There is a video that gets replayed inside BCCI circles more than people admit. A skinny boy, maybe 14, stands in a net in Amritsar. A senior fast bowler is running in at him, close to 150 km/h. Someone on the sidelines flinches. The boy does not. He asks for it faster.
That boy is Abhishek Sharma, and by 2026 he sits atop the ICC Men’s T20I batting rankings with a rating of 931, a number no batter in the format’s history has touched before, not Dawid Malan at 919, not Suryakumar Yadav, not even Virat Kohli at his peak.
But the story of how he got there says less about talent and more about how Indian cricket, and the money circling it, has quietly rewired what it wants from a batter.
A father who planned for fear
Rajkumar Sharma was a Ranji Trophy cricketer once, then a grassroots coach, and he seems to have decided early that his son’s biggest enemy would not be spin or seam. It would be fear of pace. So he built a plan around it.
At 3 and a half, Abhishek was already in the nets. His sisters bowled to him late at night, ball after ball, because the family simply had that kind of obsession running through it. By age 11 his day started at 4 am.
Gym. Running. Swimming. Then hours of batting. Arun Bedi, his junior Punjab coach, remembers an 11 or 12 year old clearing the ropes with lofted sixes that looked effortless, at an age when most boys are still learning to just middle the ball cleanly.
None of that reads like childhood exactly. It reads like training for a war that hadn’t started yet. And it paid off early. In the 2015-16 Vijay Merchant Trophy he scored over 1,200 runs at an average of 109.09, and picked up 57 wickets bowling left arm spin on the side. He captained Punjab to the Under-19 Asia Cup title in 2016, then helped India win the Under-19 World Cup in 2018. On paper, a golden career was already written.
Except junior cricket doesn’t test what senior cricket tests. It doesn’t test what happens when you fail twice in a row and the whole country is watching on a phone screen.
Enter Yuvraj, and a very different kind of coaching
During the Covid lockdown, Yuvraj Singh set up a training camp back home in Punjab for a small group of young players. Sharma had grown up idolising him, so he went in expecting technical fixes, a tweak to his back-lift maybe, or his footwork against spin.
What he got instead was something closer to therapy with a bat in hand.
In an interview with Open Magazine, Sharma said Yuvraj told him plainly that this camp was not about surviving domestic cricket or landing an IPL deal. It was about training his mind to win matches for India when it actually mattered. That is a very different target to aim at, and it changes how a young player prepares.
There’s a personal thread running underneath all this too. Yuvraj has spoken more than once about his own upbringing under his father Yograj Singh, who treated fatherhood almost entirely like coaching, strict, results-only, not much room for softness.
Yuvraj has said he wanted to be gentler with his own kids. But with Sharma, he leaned right back into that old discipline.
Videos have surfaced of him making Sharma do sit-ups while holding his own ears during net sessions, the kind of punishment an Indian kid gets from a strict uncle, not usually from an international icon.
He’d make Sharma repeat, out loud, “Bol mai pehli ball te lappa nahi maaranga”, meaning I will not play a wild shot on the very first ball. Sharma would say it back, half embarrassed probably, and promise to behave.
It stuck though. His father has joked to reporters that even now, as the world’s number one T20I batter, Sharma is still scared of Yuvi’s scolding whenever he throws his wicket away on a careless shot. That’s a strange thing to carry into your late twenties, being scared of disappointing a mentor, but it seems to be doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The relationship spilled well outside the nets too. Wimbledon trips with Sanju Samson, family celebrations, dancing at teammate Ramandeep Singh’s wedding. His sister Komal has spoken publicly about how much emotional support Yuvraj gave her brother during the lean patches, the stretches where form disappears and doubt creeps in.
And for the technical polish, Yuvraj brought in West Indies legend Brian Lara, of all people, to work on Sharma’s swing through golf, smoothing out his hip turn so the bat arc stayed clean even when he was going for broke.
The numbers that made the cricket world sit up
By 2024, all that groundwork turned into results nobody could ignore.
He made his T20I debut for India in July that year. Then in February 2025, at Wankhede Stadium against England, he scored 135 off just 54 balls, with a century in 37 deliveries and 13 sixes. Only Rohit Sharma has scored a faster T20I hundred for India, in 35 balls.
He carried that form into the Asia Cup 2025, scoring 314 runs across 7 matches at a strike rate of 200, winning Player of the Tournament as India lifted the title. Across 2025 as a whole he hit 108 sixes in T20 cricket and became the first batter ever to cross 1,000 T20 runs in a calendar year while keeping his strike rate above 200.
In the IPL that year, playing for Sunrisers Hyderabad, he smashed 141 off 55 balls against Punjab Kings, reaching fifty in 16 balls and a century in 40, breaking KL Rahul’s record for the highest score by an Indian in IPL history. Then came the 2026 T20 World Cup, where his 21 ball 52 in the final against New Zealand helped India lift the trophy.
But here’s the part that gets skipped in the highlight reels. Right after all that, in bilateral series against Ireland, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan, he got out for single digits in 4 straight innings. Same technique, same intent, same shots that had just made him the best T20 batter alive, suddenly not coming off.
That is the deal you sign up for as a white ball specialist. The method that wins you a World Cup can also get you out cheaply three matches running, and there is no long format cushion of time to quietly rebuild form. You are judged match by match, sometimes ball by ball.
