Welcome to The State of Play

"In sports," Ted Leonsis, the CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, once said, "you're not just competing on the field but for attention, but for dollars, and for influence."

In my various roles, journalism taught me to chase the story, entrepreneurship taught me to follow the money, and sports taught me that these two were never too far apart to begin with.

That is what The State of Play will be about.

Before I explain the mission of this project, allow me to introduce myself.

I began my career as a sports journalist eighteen years ago, chasing stories that unfolded in real time. Athletes, administrators, rivalries, and the daily drama that came with them. Those years were spent in newsrooms that measured the world by the scoreboard. It was exciting, but also limiting.

A few years later, I transitioned to writing about business and technology, which altered my perspective. It taught me to look at sport not just as performance, but as enterprise — a system built on capital, policy, and ambition. What happens on the field is what's visible under the lights, surrounded by roaring crowds. The real action, however, often takes place in less glamorous settings: in sterile boardrooms and quiet corners of a coffee shop. These conversations rarely generate the same excitement as those on the pitch. The State of Play is an attempt to change that.

This is not unfamiliar ground. In 2014, as a reporter at Mint, I covered the Indian Premier League’s midlife crisis from the Supreme Court, along with stories on sponsorship trends, governance battles, and the business currents that defined the league. Those threads revealed how money, power, influence, and policy (or law) were beginning to reshape Indian sport. That experience sharpened my interest in how sport is built, not just played.

In 2016, I joined The Ken as part of its founding team, helping build a publication that valued depth, clarity, and strong narrative reporting. It was there that my approach to storytelling evolved, away from breaking news and toward explanation, structure, and long-form craft. Even though my focus was on business and technology, sport found a way back. In 2017, we published a story on the economics of Indian football, which reminded me that the business of sport was an equally compelling beat, just underexplored.

After I moved on from The Ken, the team later validated that instinct with Moneyball (an excellent but now-discontinued newsletter), which brought serious attention to this space. In 2018, I joined The Economic Times, where I covered India’s expanding technology and internet economy. That period reinforced how business, culture, and policy overlap, lessons that continue to shape how I see sport.

By 2022, it was time to give this field a proper home. As co-founder and CEO of The Signal, I helped launch The Playbook, a free weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. It grew quickly, and by the time The Core acquired The Signal in 2024, The Playbook had reached more than 10,000 subscribers. That experience made something clear: there is an audience that wants thoughtful, consistent coverage of sport as business.

Indian sport is entering a defining phase, and this felt like the right moment to start chronicling it carefully.

The State of Play builds on that belief. It will follow the same steady approach to reporting and storytelling, but with more depth and ambition.

Now to the newsletter itself.

It is a weekly newsletter about the business of sports, written from India with a global outlook. Every Friday evening, it will bring you one story and a curated reading list of the week that was. The goal is to understand and document how India’s sports economy is evolving, not just through billion-dollar media rights and sponsorship deals, but across its entire landscape. From grassroots development and infrastructure to policy, advocacy, manufacturing, and retail, The State of Play will track how sport is built, sustained, and governed, and how these forces connect India to the broader world.

Each edition will take about five to six minutes to read, long enough to explain, but short enough to hold attention. The writing will prioritise clarity over pace and treat sport not as a diversion or seasonal indulgence, but as a serious business that reflects the economies and ambitions surrounding it.

This is a project I've been thinking about for a while. It feels like the right time to begin. Join me as The State of Play begins its journey, a weekly account of how sport, business, and ambition now move together.