At 75, Subhash Chandra plays extra time

MUMBAI: Most 75-year-olds are content refereeing from the sidelines. Subhash Chandra, chairman and mentor of the Essel and Zee group, would rather be back on the pitch, studs up.

The last three years  have not been kind. The collapse of Zee’s proposed mega-merger with Sony Pictures Networks India in January 2024 left the broadcaster without its dance partner, several marquee investors  filed for the exit, and the stock spent long stretches looking less like a media stock and more like a cautionary tale. Zee shares touched a 52-week low of Rs 68.10 in March this year, a bruising 55 per cent below their July 2025 peak.

And yet the septuagenarian founder has chosen this precise moment to go on the offensive — not with one bet but with five, fired off in quick succession, a promoter cheque book prised wide open, a World Cup on every screen in the country, a fiction slate back at the top of the charts, a scramble of new-format businesses from gigs to thirty-second soap operas, and, most audaciously, a plan to use sports broadcast and revenue from it into a football nation.

On 1 July, Zee’s board approved a preferential allotment of up to 24.95 crore fully convertible warrants to promoter entity Sunbright Mauritius Investments, at Rs 126 apiece, a capital infusion worth up to Rs 3,143.52 crore. Sunbright pays a quarter upfront and the rest on conversion within 18 months; if fully converted, the promoter group’s stake in the company could climb to nearly 20 per cent. The board also cleared ESOP 2026, a fresh employee stock option pool of up to 3.74 crore options, in a none-too-subtle signal that the talent bleed is meant to stop here. It is, by some distance, the biggest bet the promoter family has placed on Zee since reclaiming control of the boardroom and it lands within days of a separate filip: government clearance for a Rs 418-crore investment from Invesco-managed OFI Global China Fund, marking that investor’s return to the Zee register after a near three-year absence.

Before there was a football gambit or a warrant issue, there was Zee TV, the channel Chandra launched in 1992 as India’s first private Hindi satellite broadcaster, and it is fitting that the old flagship is doing much of the heavy lifting in the turnaround story. Through May and June, Zee TV pulled off a rare clean sweep of the BARC weekly charts, with fiction shows Ganga Maai Ki Betiyan, Vasudha and Tum Se Tum Tak occupying all three podium positions for several weeks running, elbowing aside long-running rivals such as Anupamaa and Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. The result: an 18.6 per cent market share in urban India in the 22nd week of 2026, the network’s highest in 48 weeks, with Zee TV holding the Hindi prime-time crown for 17 consecutive weeks.

This is Chandra’s original playbook, run at full tilt: hyper-local storytelling, executed language by language rather than dubbed and shipped nationally. It is why Zee’s regional bouquet has quietly become as important to the turnaround as anything happening in Hindi prime time. Zee Marathi has notched an 82 per cent rise in viewership over three years  and grown its share from 33.9 to 38.8 per cent in a single quarter; Zee Tamil is the fastest-growing channel in its market; Zee Bangla has held onto genre leadership in Kolkata for years  on the back of stalwarts like Sa Re Ga Ma Pa and Didi No. 1; and Zee Keralam has climbed to second place among Malayalam entertainment channels. It is a model Chandra effectively invented for Indian television — build a channel in the audience’s own tongue rather than assume Hindi content travels and one that rivals are still trying to copy three decades on.

Money and ratings, though, are only the opening act. The bigger swing is football. After a nail-biting, deadline-defying negotiation, Zee snatched the India media rights to the 2026 FIFA World Cup for a reported fee north of $40 million — beating back interest from JioStar and undercutting FIFA’s own asking price by more than half. The deal bundles in the 2030 World Cup, the 2027 Women’s World Cup, and a clutch of futsal and youth competitions, amounting to 39 FIFA properties through to 2034. All 104 matches of the 48-team, three-nation tournament are carried on Zee’s newly minted Unite8 Sports channels and streamed on Zee5 increasingly styled simply as Z5 with subscription packs priced at Rs 799 for the tournament and Rs 1,699 for a full year. Free-to-air viewers  get a look-in too, with Doordarshan carrying select marquee fixtures.

Chief executive Punit Goenka, Chandra’s elder son, called the deal proof that Zee’s “extensive broadcast and digital distribution ecosystem” would help unlock football’s long-term value in India, an ambition that had looked distinctly parked since Zee sold off its Ten Sports network to Sony a decade ago.

This is where Zee’s pitch turns explicitly competitive. Indian sports broadcasting has for yeaRs  been a two-hors e affair: JioStar, the Rs 70,352-crore Reliance-Disney merger of Viacom18 and Star India dominant and, until recently, near-unchallenged, with Sony Pictures Networks India a smaller but disciplined second, holding England cricket rights to 2028 and the Champions League on SonyLIV. Zee’s calculation is that an $840-million annual advertising hole left by India’s real-money-gaming ad ban, previously cricket’s biggest sponsor category, has weakened JioStar’s grip just as Zee needed an opening. The plan is to build a network rather than a one-tournament pop-up: Zee5 entered sports almost by accident through the UAE’s ILT20 cricket league in 2023, then added Calcutta Football League matches in 2024 and a three-year deal with the UP Kabaddi League, with executives talking openly of stitching cricket, kabaddi, badminton, wrestling, boxing and football into one sports brand — Unite8 for the living room, Z5 for the small town and the local-language fan on a budget Android phone, a different and arguably cheaper model than JioStar’s blanket dominance.

