International stars create a huge impact when you are trying to establish a product in the market for the first time or trying to revive a flagging sport.
By Rathindra Basu
There was a time when sports fans in India rarely got to see internationally acclaimed stars in the flesh. A few brands would now and then bring in stars in their twilight years or long retired for charity work or a few select brand activities. But the nation waited and waited to see the best play on Indian soil.
In the last decade, all that changed very quickly. However much you blame the Indian Premier League (IPL) for all its misadventures, it created a platform for the first time in any Indian sport where the best players in the world clamoured for attention in front of a starved audience. And this in a manner of speaking opened the floodgates.
As new leagues started cropping up across various sports, organisers realised that a sure-shot way to get the attention of the sports fan amongst the clutter was to bring in a galaxy of stars. And stars came in from everywhere. Cricket attracted the very best obviously – Chris Gayle and Kevin Pietersen rubbed shoulders with AB de Villiers, Muttiah Muralitharan, Dwayne Bravo, Shane Warne and Jacques Kallis to name a few.
The Indian Super League (ISL) pulled a coup of sorts by getting a bevy of retired marquee names like Alessandro Del Piero, Marco Materazzi, Luis Garcia and Elano Blumer and even coaches like Zico who has been a big favorite for Indian football fans for a while.
Jamie Dwyer has won 2 World Cups and an Olympic gold with Australia The newly minted Premier Futsal saw Manchester United legends like Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs display their artistry along with superstars Ronaldinho and Salgado and Futsal legends like Falcao. The Premier Badminton League (or Indian Badminton League as it was known earlier) managed to get Lee Chong Wei, Taufik Hidayat, Jan O Jorgensen and Juliane Schenk to fight with or against their Indian compatriots. The International Premier Tennis League in tennis created history of sorts as the likes of Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic played for their respective franchises in front of packed stadia in Delhi for the first time.
The NBA in its ambitious schools program started bringing in a host of old and current superstars from the world of basketball. The Hockey India League saw stars from Germany and Spain cut across language barriers as they celebrated with their Indian teammates. Even scripted entertainment learned its lesson – WWE was no longer afraid to get a John Cena to come down and meet his Indian fans.
Make no mistake – these stars create a huge impact when you are trying to establish a product in the market for the first time or even try to revive a flagging sport. But it is not easy to ensure that you are getting the maximum bang for the buck.
For cricket it is not an issue as players yearn to come and play for big bucks and mega adulation. But for a sport like football, it is slightly different – it is not easy to lure existing world superstars to come and play in India and hence the development of marquee names from a list of players who are retired or on the verge of hanging up their boots. For a sport like tennis you have to invest enormous sums of money to see Andy Murray, Federer or Djokovic in action for a few hours. It cannot be easy for the NBA to get a current star to come down to India during season and has to rely on their roster of brand ambassadors.
So if the value of getting such stars to headline your property is unmistakably strong, how do you strike a balance between the cost of acquisition and the benefit you can extract from such an association? Firstly, you have to accept the reality that in certain sports which do not have nationwide acceptance, a star player with a proper promotional build-up will produce enough curiosity to drive initial sampling. Stars draw fans everywhere and here as well it will do the same. But just a one-off appearance will not be a smart move in my mind. The crux of the association is how well you can use the marquee name to not just kick start a game but help develop and grow its popularity among fans – old and more importantly new. This is a key factor which will decide if the investment behind these stars bear fruit or become a white elephant.
So stars need to do more than just wave a hand at adoring crowds and play for a bit – you need to take them to the grass root level and use their knowledge to help the sport in India grow. So in a nutshell, the most important value which a star player adds is probably outside the playing field more than in it. So when you are selling them a dream make sure that the dosage of reality where they need to do more than just play a match is firmly inked in.
The best league should have the best players playing in it – both locally and internationally. And needless to say, sponsorship, promotion, event management and TV production will also be key contributors towards a successful product. While stars will continue to shine and provide happiness to Indian fans for a long time to come – if they can make the investor behind the sport happy as well it will make for a blockbuster sporting property - for years to come.
