of course, the first time that cricket is on the program and a lot of people in and around cricket excited about the progression of the US as a viable market for growth in cricket. But the IOC, having put cricket on the program, presumably to try to monetize India more effectively, not yet able to do that because of the challenge in the market at the moment.

15:48James Emmett:But Sandeep Agrawal from the Aditya Birla group, not fussed in the slightest about the potential for media market growth. I guess They're looking at this as a long-term thing and competition will come into the market at some stage. So whether for this next cycle, they're not that bothered. They assume that there will be growth, but absolutely certain that future growth is there in a big way. He also pointed to gaming as a potential area for development that would add value to IPL franchises. And then there was the usual talk about development of stadium assets and selling hospitality packages and tickets in a slightly more Western way, I suppose.

16:35James Emmett:But good confidence in the future growth of the IPL. It was a funny moment as well, where there were a few finance folks on stage, all of them agreeing with each other about one of them said, well, the IPL is the best structured sports league on the planet, better than the NFL, which is obviously the richest, better than anything. Everyone agreed with them. And of course, finance people would say that because it is absolutely the most extractive league on the planet, I would suggest. it's the most successful league where owners and administrators receive the most the biggest slice of the pie versus um athletes and no chance of that changing anytime soon but we've discussed that on other podcasts yeah very interesting and as a little tidbit and it's going in the newsletter this week um one of the other new owners um of royal challenges bangalore is a called Satyan Gajwani, who's a principal at the Times of India.

17:34James Emmett:He's the chairman of Times Internet, I think. So he actually lives in, and I think the idea is that he'll come in as vice chair of Royal Challengers Bangalore, but the deal hasn't yet gone through and been ratified. That's coming in June. Anyway, Satyan Gajwani lives in California. And in fact, I think he did the same Stanford course as former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Anyway, he lives in California and he sends his kids to the same school as, get this, Egon Durbin, who is the CEO of Silver Lake, Sundar Pichai, who's the CEO of Google, and Neil Mohan, who is the CEO of YouTube. So the Parent Teachers Association at this school, crikey, what a powerful table at the charity, the annual charity dinner you've got there.

18:24James Emmett:Anyway, all four of those folks, investors together in the London Spirit 100 franchise. So I don't know about the PTA activity that you're involved in at the school that your son goes to, David. But yeah, imagine going for a little beer after a kid's pickup with a few folks and deciding what franchise you're going to buy next.

18:42David Cushnan:Yeah, it's similarly high level, James, as you can imagine. No, I know. It's maybe worth watching thinking about the IPL as it goes to market or the BCCI as it goes to market with this next round of media rights. Because I don't think the IPL, BCCI have their own in-house broadcast service in any shape or form. IPL TV. Could be wrong about that. No, I don't think so. That could be the kind of thing that it's worth watching out for because we've seen elsewhere that that's a move to try and stimulate activity in the market, perhaps, or just add a new element to the type of conversations and the dynamics of the conversations between rights holder trying to sell media rights and broadcasters.

19:31David Cushnan:So maybe one to watch.

19:31James Emmett:Yeah, Anurag, we'll have a future episode of the podcast actually with Anurag Dahia, who's the chief commercial officer of the ICC, who was there. And we covered this idea of competition in the market. And he said, as a seller of media rights, he said, there's no need to get too panicked about it, because the market will always respond. And if there is just one sole incumbent, sure, you're not going to maximize the value that could be there. But if they go too low on the price that they will buy from you, the market will see the opportunity and there will be a broadcaster that springs up. If rights are grossly undervalued, someone will start a broadcaster and swoop in.

20:11David Cushnan:One of the discussion points at Attention Seekers Workshop here in New York yesterday on Tuesday morning, and we brought together around about 40 senior executives, a real cross-section from across sport. And I'll tread carefully here because, as you know, James, these are very much strictly off the record. But one of the points that was talked, was raised and then discussed at a bit of length was actually the situation here in the US where, as is well known, the big boys, the big rights holders, the NFL, the NBA in particular, have sucked a lot of oxygen out of the market in terms of media rights fees.

20:48David Cushnan:Their huge deals have really taken up most of the budgets of the major networks who have come in to take those rights. There were obviously representatives of those established rights holders in the room. There were also a lot of what you might call more emerging or challenger rights holders in the room. And it was quite an interesting discussion about the level of boldness that a rights holder, that a property can demonstrate, can show. And in the case of the NFL and the NBA, the security of those long term media rights deals is actually allowing them to be a bit bold, albeit with greater resources, of course, you know, as a starting point, but allowing them to be a bit bolder in terms of how they think about packaging and, you know, ultimately monetizing content in other ways, whether that's clips or short form highlights or outcasts, you know, various ways of essentially in a very, very, very public.

21:46David Cushnan:way, being able to engage in a little bit of test and learn, which is something that is, we often talk about smaller rights holders, challenger rights holders, startup rights holders having a blank sheet of paper to start with. But what they don't have, or they very rarely have, is any form of sort of security of revenue that they know they are getting. And actually, that does naturally breed a bit of caution in those smaller properties.