Sports as investment asset class now gets focus

KOLKATA: The franchise-based sports are now slowly emerging as investment opportunities for high networth individuals, who earlier restricted their funds to assets like gold, stocks and real estate.

Smaller league managers are now coming to the picture trying to convince wealth managers to lure high networth clients to invest in franchise-based teams across sports.

"Franchise-based sports is now slowly being treated as a different investment asset class in India like gold, stocks and real estate. I will be holding meeting with wealth managers shortly to market franchise teams among its high net worth clients for our forthcoming Cue Slam," Sportzlive Director Prasad Mangipuddi told PTI.

"Cue Slam franchise is just Rs 1 crore for a year with the total annual expenses coming to around Rs 1.5 crore. This is not a big amount for HNIs. We offer potential for high return in sports investment along with pride of ownership offering a great holding value," he said.

Sportzlive is a sports management company and also official marketing and sponsorship partner for the second season of the much-anticipated Indian Badminton League.

The sports management company is associated with the forthcoming Cue Slam.

The commercial success of Indian Premier League (IPL) in cricket has led to a surge of similar commercial formats in other sports such as Kabaddi, badminton, football, tennis and hockey among others.

Mangipuddi said cricket is gradually getting plateaued in terms of returns while other sports are at nascent stage offering higher return on investment.

Globally, sports have already become a matured investment class.

The Forbes study has shown top-50 teams are worth $1.75 billion on an average in 2015, a 31 per cent increase from last year.

In India, sports is yet to be recognised as a sector and there is no comprehensive study on the industry's estimated size in the country.