The first tweet landed at 5.20 pm on 1 June.
Within minutes, #CricketTwitter was abuzz with speculation that Ganguly was going to resign from his position as BCCI president, four months before his three-year tenure ends. The Indian media soon got in on the action, as dozens of publications fuelled the speculation, with some saying that the 49-year-old was about to enter politics. Eventually, news agency ANI managed to contact BCCI secretary Jay Shah, who finally put the rumours to bed.
A few hours later, Ganguly himself clarified his statement, telling the media that it was “a simple advertisement stunt” and there was “no question of me resigning” from the BCCI. “I am going to launch a commercial educational app, which will be my own venture,” he added.
The following morning, though, Ganguly threw another googly on Twitter. At 11.32 am, he posted this:
Cue more speculation and rumours.
The announcement didn’t come at 12 pm, but almost two hours later. And surprise, surprise: it was indeed an education app.
I will not get into this “genius” social media marketing strategy (which probably deserves another piece) .
But there are two other things to note here:
Ganguly has been the brand ambassador of Classplus for at least 18 months. Here’s a video of an ad he did for the edtech in December 2020. So, there’s nothing new about this association to warrant all the drama—or at least Ganguly hasn’t made it clear in his tweets.
But more importantly, the BCCI, whose president Ganguly has been since October 2019, already has an edtech sponsor in BYJU’s. This association dates back to July 2019, with BYJU’s currently paying ~Rs 240 crore (~US$30 million) per year to be the jersey sponsor of the Indian cricket team.
Which means Ganguly wilfully got involved with a brand that’s a rival of the sponsor of the organisation he heads. It’s a classic case of ambush marketing, of which there have been a number of examples in the world of sport previously.
But when it comes to individuals from the world of sport getting involved with rival brands of their organisation’s sponsors, it’s usually the athletes. Ganguly may be a former cricketer, and a very popular one at that, but he is currently an administrator. And he’s no ordinary administrator. He’s the president of the most powerful cricket board in the world.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter regularly, you’d know that this is not a one-off. Ganguly also endorses My11Circle, a fantasy sports platform that’s a competitor of another official BCCI partner, Dream11. And while Ganguly signed with My11Circle in May 2019, which was five months before he became BCCI president, he was an advisor for the Delhi Capitals IPL team that year. Dream11 was one of the team’s official sponsors.
Okay, perhaps that’s minor. But once Ganguly became BCCI president in October 2019, shouldn’t he have stepped down from his brand ambassadorial role at My11Circle? That’s what former British track-and-field athlete Sebastian Coe was forced to do after he became the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in 2015.
Coe, a two-time Olympic gold medallist, had been a Nike ambassador for 38 years. He was initially reluctant to give up the US$150,000-a-year contract, but eventually did it because “the current noise level” around it was becoming a distraction. “It is clear that perception and reality have become horribly mangled,” he had said at the time.
This was after a BBC investigation revealed that Coe had discussed his support for Eugene’s bid to host the 2021 World Athletics Championships with a senior Nike official. Eugene in Oregon, United States, is the birthplace of Nike.
Ganguly has been similarly dismissive of the perceived conflicts in his endorsements. “It is not [a conflict],” he had said about his My11Circle association after becoming BCCI president. “If I was endorsing another fantasy cricket platform, that would have been a conflict of interest.” He is, of course, referring to Dream11.
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