MAM
Shashank Panthri exits Sony Sports Network after over nine years
The senior manager signs off from cricket, football and Olympic sponsorship deals, promising a next innings rather than a retirement
MUMBAI: Nine years, four months, and a career’s worth of last-minute sponsor integrations later, Shashank Panthri has called stumps on his innings at Sony Sports Network. He leaves as senior manager, a post he held since April 2024 after seven years as manager, and the exit note reads exactly as you would expect from someone steeped in cricket for nearly a decade: no retirement, no DRS, just a change of dressing room.
The record backs the swagger. Panthri managed revenue across Sony Sports Network’s full portfolio, cricket, football, tennis grand slams, WWE and the NBA, and handled more than 40 per cent of the west territory across sectors as varied as automobile, ed tech, med tech, government and FMCG. He built PharmEasy’s sponsor relationship from its early days into a fixture across multiple cricketing events, and worked government heavyweights like the Reserve Bank of India and the Life Insurance Corporation of India onto the Tokyo Olympics 2020 as co-title sponsors, a deal that sits near the top of any sports-sales CV. He also ran hybrid graphic monetisation across marquee series, India vs Australia, India vs England, India vs Sri Lanka and the Abu Dhabi T10 league among them, coordinating across programming teams in India, broadcast teams in Singapore and a chain of vendors.
The nine years at Sony followed a steady climb through media sales: a year and four months at Network18, driving revenue for History TV18 and CNN News18 and building integration ideas for newly launched properties; a year and seven months at Helios Media across music, food and entertainment genres, including a hand in launching EPIC TV and Living Foodz; and eighteen months at HIT 95 FM, where he more than doubled regional revenue.
Panthri leaves with 12-plus years of sales, brand solutions and content IP experience behind him, and a farewell note that makes clear this is a pause between overs, not the end of the match. Where the next innings is played is the story worth watching.
