While the retiring legend Sachin Tendulkar has been the most enduring brand in cricket for over two decades now, a figure revealed the other day was quite stunning.
A report from Wealth-X, a global wealth intelligence company, has rated him as the wealthiest cricketer with a personal fortune of $160 million (Dh587 million).
For someone who became the sport’s first million-dollar boy as early as 1996, that’s understandable — but it’s here that his brand managers also deserve a big pat on the back in marketing him well and exclusively over such a long period.
Just ponder this: Tendulkar’s net worth, according to the report, is nearly three times more than that of current captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the man who replaced him on top of the Forbes’ rich list of cricketers at least four years back.
It’s also no surprise that the top five wealthiest cricketers, according to the Wealth-X list, are all Indians with the Little Master and Dhoni being followed by Yuvraj Singh, Rahul Dravid and Virat Kohli — in that order. The lion’s share of a Indian cricketer’s earnings has always come from personal endorsements and deals (the board’s annual contract, match fees are bonuses being the other sources), and this is where Tendulkar had been a kind of pioneer in doing things his way.
While it was his elder brother Ajit who dealt with the prospective sponsors in the early years, the watershed moment in his growth as a brand came on the eve of the 1996 World Cup. The Mark Mascarenhas-owned World Tel signed him up for a reported guarantee fee of $7.5 million for a period of five years — an incredible figure by any stretch of imagination those days.
There were sceptics who felt that the price tag was actually a conscious decision to overprice Tendulkar in the endorsements market, but it ticked along nicely as the Mumbai maestro continue to scale the cricketing peaks around the world. When the time came for the renewal of the deal in 2001, the scenario had changed and several big players in sports management, including IMG, queued up for somebody who had stamped his class as the best batsman in contemporary cricket.
However, Mascarenhas pulled off a coup again, renewing the contract at nearly four times the previous sum. The prohibitive price tag for the man had often put off some of his earlier supporters along the way, but it was a policy of ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ that World Tel and subsequently his managers World Sports Group have pursued — not allowing for any sort of brand dilution.
As it’s time for Tendulkar to walk away into a golden sunset, speculation is already rife among the industry watchers as to what strategy his sponsors will take in the future. Some of them are keen to keep their association going — given the fact that Brand Tendulkar has actually surpassed his appeal as merely a cricketer — but feel that the ‘pricing’ will be a key factor here.
It will be interesting to wait and watch.