 Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni has signed a record deal with two sports
management firms to become the richest ever cricketer in the history of the sport.
He has signed a three-year contract for a whopping sum of Rs 2.1 billion or 210
crores ($ 42 million) with the two firms. This is about Rs. 30 crores more than
what Tenulkar had signed in 2006 and that puts him at the top pedestal.
Dhoni has signed the contract with Rhiti Sports Management and advertising
agency Mindscapes. Rhiti is owned by Arun Pandey, who is a former Ranji
trophy cricketer and Mindscapes is an ad firm which had earlier had a contract
with the Indian captain for all of Dhoni's advertisements.
The two firms will now handle the broad aray of Dhoni's ads, brand associations,
digital rights, and the presence on social networking sites like Facebook and
others. It is said that the deal was signed about a week back, around the same
time Dhoni was getting married.
It was not as if Rhiti and Mindscapes were the only two firms who wanted to
handle Dhoni. They had to overcome stiff competition from IMG, Percept Group,
PMG (which is owned by Sunil Gavaskar) and the World Sport Group amongst some
of the other sports management firms who had tried to woo the biggest brand
in Indian cricket. Dhoni has a repertoire of 22 different sponsors that he does.
Dhoni's previous year's income was $10 million out of which only 20% of it
was from playing cricket. This included the likes of IPL and the BCCI contract,
but the rest of the money came from endorsements and advertisements.
He was the second highest paid cricketer after Sachin Tendulkar till
last year, but this deal makes him the highest paid!
Dhoni's previous contract was for one year with Mindscape. Before that, he
was with the sports management firm from Kolkata, Gameplan Sports in 2008. Rhiti
Sports also manages two other Indian cricketers in R P Singh and Harbhajan Singh and this means that they have a nice array of players on their list.
Having said that Dhoni is a good way off the richest ever sportsman in the
world, Tiger Woods, who earns a 100 crores every year! Woods was dropped from
the sponsorship by many of the companies he endorses the products but that hasn't
stopped him from earning a lot of money.
|