Zee is not merely angling to broadcast the beautiful game; it wants a hand in growing it. The company has committed to investing 15 per cent of Zee5’s football-subscription revenue into identifying and training young Indian talent, from grassroots leagues up through age-group pathways, with a declared goal of competitive Indian men’s and women’s teams at FIFA World Cups by 2034, the very year Zee’s rights deal expires. “India has a large, untapped reserve of football talent that harbours  immense potential to compete at a global stage,” Goenka said, describing Zee as wanting to be “the home of football in India.”

Football is the headline act, but Zee’s chairman is placing plenty of side bets too. Zee Live, the group’s experiential arm, has been testing new live formats such as “Bhajan Club” devotional music staged as a gig, complete with call-and-response chanting, timed around festivals such as Mahashivratri and designed to spill from stadium floor onto screen. Zee Music, by contrast, is the proven cash cow the family seems most willing to let go of at the right price: the label added more than 12 crore subscribers  in FY26 and counts around 176 million subscribers  on YouTube, among the largest music channels on the platform worldwide, yet Goenka has openly floated demerging it. “If I get the right offer, why would I not be open to considering and demerging Zee Music from Zee to a separate entity and bringing in a strategic partner?” he told analysts recently. And for the audience television was never built for, Zee has gone shopping: a 2025 equity stake in Bullet, a start-up building what it bills as India’s first micro-drama app, offering vertical, bite-sized episodes that Zee plans to fold into the Zee5 ecosystem rather than compete head-on with Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

None of this happens without a bench of new lieutenants, hand-picked over the past year to execute what Chandra started and Goenka is now scaling. Raghavendra Hunsur, Zee’s chief content officer, arrived with a résumé built at Disney Star and Viacom18 and, tellingly, a stint running Zee’s own Kannada and Marathi channels, a regional pedigree that maps neatly onto the language-first strategy now paying off across the network. On the money side, Sandeep Mehrotra joined in February as chief operating officer for advertisement revenue, poached from Sony’s Culver Max Entertainment with a brief to converge linear and digital ad sales into a single engine; he has since brought in Sudeep Nagpurkar, a former Google executive, as chief sales officer for social platforms and the creator economy. Rohit Suri, formerly head of talent at Netflix India, took over as chief human resources officer in mid-2025 to stem the attrition that had shadowed the group since the Sony collapse. And on the sports side, Bavesh Janavlekar who doubles up running Zee’s Marathi film cluster has been tasked with building Unite8 into a genuine multi-sport network rather than a World Cup vanity project.

Chandra’s own contribution to the turnaround is not confined to boardrooms. Every Sunday at 10pm, he hosts Sach, now in its third season on the Zee Media network and streaming on Zee5, a talk show he began as an attempt to bridge the generational divide through campus conversations with students across the country. Sitting among those audiences, he says, convinced him that India’s youth are pulled two ways at once: outwardly consumed with building and disrupting, inwardly searching for meaning amid the noise. Season 3 marks a deliberate shift in ambition. Chandra no longer wants to be Sach’s commentator, he says, but its Sarthi — the Sanskrit term for a charioteer, best known from the Bhagavad Gita as Krishna’s role for Arjuna, guiding without fighting the battle himself. The pitch, extended directly to viewers  through his own outreach channel at sach.org.in, is aimed squarely at “innovators , dreamers ” and anyone “navigating a difficult crossroads in life or business.”

It is, in its way, a neat mirror of the corporate story: a chairman past traditional retirement age recasting himself not as a relic issuing instructions from the top, but as a guide clearing the fog for others  to find their own way, whether that’s a boardroom, a balance sheet, or a nineteen-year-old wondering what comes next.

So what, at 75, is powering the second wind across so many fronts at once? Chandra offered his own answer in a LinkedIn post a fortnight ago, and it owed rather more to the Upanishads than to any investor deck. Time, he wrote, is Kala “not just a ticking clock, but the ultimate cosmic force of transformation.” Nothing in the universe, he argued, truly stands still; stagnation is merely “a human illusion born out of our comfort zones,” and clinging to past glories is how ambition quietly calcifies. The conscious leader, he said, neither resists change nor drifts passively with it, but reads adaptation as the sharpest form of intelligence there is. His parting shot doubled as a mission statement: don’t let your mindset become a monument to the past.

Whether Kala is on Chandra’s side remains, strictly, a matter for the scoreboard Zee’s, and football’s rather than the scriptures. The shares closed at Rs 108.31 on results day, still some way shy of former highs, and the OTT-and-AI onslaught he name-checks shows no sign of taking a breather. But between a promoter writing a four-figure-crore cheque, a fiction slate back on top of the ratings after years   of drift, a World Cup landing on Indian screens, a fresh executive bench brought in to make it stick, a decade-long promise to help build the football team to go with the football audience, and a chairman now moonlighting as the nation’s chosen charioteer, the old showman has at least ensured one thing: nobody is switching channels on him just yet.