FOREIGN HANDS

GOING CHEAPLY With five months to go for the World Cup, many foreign cricketers are hoping to leap over the home market barrier and cash in on the cricket craze in India. An early player in this is Australian Test captain Steve Waugh who has signed a deal with MRF. His bat carries its sticker. Foreign players usually feature in ads when they are playing in India but in Waugh's case his popularity is seen as more widespread and deep-rooted. Says Jeet Banerjee, CEO of Gameplan, a Kolkata-based sports marketing company: "More and more international cricketers are coming to India for advertising." Waugh's compatriot Brett Lee is negotiating for an endorsement of Kingfisher through his manager Sporting Frontiers while Sri Lanka's Muthiah Muralitharan came for a scouting mission-cum-coaching clinic earlier in the year. Australian Shane Warne has also indicated keenness. A foreign star, no matter what his cricketing ability, comes cheap-usually a quarter of a frontline Indian name. The ratio of match fees to endorsements is 90:10 overseas and closer to 40:60 in India. Outside of India, Australia is the biggest cricket market with its highest earner being vice-captain Adam Gilchrist. His endorsements include fork-lift trucks and air conditioners earning him $1.1 million (Rs 5.3 crore) a year. England's top-earner is skipper Nasser Hussain whose annual earnings are $750,000 (Rs 3.63 crore).

On the field, equations balance out a little differently as the Indians remain a middling XI struggling up team rating ladders. But off it, its stars are the undisputed market leaders, its movers and shakers. They are seen as possessing the power to drive youngsters to colas, mothers to toothpaste, young men to motorbikes and young women to er ... distraction. Nowhere else in the world are cricketers pop idols, nowhere else does cricket pull in the numbers it does in India.

The "why" of the phenomenon is hardly rocket science: as India's No. 1 sport, cricket reaches millions through TV, leaping over barriers of region and language that even the other great Indian obsession, Bollywood, can't.

It's the "how" that tells the tale. Of the remaking of the Indian cricketer from an exponent of arcane arts into a popular brand, first created and then sold. "Indian players are the most expensive in the world. No foreigner can match the kind of monetary draw that these players have today," says Arun Mahajan, branch manager of advertising firm Mudra in Delhi. Which is where the utterly mental maths comes in: industry estimates put Tendulkar's bat contract with MRF to be worth a basic Rs 3 crore a year; Steve Waugh's similar deal with the same company, sources say, is worth Rs 65 lakh. To get Australian one-day captain Ricky Ponting to turn up at a coaching clinic could cost a promoter $2,500 (Rs 1.2 lakh) a day; the Indian captain won't turn up at clinics on a per diem fee, but it comes as part of a package that's reckoned to cost between Rs 60 lakh and Rs 80 lakh per endorsement per year. An industry source says Australian vice-captain Gilchrist will "happily" endorse a product for Rs 20-25 lakh, a fee now commanded by tyro Mohammed Kaif. It also explains why recently in the West Indies, Lara, 90 Tests and 7,500-plus Test runs, turned to Virender Sehwag, nine Tests and 546 Test runs, and asked if the Indian's "people" could find him a nice bat contract.

CRICKET

RAHUL DRAVID Manager Lokesh Sharma Clients: Castrol, Samsung, Pepsi, Britannia, Reebok, Colgate Fees: Rs 65-70 lakh HARBHAJAN SINGH Manager: Steve Smith Clients: Samsung, Pepsi, Ray-Ban, Complan Fees: Rs 20-25 lakh SOURAV GANGULY Manager Sanjay Lal Clients: AirTel, Pepsi, Hero Honda, Britannia, S Kumars, Sahara, Colgate Fees: Rs 75-80 lakh SACHIN TENDULKAR Manager Samir Singh Clients: Fiat, Pepsi, MRF, Boost, Visa, TVS, Adidas, ESPN-Star Sports Fees: Rs 1.25-3 crore VIRENDER SEHWAG Manager: Latika Khaneja Clients: Coke, Samsung, Boost, Britannia, Hero Honda Fees: Rs 30-35 lakh

Sehwag's "people" have enough on their hands. Collage Sports Management (CSM), the latest entrant in the rarefied business of sports management in India, handles business for the big hitter from Najafgarh, as well as his less luminous colleagues Dinesh Mongia and Sanjay Bangar. Sehwag was CSM's first signing in June 2001, the company a spin-off of Collage Cricket Club, run by businessman Sumit Khaneja, whom Sehwag turned to every time he received a legal document. Market watchers say that Sehwag, a sellable mix of brutal bat and homespun charm, can command Rs 30 lakh per endorsement these days. Khaneja's wife and CSM Director Latika, an IIM-Kolkata graduate, smiles. "It's a premium you get for being famous."

