It took a long time for FIFA to find a broadcast partner for the on-going World Cup 2026 in the country. ZEEL eventually did a long-term deal.
Medianews4u.com caught up with Aahna Mehrotra, Founder, AM Sports Law & Management Co. to get her take. She expects digital to grow in importance when it comes to the rights value of sporting events. Also other sports will be fighting for leftovers in a cricket dominant country.
She is widely recognised as India’s first female sports lawyer, with over 15 years of experience in sports and gaming law. She advises elite athletes, teams, and organisations, and is known for her work across policy, anti-doping, athlete representation, and the business of sport. Media and industry stakeholders frequently seek her perspective on governance, legal frameworks, and emerging trends in the sports and gaming ecosystem.
Her journey in sport began at the age of four, leading to a successful multi-sport career in lawn tennis and water polo where she played at the state level, and cricket where she was selected for the India Under-19 team. These early experiences shaped her disciplined and fairness-driven approach to law.
She pursued an LL.M specialising in Intellectual Property, Entertainment, Media, and Sports Law, guided by a strong belief in the role of law in advancing equity and accountability.
In 2017, she founded AM Sports Law & Management Co., building a practice marked by long-standing client relationships and strategic advisory work. She has served as the youngest Vice Chairperson of India’s National Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel, contributed to anti-doping education initiatives such as the ‘Know Your Medicine’ app, and advised the Central Government on rules addressing age fraud. Internationally, she has contributed to the UNODC’s Global Report on Corruption in Sport and serves on the IFHA Council on Anti-Illegal Betting & Related Financial Crime.
Her work spans multiple sports, including cricket, football, table tennis, motorsport, and golf, and includes advising on the establishment of over 20 leagues in India and globally, as well as having done strategic consulting on high-value broadcast rights deals for European football leagues.
Alongside her legal practice, Aahna supports gender equity in sport, mentoring women professionals and working with organisations such as Women in Sport India to strengthen inclusive and transparent systems.
Excerpts:
Q. The FIFA World Cup 2026 took a lot of time to find a broadcast partner. Do you attribute this to match timings?
Timings are the most cited reason and they matter, but they are not the whole story. Only 14 of the 104 matches start before midnight in India, with the final match kick off being at 12:30 AM, which has been more hyped than ever before – so an advertiser is right to assume fewer eyeballs and a broadcaster automatically marks down the revenue.
But the deeper issue is that the advertiser ecosystem which once made a difficult broadcast bet viable has been structurally weakened, and the real-money gaming ban is part of that story. Add to it the fact that India is a cricket-first market, and that there is no emotional hook at all i.e., no Indian team, topped off with the fact that until Zee came about, the major player was only JioStar (given Sony did not even bid) and you have your answers. Timings has been the easy headline, but the economics behind it has been the real problem.
Q. What were the legal and commercial implications of delayed rights negotiations close to a marquee sporting event?
Legally, delay compresses everything, contract drafting, due diligence, regulatory filings, and the build-out of production and distribution all get squeezed into a few weeks, and that is precisely when clauses get missed and revenue share arrangements do not get thought through. Those ambiguities become disputes later.
Commercially, the bigger cost is the lost lead time to sell inventory, because sponsorship packages for a World Cup are not sold in four weeks, you need months to go to market. With the IPL having only just finished and the kick-off less than a fortnight away, Zee has almost no runway to build advertising packages or lock in integrated deals – so you are largely behind on monetisation before a ball is kicked.
Q. Is it fair to say that only die hard football fans are tuning in?
It is a bit more nuanced. A World Cup match in India caters to two groups – (i) the true fan who will wake up at any hour because that is what true fans do, but that is a small percentage of people; and (ii) a particular strata of society that treats a match as a social occasion, the people with spending power who host viewings at home over beer or head to a pub. With these timings, almost none of that second group is showing up this year, and that is the group advertisers actually want. So yes, you are mostly preaching to the choir, because you cannot manufacture a water-cooler moment when the country is asleep when the whistle blows.
Q. Are we in a situation where sports broadcasting on a standalone basis for a media company is not profitable any longer? You have to see how having cricket can help other parts of the business?
Honestly, sports rights as a pure play profit centre has been under stress for a while, the economics rarely close on the rights fee alone. You are paying for reach, engagement and a halo for the wider business, not a neat line item. Cricket, and the IPL especially, is the engine, it drives subscriber acquisition, advertiser relationships and a platform off which you cross-sell everything else.
That is exactly why a property like FIFA sits so awkwardly, because on a standalone basis the numbers do not work in India (even the EPL values have significantly gone down), and there is no cricket-style ecosystem around it to justify carrying the loss. So you bid for it as brand positioning, not as a P&L decision.
Q. The IPL in the previous rights cycle saw a big jump. Do you expect to see the new deal to be flat in value as a result of consolidation?
Yes, I think the next cycle is flat at best, and that is a sentence no one in this market would have said three years ago. The big jumps were a function of two heavyweights, Reliance and Star, slugging it out, and once you take that fight away (thanks to the merger) and put everything under one roof, the tension that drove those numbers vertical simply disappears. Then layer on the gaming ban gutting the advertiser base and the linear decline, and there is nothing left pushing valuations up.
