Ravi Shastri was not thinking about money that evening in July 1995. He was in Bangalore for production meetings ahead of the 1996 World Cup, doing what commentators do between meetings, making small talk over drinks.
Across the table sat Mark Mascarenhas, a broadcaster from Connecticut who had built a sports marketing outfit called WorldTel. Shastri, almost in passing, asked him a question that would end up reshaping Indian sport: Would WorldTel be interested in managing the commercial affairs of a young batsman named Sachin Tendulkar?
Mascarenhas said yes immediately. He had spent years reading the tea leaves of satellite television and understood, faster than most Indian administrators did, that a 22 year old with Tendulkar’s talent and a growing television audience was sitting on something nobody had properly priced yet.
Three months passed before the real conversation happened. In October 1995, during the first Test between India and New Zealand in Bangalore, Shastri and Mascarenhas met again, this time at the Jockey Bar inside the Taj Residency.
Reportedly Mascarenhas made an offer there that no Indian cricketer had ever been handed before: 2.5 million dollars, guaranteed, over five years, for exclusive rights to manage Tendulkar’s commercial life.
Shastri called Ajit Tendulkar, Sachin’s elder brother and the man who had quietly guided his career since childhood. Ajit understood the number was serious. The next morning, he, Sachin and their financial advisor flew from Mumbai to Bangalore.
By evening, after going through the details, the deal was signed. No lawyers dragging things out for months. No committee.
Just a family deciding, in a single day, to bet on a boy who was still 3 years away from turning 25.
Cricket before the deal was a modest business
To understand why this contract felt seismic, you have to understand how Indian cricketers were earning back then. There was no annual contract system. Players largely depended on match fees, and even the biggest names were earning modestly by today’s standards.
Endorsements existed, but they were rare and modest. A player might get paid to appear in a newspaper ad or promote a product, but there was no long-term thinking behind it.
There were no agents building careers, no brand managers shaping public images and no real sense that a cricketer could be a business asset beyond the runs he scored or the wickets he took.
Indian cricket was hugely popular. But popularity and commercial value were two very different things. In 1995, Indian cricket was just beginning to understand that difference.
The money around the game was modest too. The BCCI was actually paying Doordarshan to broadcast matches rather than earning from television rights. Fans got their cricket on a single channel, often in grainy pictures, while the board received little or nothing from the enormous audience sitting in front of those screens.
The game had millions of fans. What it didn’t yet have was a business model.
Why the money was even possible
None of this happens without a fight over who owns the airwaves.
Doordarshan, the state broadcaster, held a monopoly on Indian television through the late 1980s and early 1990s. If you wanted to broadcast a cricket match, you paid Doordarshan for the privilege. The organisers of the event earned nothing from television rights. It sounds strange today, but that was the rule.
In 1993, Jagmohan Dalmiya, then secretary of the Cricket Association of Bengal, decided to test that rule. He sold the international broadcast rights for the Hero Cup to TransWorld International. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting tried to block it.
Dalmiya took the fight to court, and on 9 February 1995, the Supreme Court delivered a judgment that changed everything: airwaves were public property, the court ruled, not government property, and event organisers had a constitutional right to uplink their own feeds to whichever satellite they chose.
That single ruling turned Indian sport into an open market overnight.
Dalmiya, then heading the organising committee for the 1996 World Cup, put the global television rights up for auction. WorldTel won them with a guaranteed bid of 10 million dollars, backed by an upfront payment of 3.6 million dollars in cash.
That figure more than doubled what the previous World Cup, held in Australia and New Zealand in 1992, had generated in broadcast revenue. ITC’s Wills brand separately paid 12 million dollars just for the title sponsorship.
So by the time Mascarenhas sat down with Tendulkar’s family, WorldTel already controlled the pipes through which Indian cricket would reach television screens. Signing Tendulkar meant they now controlled the face people would see coming through those pipes too.
Content and talent, bought by the same company, in the same year. It was a smart piece of business, even if nobody used that phrase back then.
The man who built the wall around Sachin
Mascarenhas had a line he repeated often: “You’ve got to create heroes and you’ve got to pay them.” It sounds obvious now. In 1995, in a country where cricketers were treated as national property rather than professionals with careers to protect, it was close to radical.
His real skill was not negotiation. It was protection. He set firm price floors for endorsements so companies could not haggle Tendulkar down. He handled every corporate call himself so that Tendulkar never had to think about contracts between nets sessions.
Ajit Tendulkar had one non negotiable rule through all of this: brand shoots never interfered with practice, preparation or rest. Mascarenhas respected that rule without being asked twice.
The portfolio that followed was carefully built, not thrown together. MRF put its logo on his bat, turning cricket equipment into advertising space for the first time at this scale. Pepsi signed him for its “Nothing Official About It” campaign alongside Shah Rukh Khan, a rare crossover between Bollywood and cricket.