Sehwag is in the group of four Indians, all batsmen, who command high fees, with Tendulkar at the very top. The rest of the industry piggybacks on this popularity. Without them, the circus of sponsors and TV could well find that no one wants to crowd their tent.

During a two-month long stand-off over the controversial ICC contracts, for the first time the players made their marketability count for something other than cheesy campaigns. The prospect of an India-B team competing in the Champions Trophy brought about a hurried teleconference of international officials who then agreed on an amendment to the contracts. "There are very few celebrities of that nature, it's a tight market," says Sanjay Lal, chief executive of Percept D'Mark (PDM), an aggressive player in the celebrity management business which represents Ganguly, Yuvraj Singh and Zaheer Khan. Five agencies-21st Century Media (Dravid and Kaif), CSM, PDM, Sporting Frontiers (Harbhajan Singh and V.V.S. Laxman), and WorldTel (Tendulkar and Ajit Agarkar)-handle the entire business. But everyone bristles at being called an "agent". Managers or business partners is the preferred term, but really, it's still hardsell and hustle. Every deal takes six months from conception to signing, with the intermediary picking up a commission between 10 and 15 per cent. The quirkiness of cricketers can always produce a slip: a current India batsman landed up at the crease in a Test match in the West Indies this year without his bat sticker-he'd changed his mind overnight because the Rs 1,000-a-run rate offered by the sponsor made him jittery.

India's cricket market is strictly oddball: CSM clients address Latika as "Bhabhi", a sign of sentimental hearts perhaps, but no one underestimates the Indian cricketer's hard nose: when IMG, pioneer of sports marketing worldwide and manager to John McEnroe among others, first came to India in the mid-1990s, it had to break away from established practice and offer a minimum guarantee (MG) fee to cricketers. In 1995-96, IMG insiders say, it offered a group of four teenagers, including Kaif and Yuvraj, an MG of Rs 10 lakh each, but were turned down because the sum wasn't deemed enough.

This was, after all, the year Tendulkar was first signed by the late Mark Mascarenhas and WorldTel for an mg of Rs 30 crore over five years, a figure that popped eyeballs. "Mark's deal brought a big change to cricket marketing. It was like he was doing the bidding on behalf of everybody," says Lokesh Sharma of 21st Century Media, a former athletics journalist, whose stars, astrological and cricketing, are the envy of his rivals these days.

Form in cricket is an intangible and its management is as secure as skating on thin ice. The major players in the business choose to multi-task: Sporting Frontiers India manages Harbhajan and Laxman. But that, says Chief Executive Steve Smith, "is a small part of our business. Instadia rights is a huge area of interest for us." Similarly, celebrity manager PDM constitutes only 5-6 per cent of media giant Percept IMC's total business.Ganguly and PDM have set up Sourav Ganguly Percept D'Mark (SGPDM). Percept IMC Joint Managing Director Shailendra Singh says SGPDM is free of any conflict of interest for the Indian captain. "SGPDM will only be involved in institutional stuff-clinics and camps. It's got nothing to do with personal endorsements. We would never get a cricketer into things like that."

Mascarenhas' deals usually measured the temperature of the business; At WorldTel, Tendulkar's account of an estimated MG of Rs 100 crore over five years beginning 2001 is now handled by Samir Singh. The contracts crisis has, he says, affected the market. "Sachin's current sponsors have been more than supportive. But people are very wary. It's wait and watch."

An old truth is now self-evident and will dictate the future of the contracts issue, when it's time to draw up World Cup player terms. No sponsor wants to be remembered as the brand that tried to cut in on the country's foremost sporting heroes. Never mind sharing a piece of the pie, Indian cricket's poster boys could end up having their cake and eating it too.

-with bureau reports