India's sports economy crosses $2 billion, and CTV is where the big money is now going

Attention, not eyeballs, is the currency marketers are chasing this year, and nowhere is that recalibration more visible than in the sporting calendar India has just lived through. A T20 World Cup, an Indian Premier League season, Wimbledon fortnight and the countdown to the.

Where does a rupee spent on sport actually work hardest. The answer emerging from boardrooms this year is less about a single tournament and more about a single screen.

What Happened

Across cricket, tennis and a multi-sport spectacle still months away, planners are quietly prioritising connected television, the internet-enabled television set that streams content the way a phone or laptop does, over the older binary of broadcast versus digital. It is a bridge.

• What plays out in the boardrooms deciding H1 2026 spends will likely set the template for how brands plan around sport for the rest of the decade.

• India's sports economy crossed the two billion dollar mark for the first time in 2025, reaching ₹18,864 crore, a 13.4 percent rise over the previous year, according to WPP Media's Sporting Nation report.

• Media spends were the single biggest driver of that growth, accounting for 51 percent of industry value and rising nearly 20 percent year on year, split between a 16.4 percent rise in television advertising.

Key Details

It signals that India's sports marketing machine, built for two decades on the assumption that television delivers scale and digital delivers precision, is being redrawn around a channel that claims to do both at once. For years, the sports marketing playbook in.

• Sponsorship spends grew a steadier 7 percent, while athlete endorsements rose over 10 percent, increasingly structured as equity-linked partnerships rather than simple ambassador fees.

• Cricket's grip on this economy has, if anything, tightened, accounting for 89 percent of total industry revenue in 2025, up from 85 percent the year before, and commanding an even higher share of endorsement.

• It is being planned around attention itself, wherever it happens to land, and for now, connected television is where the industry is placing its clearest bet.

Why It Matters

That instinct has not disappeared, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. They buy credibility and association with marquee properties.

• Sport in India is no longer being planned around a single tournament or a single screen.

• That is arguably the most consequential shift of all.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by Storyboard18 as more details emerge