Daybreak - How one merger left FIFA with no game to play in India

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Three weeks before the FIFA World Cup kicks off in the US, India still does not have a broadcaster for the tournament. JioStar offered $20 million. FIFA said no. Sony did not bid at all. A petition has reached the Delhi High Court asking that matches at least air on Doordarshan.The easy explanation is that FIFA got greedy. But that does not explain how the world's biggest sporting event ends up with no takers in a country with more than 300 million football fans.In today's episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at what FIFA fundamentally misunderstood about India as a football market. And how one merger  gave Reliance enough power that left FIFA with nowhere else to go.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In three weeks from now, the FIFA World Cup 2026 is going to kick off in the US. And I know that we're mostly cricket fans here, but Inna still has more than 300 million football fans. And yet, we still do not have a broadcaster for the tournament. For the last World Cup in 2022, WICOM 18 had paid around $60 million for the rights and streamed the final to 32 million people in a single night. Two years later, Wycom 18 merged with Reliance in Disney to become GeoStar, the country's biggest broadcaster. And when FIFA came back for 2026, GeoStar offered $20 million.

FIFA, as expected, said no. Sony, the only other broadcaster who might have been interested, looked at the numbers and chose not to bid at all. The asking price then fell from $100 million that FIFA was initially asking to $35 million. Still, no deal. In fact, a petition has now reached the Delhi High Court asking that the matches be at least aired on the state-owned broadcaster Dool Darshan so fans can watch for free. Now, for a tournament FIFA president himself, Gianni Infantino, called the most inclusive World Cup ever, this is quite a remarkable place to land.

The easy explanation is that FIFA got greedy and there is truth in that of course. But greed alone does not explain how the world's biggest sporting event ended up with no takers in a country with hundreds and millions of football fans. Something more structural is happening here. Indian sports media landscape has been reshaped by this one merger and FIFA walked into a negotiation without fully understanding what that meant. When Reliance and Disney combined their India operations, Geostar became the country's biggest broadcaster, and it is acting like the gatekeeper of Indian sports now.

Think about it, all of cricket, IPL, ICC, it's all sitting under one roof. Every media advertiser and every agency runs their sports marketing money through this gate first. And the company that owns this gate had already decided, before the talks even began, that it did not need the football World Cup badly enough to overpay for it. So today, the real question is what it actually means when one company controls enough of a country sports market that everybody else has to negotiate on its terms. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nickda Sharma, and I don't do. chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time.

Today is Tuesday, the 19th of May. This is a football gold mine on paper. An Ormax media report estimated that the country's football audience is at 305 million people. In 2022, more than 110 million people streamed the World Cup online. The final between. Argentina and France drew 32 million viewers to Geo Cinema in a single night, with a total watch time crossing 40 billion minutes across sports 18 and GeoCinema combined. So by every metric, this is a market that FIFA should be able to monetize. The problem is that a large audience and a large market are two very different things.

And conflating them is exactly the mistake that FIFA made. The United States is actually the clearest example of what this gap actually looks like. The 1994 World Cup, hosted in America, drew an average of nearly 69,000 fans per game, a record that still stands today. The audiences were real and they were big, but a competitive broadcasting market for football did not follow. MLS, or Major League Soccer, was launched two years later, but it took another two years. decades before football rights in America became something that broadcasters would genuinely compete over. So, the audience was there in 1994.

It's just that the market took until the 2010s to actually catch up with them. India is at an earlier version of that same stage. The fans exist, the midnight pub crowds are real, but the commercial infrastructure to turn that fandom into a bidding war simply has not been. been built yet. Cricket is the only sport in India that has successfully made that conversion and it took decades. It needed a domestic league of its own with Indian players at the center and an advertising ecosystem that compounded over years into something that no brand could afford to ignore. Football has none of that in India. The men's national team has never even qualified for a World Cup. As Nandan

In Kamat, one of India's leading sports lawyers, told DW, the FIFA World Cup would not even rank among India's top two broadcast right properties. Those would be IPL and ICC cricket. But FIFA looked at 40 billion watch minutes and saw a market that was ready to pay more. What it did not see was that by the time that it came to negotiate, one company had already decided what football was worth in India, and that company had far bigger things on its plate. More on this in the next segment. When Reliance and Disney completed their merger in November 2024, GioStar, as we know, became the largest media and entertainment company in India.

But it also inherited a staggering sports rights bill. Over $6 billion for IPL digital and TV rights covering 2023 to 2027. another $3 billion for ICC cricket through the same period. So by the time that FIFA came knocking, GeoStars provisions for expected losses on its sports contracts had more than doubled in a single financial year, reaching nearly 26,000 crore rupees. So the economics of cricket broadcasting were already under severe strain.

And that is the context that FIFA walked into. A company carrying that kind of financial weight had no incentive to take on more risk for a sport with a fraction of cricket's advertiser appeal. So GeoStar's $20 million offer was the number that the broadcaster must have arrived at because it knew that it had already stretched itself to the limit on the properties that its advertisers actually care about. And football is not on that list. The merger also changed the structure of negotiation in ways that FIFA appears to have underestimated. Before it, Wycom 18, Star Sports and Sony were all competing for properties. But that competition is what drove Wycom 18 to pay around $60 million for the 2022 World Cup rights. But when Wycom 18 and Star collapsed into one entity,

Sony had no competitive pressure left and walked away without bidding. FIFA was left with a single buyer whose opening position essentially was, take it or leave it. Nand Kamath told DW that normally these rights sell where there is genuine fear of missing out, and that fear was absent from this negotiation entirely. You will actually understand the situation even better if you just look at the Indian Super League and what is happening to it. Last year, the All-India Football Federation failed to attract a single bid

for a 15-year commercial rights tender for the ISL. Governance disputes and unrealistic financial terms played a role in that failure. But the fact that no entity, incumbent or new, was willing to absorb the risk of Indian football's flagship league tells you a lot about where the sport sits commercially in India. Executives estimated that the league ecosystem has already lost 5,000 crore rupees. And now, coming back to FIFA and what is happening here, the silence from both sides is doing a lot of work. FIFA's president has repeatedly called India the sleeping giants of football and a key long-term growth market.

So, admitting that it walked into a negotiation where the market had already moved on would meet acknowledging that its emerging markets. strategy is built on audience members that do not convert into revenue. That is a strategic miscalculation with consequences for every future World Cup. On the other hand, Geostar's silence serves a different purpose. A single merger gave one private company enough control over India's sports media that a global rights holder with the world's biggest sporting property had nowhere else to go. GeoStar basically has every reason to let that go unexamined. So what neither side will say is that the pricing disagreement is just the surface of all of this.

Underneath it is a sports media market that has been reorganized in ways that will work very well for one company and very poorly for everybody else negotiating with it. And at the end of the day, the fan who has been setting alarms at midnight for leagues and and World Cup matches for years has no legal way to watch the upcoming tournament. So here is what we really need to think about. If India's sports media market has been consolidated by one company with no incentive to pay for anything that is not cricket, who wins? Geostrad obviously, but does football in India just stop growing? Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news

platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Snitha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv Sien.