Long-Hopping Cheques

WHEN Mark Mascarenhas, as wily an operator as any in the sports marketing business, signed up Sachin Tendulkar as his first individual cricket client in the second half of 1995, he was in the middle of a dream run. The countdown to the Wills World Cup, the greatest-ever cricketing show on earth, had begun and it was his Connecticut-based company, WorldTel, that held the exclusive television rights of the tournament. Mascarenhas had every reason to be upbeat, perhaps even cocky. He was sure of making a killing. So he assured Tendulkar, India's brightest sports icon, an unbelievable sum of Rs 36 crore from product endorsements over a period of five years. After all, it was a tested brand name that he was dealing with. Mascarenhas reckoned—justifiably at that point—that he would have no difficulty in finding corporate takers for the little master blaster.

Initially, he didn't. Nearly two years on, there's a new twist to the tale. The Tendulkar goldmine seems to be running thin. The much-hyped deal is in danger of floundering as several corporates baulk at the prospect of shelling out the kind of money that the aggressive Mascarenhas is demanding for his high-profile client. "Sachin is being overpriced," says Aushim Khetarpal of Radiant Sports Management, which recently fetched Ajay Jadeja a Rs 50-lakh, three-year deal with Kingfisher. "For any property," says Malcolm Thorpe, senior manager, sales and marketing, International Management Group (IMG), "you have to quote the right price."

What, indeed, is Tendulkar's right price? It is tough, say observers, to put a price tag on a human brand, especially one whose value hinges on the vagaries of personal form as well as on the collective showing of the band of men he leads on the cricket field. A 'reasonable' price for any player, explains Grand Slam Sports' Lokesh Sharma, is determined by the popularity of the sportsman and an assessment of the benefit that would accrue to the company that invests in him. "The buyer and the seller have to meet at a point and work out a reasonable deal," he says.

Therein lies the rub. In the past year, little has gone right for Indian cricket. Tendulkar's team has suffered a series of embarrassing defeats in one-day internationals in South Africa, West Indies and Sri Lanka, besides failing to reach the finals of the Independence Cup at home. The result: India's one-day warriors lie bruised and battered at the bottom of the game's heap. The endorsements and sponsorship market—its accent has always been squarely on cricket and, to a much lesser extent, on tennis—is understandably reassessing its involvement with individual cricketers.

Unfortunately for Mascarenhas, the inability of the Indian team to deliver consistently on the promise it displays in fits and starts has coincided with WorldTel's desperate scramble to erase the 'shortfall' that it is facing on the Tendulkar front. Some corporates are reportedly refusing to play ball. Mascarenhas' arrangement with the Indian cricket captain entails the payment of a minimum guarantee amount of Rs 27 crore, plus at least Rs 9 crore by way of spillovers which are to be split 85:15 in Tendulkar's favour. Since signing up Tendulkar, WorldTel has managed to get him only three new corporate clients: Philips, Visa International and MRF. Each has enviable financial muscle, but even their combined strength is not enough to meet the target set for Tendulkar. Currently, Tendulkar's endorsement deals fetch him Rs 3.4 crore a year, which will add up to Rs 17 crore in five years—a shortfall of a whopping Rs 19 crore. Hence, Mascarenhas has gone on the price offensive.

Says one sports marketing man: "Mascarenhas will lose a large sum on Tendulkar. But he can afford to, given the kind of money he made during the World Cup." Sumedh Shah of Sunil Gavaskar's Professional Management Group (PMG), a former adman, feels overexposure is Tendulkar's bane. "If Sachin is used for three products, he loses credibility for the fourth."

EVEN before WorldTel arrived on the scene, Tendulkar had an enviable list of endorsements: Band Aid, Action shoes, Boost, Pepsi, Gillette, Bajaj Sunny scooters. Many of these deals have since expired, but Tendulkar is no longer in the bracket he belonged to when these companies first signed him on. "In the West, there are multiple avenues of revenue—product endorsements, talk shows, television appearances. In India, material conditions haven't changed much, hence no sports management company can guarantee a player a certain amount of money simply because there isn't that kind of money around," says PMG's Sumedh Shah.

