Emerging sports are the next big business opportunity: Tero India MD

India's growing sports market is fostering new businesses beyond just cricket, including sports intellectual property, live events, grassroots initiatives, digital media, and ventures led by athletes. For entrepreneurs, the real opportunity lies in developing organized commercial ecosystems for emerging sports, rather than focussing solely on established ones. Chandrakant Singh, CEO & MD, Tero India and Partner, Tero Entertainment PCL, believes this is precisely where the next wave of sports businesses can emerge. With Tero entering India through 3x3 basketball, Singh discusses the gaps in the market, the business case for building a new sports IP, and what it takes to turn an emerging sport into a sustainable business. Edited excerpts.

The Economic Times (ET): India’s sports economy is expanding rapidly beyond cricket, with brands, investors and audiences increasingly willing to engage with emerging sports. How big do you believe the opportunity is today, and where do you see the biggest untapped commercial opportunities within India’s sports and entertainment market?

Chandrakant Singh (CS): India's sports economy is at an inflection point. A 2024 Google–Deloitte report valued the market at roughly $52 billion in FY24, projecting nearly $130 billion by 2030, a 14% CAGR, almost double the pace of India's GDP. That expansion isn't only cricket; it's digital consumption, multi-sport fandom, and Gen Z's appetite for culture-driven experiences. The biggest untapped opportunities lie beyond broadcast rights: participation-led formats, live entertainment experiences, athletes as content creators, and structured pathways for sports that have passionate fan bases but no organised competitive ecosystem, basketball being a prime example. That gap between passive fandom and active, monetisable participation is where we see the real space.


ET: What was the business case for Tero Entertainment to enter India at this particular point? What gaps in the Indian sports ecosystem did you identify, and what does Tero believe it can bring to the market that is currently missing?

CS: India has it all: the world's largest youth population, with about 65% of the country under 35, an enormous digital appetite for basketball already reflected in its ranking among the highest NBA followerships outside the US, and a sports economy actively diversifying beyond cricket. What was missing was conversion: passionate fans with no structured route into organised ranked competition. More importantly, what was missing was the middle: an organised competition structure. Fans had nothing to follow on an ongoing basis, and players did not have a natural pathway after school basketball. Tero brings two decades of experience building sports entertainment IP across Thailand and the region, including FIBA-endorsed 3x3 events, plus genuine expertise in fusing live sport with music, culture, and fan experiences. We saw an underdeveloped basketball ecosystem needing a credible, FIBA-backed entry point, and are launching 3x3, starting with Quest India, specifically to close that gap.

ET: 3x3 basketball is already a global format, but India’s basketball market is still relatively underdeveloped commercially. How do you assess the size of the 3x3 opportunity in India in terms of players, audiences, sponsorships, media rights, and participation, and what would it take to turn it into a meaningful sports business?

CS: Globally, 3x3 is thriving with FIBA reporting 1.35 billion video views and 8.5 million social followers in 2024, with followers growing further to 10 million in 2025 and an expanding Olympic footprint through LA28. India, despite huge basketball fandom, has almost no organised 3x3 pipeline: players compete in unranked domestic formats with no route to FIBA ranking points. That's where the gap and the opportunity is: a young, digitally engaged, basketball-curious population with a barely existing supply of structured competition. Turning this into a real business needs three things: a regular calendar of FIBA-sanctioned events, credible sponsorship and media packages benchmarked to global 3x3 properties, and a grassroots-to-elite pathway that helps players to be recognized in rankings and keeps fans engaged year-round rather than around a single event.

ET: With the launch of 3x3 Quest India 2026, what is the larger business model you are building? Is the ambition to create a tournament, or ultimately a year-round 3x3 ecosystem spanning leagues, grassroots programmes, entertainment, digital content, sponsorships, and player development?

CS: Quest India 2026 is the very beginning, not the destination. Our ambition is a full ecosystem with grassroots discovery programmes that bring young players into the game, a regular competitive calendar building toward FIBA-sanctioned events, a clear progression pathway to the global 3x3 circuit, plus the entertainment, digital content, and sponsorship layers that make it commercially sustainable. The goal is to build from the ground up so a young player can discover the sport locally and develop and get to a much bigger horizon on a global level.

ET: Sports IP has increasingly become an entertainment business rather than just a sporting event. How do you intend to build 3x3 Quest into an IP that audiences follow beyond the court, and what role will technology, content, music, influencers, and fan engagement play in that strategy?

CS: Sport is the heartbeat, but the surrounding atmosphere, which is the music, the creators, the fan zones, and the digital storytelling is what builds a following, not just a spectator base. Gen Z moves fluidly between sport, music, and creator culture, so 3x3 needs to live across all of those touchpoints simultaneously. Practically, that means DJ-led live events, short-form content built for social platforms, athlete personal-brand development, influencer and creator partnerships, and consistent digital storytelling between events, not just during them. The goal is a community that engages with the IP year-round, through content, culture, and player narratives, not only on match days. We at Tero call think of it as entertainment-sports.

ET: One of the biggest challenges for emerging sports in India is monetisation, where strong participation does not necessarily translate into strong commercial returns. What are the revenue streams you see working for 3x3 basketball, and how long do you expect the market to take to become commercially self-sustaining?

CS: We are just at the beginning of the journey, and there is a lot to be achieved with the support of our partners and sponsors. The support from associations, authorities, and corporate sponsors is going to be the primary revenue stream that will enable us to be successful in our mission. No one can predict the future, but our goal is to be self-sustaining in 3-4 years. However, this will require support from the various partners we engage with and the timeline may change in the future.

ET: You have spent over two decades scaling businesses across technology, SaaS, events, and digital transformation. What lessons from those sectors are you applying to building a sports business, and what is different about scaling a sports IP compared with scaling a technology or services company?

CS: Two decades in technology, SaaS, and events taught us that scalable businesses are built on repeatable systems, data-informed decisions, and, most importantly, a relentless focus on consumer (fan) experience, all of which apply directly to building a sports IP. What's fundamentally different is the emotional and cultural connection fans make with sport: you can't build fan loyalty the way you can with a product. Sports IP also compounds gradually; trust, credibility, and athlete pathways take years to build and can't be rushed with capital alone. So, we are applying the operational discipline of tech scaling to a business that ultimately grows on experiences, community, and culture rather than pure product-market fit.

ET: f we look five years ahead, what does success for Tero in India look like? What kind of player base, tournament footprint, audience, commercial revenues, and investment ecosystem would convince you that 3x3 basketball has moved from being an emerging sport to a mainstream sports business in India?

CS: For Tero India, success is having established an authentic, self-sustaining 3x3 ecosystem: a nationwide network of grassroots and city-level events feeding into a recognised annual competitive calendar, a meaningful base of FIBA-ranked Indian players and teams competing internationally, sponsor and media partnerships that don't need to be justified event-by-event, and 3x3 recognised as India's home-grown gateway to global 3x3. Beyond the numbers, the real marker of success is cultural: when 3x3 stops being described as an "emerging" sport in India and is simply understood as part of the country's everyday sporting and entertainment landscape, with its own stars, its own fanbase, and its own commercial ecosystem.