CXOs in Sports : Interview with Ashish Chadha, CEO, Sporty Solutionz

Ashish Chadha

Sportskeeda brings another exciting series of interviews – CXOs in Sports, where we speak to eminent and prominent personalities in the sports industry, talking about their sporting interests and ideas for development of sports in general and of their sports work/interest in particular.

Ashish Chadha is the CEO of Sporty Solutionz, the commercial partner of the Indian Badminton League. Sporty Solutionz is the Indian sub-continent’s leading Sports Rights Management company. With a client base of more than 100 world-wide broadcasters, telcom companies, web portals. Sporty Solutionz has exemplary media-rights distribution & monetization network all around the globe.

With more than 14 years experience in the industry of sports journalism / sports production / sports anchoring & sports management, Ashish is one of India’s most traveled and most experienced names in the field of Sports. He has worked for global Sporting powerhouses – TWI London, Espn Star Sports, Al Jajeera and many other international and Indian channels. He is an English literature graduate and post-graduate from St.Stephens & Hansraj College and is MBA from Nanyang University in Singapore.

He spoke to Sportskeeda recently, about the Indian Badminton League, the business of Sports rights, and the future of sports in India.

It is known to us that you were a National level Badminton player, having represented India in junior level tournaments and were ranked no.3 at one point of time in India. At what age did you pick up the sport, and what caused you to eventually not pursue badminton as a career professionally?

I was in the National reckoning for some time, yes. At the time, it was very crucial to perform in the limited tournaments available if you wanted to continue playing it professionally. A couple of knee operations though ended my career.

Did you play any other sports during your formative years, and what made you choose Badminton over any other Sport you might have played?

Yes, I did play many sports growing up, but Badminton was the sport I really got hooked to. I started playing Badminton at the age of 10.

You have handled all genres of media channels (Sports, Music and News); how did you make the move to the Journalism industry, and what has your experience been like?

I started working in the Indian Railways (Sports Quota) but then quit to start working as a journalist. My career in the Journalism industry saw me moving on to managerial roles (both editorially and business wise {because of MBA background}). With about 18-19 years of experience, it has helped both me understand programming much better, and this has given us great acceptance at broadcast level.

Speaking as a veteran of sports broadcasting, do you miss the times that you used to spend earlier in the production room/ newsroom (considering that now you are the CEO and have other responsibilities to take care of)?

What I learnt from the production room is that every second matters, you are on your toes all the time. It really taught me how to manage time and pressure. I wouldn’t call it exactly missing, because I really love doing what I am doing now, but yeah, sometimes, the thrill of live broadcast is something you miss.

India now has a considerably strong pool of talent indicated by the recent exploits of Saina Nehwal, Parupalli Kashyap, K. Srikanth, Ajay Jayaram, P.V. Sindhu, Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponappa. What do you think is the difference in the perception of the sport now amongst youngsters interested in it as a career after the IBL?

There is a huge difference in the perception of the sport now. After the IBL, players have now seen that there is a lot of security in terms of playing Badminton professionally as on an average they were earning around 60-70000$ for about 18-20 days. It has earned approval as a career.

Recent reports I read said that the equipment industry has gone up by 150% post the IBL. Finally, the audience that made it to the stadiums was predominantly families, which indicates that parents are ready to inculcate the possibility of playing Badminton as a career option in the kids.

Do you believe that India has the infrastructural capability necessary to handle a steep increase in the levels of interest for Badminton and whether the requisite support systems are in place to help groom young talent?

There is a lot of infrastructural improvement needed, and although steps are being taken, lot more funds need to be put into the sport. We need many more world class stadiums, with large capacities. Our current stadiums cannot accommodate very high numbers, and it is important, both from generating an atmosphere point of view and also from a commercial perspective.

The BAI is one of the best sporting federations in India. Very proactive, it offers a great deal of support to the players. Another important aspect is the fact that they are focused on becoming self-sufficient, as they are not dependent only on grants, but also look to generate sponsorship on their own.

Sporty Solutionz has been sort of a trailblazer in the Broadcast sector in the Indian sub-continent. The idea to do live streaming of the UEFA Euro 2012 coverage on NEO Sports through iStream could have been a bust but worked out great. What made you think of exploring the digital media platform as a viable means to reach a larger audience?

As a business, our main focus is to manage sporting rights. We bid for rights, and then trade them. The digital platform is continuing to grow by the day, and we saw an opportunity back then. Selling digital rights was a no-brainer, and it came about because of the advent of social media today.

The presence of second and third screens where people share their feelings on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter while watching the game, convinced us that this was a space we needed to explore.

Becoming the commercial partner of the IBL was a huge gamble taken by Sporty Solutionz. Was this a conscious attempt by you to give something back to the game you love?

More than a gamble, it was a calculated risk from within the company. We had the conviction that this was a great opportunity; Badminton has faces to market (the players), the market was right to create a niche for the sport, we were sure we could create an audience, and the fact that I was close to the Badminton fraternity gave me comfort when we were taking the step.

Do you still get the time to play Badminton?

Hehe, No, I haven’t played Badminton for about 15-16 years now.

Season 1 of the IBL was very well received, what measures do you think helped?

Badminton is not a great television sport. The London Olympics were very pivotal in changing the perception of the sport and we built on it. Cameras were not able to capture the difficulty of the sport, thus taking excitement away from the sport. We made a concerted effort to produce it in a manner that it captures the nuances of the sport (a lot of research and effort went into deciding camera angles).

Marketing the sport well was the other issue, we undertook extensive campaigns to make sure we got sizeable crowds into the stadiums and spent about 30% of our budget on utilizing the digital space to connect with the youth. We also ensured that it was economically feasible as the tickets were priced at ~400/ ticket while the cost incurred per ticket was around 1400.

The IBL also had some setbacks, with the withdrawal of the Chinese delegation one of them. When do you see Season 2 happening (with the 2014 calendar being so congested with the World Championships, the Commonwealth games and the Asian games)

Yes, the withdrawal was a setback, but we have had lots of requests for the 2^nd season. As the rosters are already decided, we will probably have a mini-auction to distribute the incoming players evenly.

Also, a certain window has been zeroed in for IBL season 2, which should be comfortable for both the players and organizers. The Governing Council will formulate a model for both these points and we will be announcing it soon.

The proposed Indian Wrestling League will be another ground breaking achievement if you manage to pull it off. Your thoughts on the same.

Wrestling is a sport that is deep rooted in our DNA as a nation. There is huge potential for popularizing it. As a sport, wrestling has won us a lot of medals, and has been zeroed in on as a sport that will bring laurels to the country in the future also. The model for the IWL is being formulated (lots of research and formats being discussed) and the framework should be rolled out soon.

Your thoughts on: a) What India needs to do to promote the growth of the culture of Sports and b) What do you think of the future of Sports in India?

To help grow Sports as a culture in India, we need to create an aspiration for Sports. e.g., people outside India have already started saving money to go watch the 2022 FIFA World Cup, or the Olympics in 2020. The involvement of society as a whole is very high outside India.

We are trying to build a culture to encourage professional badminton players (IBL), and it needs to be done by individual sports on their own. As a country, our strength is in numbers, e.g. for a sport like Karate, we would have enough followers that we would probably out-number the following for Football in Holland.

The future is really very bright; we have multiple sports in which we are performing very well, we need to ensure that this growth continues.

A message (advice) that you would like to share with our viewers as well as budding Sports Journalists.

Keep following Sports and sports-persons, Sports has a bright future as a business, but for it to get there, the support needs to be there, so, yes, keep supporting!