IMG's Thorpe, aware of the way the business works in the West, doesn't see the limited ad budgets as an insurmountable problem. "Like any industry that needs big money, sports marketing is seeing a bit of a slowdown," he says. But as Lokesh Sharma points out, many of Tendulkar's old contracts have been renewed, mostly on his own terms. "If anything, Tendulkar's market has grown," says Sharma. "If he was getting Rs 10 two years back, he commands and gets Rs 50 today." Sharma's own client base is pretty formidable—Rahul 'The Wall' Dravid, Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad, each of whom has five to six lucrative endorsement deals.

Moreover, cricket as a television sport continues to attract big bucks. The game accounts for 75 per cent of Star Sports' total sales. Ad rates on the sports channels have leapfrogged dramatically. From $1,500 for every 30-second spot in 1996, it is up to $4,000 in 1997 on Star Sports. ESPN's rate for a 30-second slot during one-dayers has been hiked from $750 to $3,500. For the recent Pepsi Asia Cup in Sri Lanka, Star roped in five sponsors at Rs 3 lakh each. Big money, big stakes, big possibilities. India's young cricketers, still seen as the safest bets in the product endorsements market, are keen to cash in while the going is still good.

DESPITE the reverses of the past few months, the brand equity of the Indian cricketers, say marketing executives, is still strong. Virtually every member of the Indian team today has two to three endorsement deals and makes a minimum of Rs 40 lakh a year from them. A far cry from the situation a few years back when only the 'Big Two'—Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev—had any hope of attracting steady corporate attention. "Individual client management is new in India. You have to bear that in mind when you judge its success," says IMG's Thorpe.

While sports management companies, in one form or another, have existed in this country since the mid-'80s—Gavaskar's PMG was the first off the blocks in 1986, followed by Khetarpal's New Delhi-based Radiant Sports Management in 1988—the arrival of IMG, the world's largest company of its kind with 70 offices in 37 countries worldwide, has opened up new possibilities. "Our greatest asset is our international network," says Ravi Krishnan, one of IMG's two senior sales and marketing managers.

Isn't the performance of a sportsman crucial in all this? Lokesh Sharma doesn't think so. "Performance isn't all that important. A good cricketer can never be down in the dumps for good," he says. "Look at Mohammad Azharuddin," says Krishnan. "Two months back, he was out in the wilderness. Today, he's back with a bang." But a 'performance' clause, say those acquainted with the legal aspects of client management, is an important element in any contract. Vinod Kambli, in and out of the Indian team, hasn't been seen too often on television ads of late. Anil Kumble, signed up by IMG early this year during the Indian cricket team's tour of South Africa, has done little of note since then, even losing his place in the side for the Toronto trip. Wicketkeeper Nayan Mongia, now out of the team, is off the TV screens as well. His Four Square 'You never know what you can become' ad has been promptly replaced by the one that features Kambli. "For a sportsperson's brand equity to be stable, you need consistency of performance, a thing that is sorely lacking in Indian cricket," says Khetarpal. The only stable products in the market at the moment, he asserts, are grandmaster Viswanathan Anand ("India's only true world champion") and tennis ace Leander Paes. So, will the focus gradually shift from cricket to other sports?

Besides Paes, IMG also has mercurial striker Baichung Bhutia on its roster of individual clients. The Mark H. McCormack-owned company has laid out grand plans of developing Indian soccer as a major marketing property. "In India, football, despite its grassroots popularity, had lagged way behind cricket because of the lack of TV coverage. Until we arrived, football was a regional, semi-professional sport. Now there is a strong national league," says Krishnan. Visibility has meant increased corporate support: a formidable line-up of sponsors for the Federation Cup and the National League (Philips, Kalyani Black Label, Coca-Cola, Cadbury's, ITC, Hero Honda, Bharat Petroleum, among others) has been put in place. New soccer stars have been created—Bhutia, Vijayan, Bruno Coutinho, Hemanta Dora—and the future of the game in India is looking brighter than ever before.

What the business needs is increased professionalism. "We wouldn't have been here if the business didn't have a future," says IMG's Thorpe. "The future," says Khetarpal, "is bright. Once the business is given a well-structured form, it will zoom. The truly big ad-spenders—Hindustan Lever, Godrej—haven't yet come in." Is that why former Indian opener Kris Srikkanth, too, has jumped into the fray with his own cricketing event management company and roped in Saurav Ganguly to be Parry's chocolate boy? Knowing his penchant for choosing the right ball to clobber, Srikkanth could well be on to a good thing. Only, forget the fact that the Indian cricket team isn't exactly on a roll at the moment.