MAM
Himanshu Sharma named head of sales at JSW Sports
The fan who walked in as an intern nearly a decade ago now leads the sales vertical where his career began
Himanshu Sharma JSW Sports head of sales
MUMBAI: From intern to boss of the vertical he started in, and all in the same house. Himanshu Sharma has been named head of sales at JSW Sports Pvt Ltd, a role that began in October 2026. It is a rare full-circle moment, and he marks it with a story worth telling.
The tale begins with a football fan. More than ten years ago, Himanshu became a supporter of Bengaluru FC and remembers thinking how cool it would be to work for them someday. A year later, he walked into the offices of JSW Sports as an intern. The internship was meant to last six months. He extended it by another six, and a year later it became his first full-time job, as manager, client servicing. “I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant,” he says. “I just knew I loved what I was doing.” Almost a decade on, he is still there. His profile puts his total tenure at 9 years and 7 months.
The decade has been rich. Himanshu has been part of some of the most memorable chapters in Indian sport: Bengaluru FC’s journey from the I-League to the ISL, the launch of the Haryana Steelers, JSW’s journey with Delhi Capitals and, perhaps most memorable of all, watching Neeraj Chopra win India’s first Olympic athletics gold medal. There have been countless other moments, people, athletes and challenges along the way. What stands out most, he says, is how little he thought about where it would all lead. At 22, he did not care much about his title. He wanted to work in sport, to learn, to contribute and to be around people trying to build something meaningful.
His rise inside JSW Sports has been steady. He was general manager, commercial sales, in Mumbai from April 2017 to July 2023, and head of talent and consulting from July 2023, also in Mumbai. His profile also lists a sales and marketing role at JSW Sports in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region from April 2017 to October 2022, with a client services skill. Now he takes charge of sales, a vertical he says he effectively started his journey in as an intern. That makes it, in his words, particularly special.
The ambition is now bigger. Himanshu wants to build a great sales organisation, to create more value for athletes, teams, properties and partners and, most importantly, to keep contributing to the sport that gave him a career he could never have imagined at 22. He thanks colleagues, mentors, athletes, partners, friends and the many people who took a chance on him. Five names get a special mention: Divyanshu Singh Phogat, Mustafa Ghouse, Karan Bhardwaj, Mayur Desai and Karan Yadav. “Thank you for trusting a 22-year-old with big responsibilities, for giving me room to make mistakes, and for helping me become better every day,” he writes.
The sporting roots run deep. Himanshu was head coach at Inspiration Football Academy from October 2014 to 2016, and at Crest in 2015. In 2016 he was pitch coordinator for the international friendly between India and Puerto Rico at the Mumbai Football Arena, and in January 2017 he was event director of the Acres Annual Interschool Sports Tournament. Earlier still, he did a two-month internship at Tata Motors in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad from November to December 2015, reporting on the implementation of FIFO in the axle factory. In 2014 he was a junior executive at Autoline Industries Ltd in the same area, from March to June, handling public relations and employee grievances.
The analysis is simple. Sports business in India is maturing fast, and a sales chief who has coached on the pitch, run events and worked across clients, talent and consulting understands what athletes, teams and sponsors want from each other. For JSW Sports, it is a promotion from within that rewards loyalty and institutional memory. For Himanshu, it is a fan’s dream that has outgrown the original script. “Still learning. Still building. Still obsessed with sport,” he says. On this evidence, the obsession is paying off.
