Virat Kohli, P V Sindhu trek an unequal road to the global endorser league

Two Indians make it to the 2019 Forbes lists for highest paid athletes; their story reveals a gendered narrative of sports, popularity and earnings

Two Indians have made it to the Forbes global list of athletes for 2019. Cricketer Virat Kohli ranks 100 in the Forbes 2019 list of highest paid athletes, while badminton player P V Sindhu is at 13 in the Forbes 2019 list of highest paid women athletes. But the cricketer who makes up the tail of his list earns five times that of the shuttler who is among the top 20 on her list.

According to the Forbes 2019 list, Sindhu’s total earnings stand at $5.5 million and Virat Kohli’s, $25 million. The earnings are a total of endorsement and match earnings. What explains the difference: gender, the games they play or is it just the power of the brands they endorse?

“All of it boils down to economics,” says Ramakrishnan R, co-founder and director, Baseline Ventures, a sports marketing and management company that manages Sindhu. Sindhu blazed her way through to the Forbes list last year. She was ranked 8 in 2018 but  is at 13 this year. The drop, he says is largely  because the endorsements follow a staggered pay system. Also Sindhu is also choosing fewer events, while balancing a packed sports calendar, Ramakrishnan adds.

Even so, what is the story behind the huge gap? “I do not think it is a fair comparison. Sindhu is in a sport that not many watch, she is lucky and has done really well to be on the list, badminton is neither popular or a spectator sport in the country,” says Sandeep Goyal, founder of Mogae Media who has done considerable work on brand endorsers. According to him Kohli earns more, not because of his gender but because nothing can match the endorsement muscle of cricket. “Kohli rides the goodwill of winning one match after another and also a lot of endorsement money flows to the captain,” he explains.

Not everyone sees the world of sports and endorsements through Goyal’s lens. Ramakrishnan reads a nuanced gender issue in the unequal stakes. “Tennis and badminton are gender neutral, where the prize money is equal, so there is equality at least on the court or field. Other games like cricket need to catch up,” he adds.

Goyal believes that it would be erroneous to look at it through the prism of gender. He says that Sindhu’s presence in the list is a sign that women’s success in sports is being recognised. He brings in a Bollywood analogy, pointing out that there was a time when there weren’t enough women to claim an endorsement spot, but that has changed. Women’s cricket will also get its due, he adds, probably ten years down the line. 

Goyal is being optimistic. In team sports, globally, women get the short shrift. Be it basketball, football or cricket, women’s teams earn a fraction of their male counterparts. Tennis is the only equal pay employer, the sport keeps throwing up a number of women on the highest paid athletes list year after year.

Saundarya Rajesh, founder of the Avtar Group and a diversity an inclusion strategist says that in sport and at the workplace, it is harder for women to prove performance. “Research states that women have to perform at an additional 30 per cent higher efficiency in order to be seen as delivering the same output as men. She sees the world of sports as being even more gender unequal than the workplace, because she says, “social norms do not encourage women from taking up physical activities and therefore, sports.”