The consequences are now being openly discussed in terms no one would have used – plateau, stagnation, downward pressure. And while the BCCI insists the next cycle will grow, the telling sign is Arun Dhumal floating a window shift, “One suggestion was a window in September-October. That is the best time from an advertiser’s point of view because it is just before Diwali.” An 18 year old tournament that survived Indian summers just fine is suddenly reconsidering its window at exactly the moment its advertiser base collapsed. The timing speaks for itself.
Q. Zee has announced plans for sports channels. Does this make bidding for sports rights more competitive or will they be cautious and go for less expensive properties?
Zee announced its sports channel only a couple of weeks ago, and they have ended up as the home for the FIFA World Cup, which is a positive. But you have to be realistic about where they sit financially and strategically, the Sony merger fell through and rebuilding credibility in sports takes time and capital.
Ideally, to be sustain, they must be selective in their approach rather than going head to head with JioStar on premium cricket, and should target properties where the fees are manageable and they can build a narrative around being the home of football (given the news around having signed a deal until 2034). Football fits that brief, which is partly how we got here. It nudges the competition up a notch, but the real leverage still sits with JioStar, and that is not changing anytime soon.
Q. Linear TV viewership for the IPL has seen a substantial decline. Do you attribute this to the RMG ban or the fact that audiences prefer OTT platforms?
It is both, and it is hard to cleanly separate them. The RMG ban hurt linear disproportionately because fantasy and betting adjacent categories were huge broadcast advertisers, reportedly funding close to 40 percent of IPL broadcast advertising, and that money has not been replaced, mouth freshener brands are now among the top sponsors but mouth fresheners are not Dream11. There is also a viewership effect, when fans have no fantasy team they lose skin in the game and passive viewership follows. That being said the structural shift to OTT was already underway, the ban just accelerated the pain on the linear side.
Q. Do you see OTT platforms being interested in cricket rights as a result of which parties could bid jointly?
Joint bidding is a real structural possibility and I expect more creative deal structures next cycle. You could see a pure play OTT platform that wants the subscriber acquisition benefit of cricket, but not the full rights fee risk, partnering with a broadcaster that brings distribution and ad sales muscle, on paper it makes complete sense.
The hard part is always execution, who controls editorial, how you split inventory, what happens if one partner’s platform underperforms, these are complex things to negotiate and operate. But the days of one entity owning every right across every platform for the mega properties are probably over. The risk is fragmentation, where the viewer ends up chasing the game across three apps.
Q. In terms of the evolving role of OTT and digital streaming in sports rights negotiations what trends do you expect to be seen in the coming three years?
Digital will keep eating linear’s audience, and rights value will increasingly track streaming reach rather than TV ratings. I expect more unbundling, packages split by platform, language and format, and more flexible structures like pay-as-you-go (single match pass). Free ad-supported streaming will matter more here because subscription willingness in India is still shallow, this is not a pay-to-watch market and that shapes everything.
Betting platforms show horrible quality content now, but stream full matches – a lot of people are happy watching on such platforms because quality does not matter. Data and personalisation will become central – platforms will pay for engagement they can actually measure and monetise. And measurement itself becomes the quiet battleground, because whoever defines the currency for digital viewership effectively sets the valuations for the next cycle.
Q. Besides cricket will other rights fees for sports struggle to see any jump in valuation in the coming three years?
Largely yes, at least over the next three years, cricket remains the only property in India with genuine pricing power and everything else is fighting for the leftover attention and ad budget. Football rights have already softened, the EPL rights value in India has reportedly gone from around $145 million to USD 65 million, and there are barely any takers for La Liga.
The same skin in the game logic applies, with fantasy gone the passive football viewer drifts and the value drifts with him. A few properties like kabaddi may hold their own on a domestic story. But broad based jumps outside cricket are very hard to see in the current environment.
Q. In terms of ad revenue will the RMG ban pose a serious challenge to monetisation of sports properties or will other categories like AI pick up the slack?
The RMG ban is a serious challenge and I would not pretend AI fills that hole quickly. Fantasy and gaming were not just big spenders, they were spenders whose product depended on people watching closely, so they drove the very engagement broadcasters sell, that feedback loop is gone.
New categories have come in but the quality of demand has changed, when mouth freshener brands move into the top sponsor list you can see the gap. AI, quick commerce and D2C will grow, but their budgets and their natural link to live sport are not yet at that scale. So in the near term, yes, this dents monetisation meaningfully, and it is one of the quieter reasons the FIFA deal was so hard to close.
Q. Is the ISL viable? Global soccer properties rely heaving on strong broadcast revenue which the ISL does not have.
This is the honest tension at the heart of Indian football, globally the top leagues are built on strong broadcast revenue and the ISL simply does not have that base (though the issue there is quality play as from a match timing perspective, ISL competes with EPL which is way more superior in every way).
Which is exactly why the Genius Sports situation is so striking, a NYSE-listed data company whose primary business is licensing match data to betting operators like DraftKings and Bet365 has reportedly bid around Rs 2,129 crore over 20 years for the ISL’s commercial rights. Sit with that irony, domestic fantasy gaming is banned on public interest grounds, yet a foreign company whose model runs on global betting data may end up underwriting a national league. Viable, maybe, but certainly not on the conventional broadcast-led model.