Boost paired him with Kapil Dev to sell milk drinks to children who wanted to grow up and bowl or bat like Sachin. Adidas, Visa, Philips, Colgate, Action Shoes and Britannia followed. By the end of the first five year deal, the portfolio had generated reportedly somewhere between 30 and 35 crore rupees in gross commercial turnover, well beyond the original guarantee.
When trust mattered more than talent
There is a moment in this story that has nothing to do with money and explains everything about why the money kept flowing.
During the 1999 World Cup in England, Tendulkar’s father Ramesh passed away suddenly in Mumbai. As Sachin has mentioned in his autobiography “Playing it My Way”, Mascarenhas did not send a car. He drove Sachin and Ajit to Heathrow himself, before dawn, so they could get home in time.
After the funeral, Tendulkar returned to England and scored a century against Kenya, dedicating the innings to his father. Ramesh Tendulkar, a Marathi poet and professor, had once told his son something that stuck with him for life:
“Son, life is like a book. It has numerous chapters… As a parent, I would be happier hearing people say, Sachin is a good human being than Sachin is a great cricketer any day.”
That grounding turned out to matter commercially too, though nobody would have said so at the time. When match fixing scandals rocked Indian cricket in the late 1990s, sponsors across the sport got nervous and some pulled back entirely.
Tendulkar’s name never came up in any of it. His reputation stayed clean, and industry executives later said it was that reputation, more than any marketing plan, that kept corporate money in Indian cricket during a period when it could easily have walked away.
Brand Tendulkar survived because the man behind the brand gave nobody a reason to doubt him. That is a business lesson wrapped inside a character trait, and you cannot buy it with a bigger contract.
The number kept climbing
By 2001, when the first WorldTel contract came up for renewal, international agencies including IMG tried to poach Tendulkar’s management rights. Mascarenhas held on by offering reportedly 17.5 million dollars, close to 100 crore rupees, making Tendulkar the first Indian athlete to cross that threshold. The portfolio expanded into cars, with Fiat Palio, and into early tech sponsorships.
Mascarenhas died in a car accident near Nagpur in January 2002. He was 44. Tendulkar spoke about him years later during his farewell speech at Wankhede Stadium in 2013, and again in his autobiography Playing It My Way: “My dear friend, late Mark Mascarenhas, my first manager… he understood what it takes to represent a nation and gave me all the space to go out and express myself, and never pressurised me to do this ad or promotion… he took care of that and today I miss him.”
Management passed to World Sport Group in 2006, under a contract worth 180 crore rupees, bringing in banking, insurance and technology sponsors like Royal Bank of Scotland, Aviva and Canon.
His final Test ended with a small, human moment that had nothing to do with any of this money. After his farewell speech, teammate Virat Kohli reminded him of something he had asked earlier: “Paaji, aapne kaha tha aapko yaad dilane ke liye ki aapko pitch pe jana hai.”(You had asked me to remind you, you have to go to the pitch one last time). Tendulkar walked out alone, touched the pitch, and thanked the ground that had carried his career for 24 years.
From endorser to owner
After retirement, the business model changed shape entirely. Instead of chasing fixed endorsement fees, Tendulkar’s own firm, Sachin Tendulkar Sports Management, began building equity stakes and long term partnerships.
A 15 year relationship with Luminous Power Technologies became the anchor. He put money into Unacademy, the education platform, invested in Spinny, the used car marketplace, backed clean energy ventures, and built a real estate portfolio now estimated at around 300 crore rupees.
By 2026, analysts pegged his personal net worth at roughly 170 million dollars, close to 1,415 crore rupees. Financial Express has not independently verified these numbers. But that is not endorsement income anymore. That is an investor’s balance sheet, built by a cricketer who started out earning few thousand rupees for playing an ODI.
What actually changed
Strip away the numbers and here is what the 1995 deal really did. It proved an Indian athlete could be treated as a business in his own right, not just a face renting itself out to whichever company paid the most that month.
It showed sponsors that a clean reputation could survive a scandal that took down an entire sport’s credibility. And it gave the BCCI, and later the founders of the Indian Premier League, a working blueprint for what happens when you combine broadcast rights, sponsorship money and individual stardom under one roof.
The IPL, launched in 2008, is often described as India’s biggest sports business innovation. It is worth remembering that its financial grammar, private rights bidding, franchise value, athlete as brand, was written a decade earlier, in a hotel bar in Bangalore, by a broadcaster from Connecticut and a cricketer’s older brother who flew down on a day’s notice to sign a deal neither of them fully knew would work.
It worked because a family trusted a stranger, a stranger kept his word, and a boy who once earned few thousand rupees for a one day international grew into a man worth over a thousand crore. Somewhere in that gap between those two numbers is the entire story of how Indian sport learned to make money without losing its soul.