Why a three match series is worth more than it used to be
This is where the story stops being just about one batter and starts being about how Indian cricket makes its money.
In August 2023, the BCCI auctioned off its home bilateral media rights for the period September 2023 to March 2028. Viacom18, now folded into the JioStar and JioCinema streaming setup, won both TV and digital rights across 88 matches for a combined ₹5,963 crore, roughly $720 million. Break that down and it comes to ₹67.76 crore per match.
For the first time in Indian bilateral cricket, digital rights were valued higher than television. Digital came in at ₹35.23 crore per match, TV at ₹32.53 crore. That flip matters. It tells you where people are actually watching cricket now, on their phones, not on a living room TV set.
Test cricket and T20I cricket make money in almost opposite ways. A Test match stretches across 30 hours of potential broadcast time, and depends on gate receipts and hospitality packages to justify the cost, but weekday sessions of a non marquee Test often see viewership fall off badly.
A three match T20I series, by contrast, is built for density. Three hours a match, prime time evening slots, and a spike in concurrent digital viewers that pulls new subscribers onto platforms like JioCinema while also selling ad slots at a premium.
A standard bilateral T20I sells a 10 second linear TV spot for ₹15 to 16 lakh, with digital mobile ad rates around ₹200 to 300 CPM. A marquee clash, India versus Pakistan for instance, pushes linear spots to ₹25 to 40 lakh, with premium custom sponsorships on top.
Connected TV inventory, meaning ads streamed to smart TVs at home, goes for around ₹6 lakh per 10 second spot, chasing urban households with higher spending power. All of this depends on batters like Sharma keeping the boundaries and sixes coming, because that is what keeps people from switching the app or the channel.
What his bat is actually worth off the field
Sharma’s own financial climb tracks this shift almost exactly.
Delhi Daredevils signed him for ₹55 lakh in 2018 before he was traded to Sunrisers Hyderabad, where he stayed on that same ₹55 lakh deal through 2021. Once he proved himself as a genuine match winner, SRH re-signed him for ₹6.50 crore a year in the 2022 mega auction.
Before the 2025 season they retained him for ₹14 crore a year across 2025 and 2026, taking his total IPL earnings to ₹51.7 crore.
He also holds a Grade C BCCI central contract worth ₹1 crore a year, plus match fees of ₹3 lakh per T20I, ₹6 lakh per ODI and ₹15 lakh per Test.
He has put that money into a family mansion in Amritsar, complete with a private training ground, plus a second home in Chandigarh. His car collection includes a Ferrari Purosangue , a BMW 320d, a Haval H9 and a Mahindra Thar.
He also works as a Youth Ambassador for the Hunger Free Bharat Mission, which funds youth nutrition and grassroots sports programs, a quieter side of his life that doesn’t make the highlight reels.
Why brands now chase strike rate, not seniority
Sponsors used to wait years before trusting a young cricketer with a big campaign. That patience is gone.
Modern T20 broadcasts run constant slow motion replays and instant social clips of every six, and the bat sticker sits right there in every one of those shots. A player hitting over 100 sixes a season, or striking at close to 200, gets more camera time in three weeks than a Test specialist might get in three years. So brands have simply stopped waiting.
According to Industry reports, Sharma’s early sponsorship deals paid ₹6 to 8 lakh apiece. Now, as the world’s number one ranked T20I batter, individual partnerships bring in ₹1 to 5 crore. He still carries his original bat sponsor, Sareen Sports, a relationship going back to the 2018 Under-19 World Cup.
But the newer deals tell a bigger story. DP World made him a global brand ambassador in November 2025, putting him alongside Sachin Tendulkar and golfer Tommy Fleetwood. Realme signed him for its smartphone and gaming campaigns.
In August 2025 he partnered with YSL Beauty, and became the first Indian male cricketer to work with diamond company De Beers.
He also fronts Garnier Men’s AcnoFight line, Gillette Guard’s “Bade League Ka Shave” campaign, Titan’s Xylys watches, a Colgate campaign alongside actor Kriti Sanon, and broader deals with Hero MotoCorp, Vadilal and Birla Opus.
He’s not alone in this either. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, just 15, reportedly signed a ₹12 crore annual bat sticker deal after one IPL season hitting at a strike rate of 237.30. The new generation is being paid for three weeks of visibility, not fifteen years of consistency.
The bet everyone is making
Step back and the pattern is clear. Talent agencies are restructuring contracts around short bursts of peak impact rather than long careers. Broadcasters are stacking linear and digital packages to squeeze every rupee out of three hour windows.
And boards like the BCCI, having watched Sharma nearly buckle before Yuvraj stepped in, are starting to see mentorship and mental conditioning as something worth investing in seriously, not an afterthought.
It is, in the end, a very human trade. Everyone involved, the boy who once asked for faster balls, the mentor who made him say a promise out loud in the nets, the broadcasters selling three hour windows at premium rates, the sponsors chasing his bat sticker, they are all betting on the same fragile thing. A young man’s nerve, holding up, ball after ball, in front of the whole country.
Somewhere in Amritsar, that same boy probably still remembers what 150 km/h felt like the first time. He asked for more of it anyway. That instinct, more than any number in this story, is what everyone is really paying for.