Gaming
Anand Rajwanshi appointed as CCO at Penta Esports
Mumbai: Penta Esports, the e-sports brand of India-based gaming and e-sports company Newgen Gaming, has announced the appointment of Anand Rajwanshi as chief creative officer (CCO).
In this new role, Rajwanshi will be heading the company’s creative initiatives and bringing the brand’s ideas to life, said the statement.
Prior to joining Penta Esports Gaming, Rajwanshi worked with Azzura International as chief operating officer and Publicis Groupe as associate vice president. While his gaming experience spans back to Kreeda, Reliance Games and training faculties at Aptech. With more than two decades in the industry, he is a seasoned professional delivering award-winning creative products for brands like Disney, Tata Motors, Nestle, and Airtel among others.
“I have worked with Anand in the past and have always admired his creative approach and vision. I believe his addition to the team will be immensely beneficial to the brand as he shapes the creative messaging going forward,” said Penta Esports founder and CEO Anurag Khurana.
Newgen Gaming operates in e-sports with Penta Esports. Rajwanshi will be working alongside internal and external teams to lead the creative conception and execution for all of Penta Esports’ initiatives including live broadcast and video IPs.
“I was fortunate to be in the first batch of people who were responsible for starting the gaming industry in India. Having worked in several verticals, I feel gaming is the only domain to challenge every talent present in me,” commented Anand Rajwanshi. “Getting back into gaming is the full circle that I needed. I look forward to teaming up with movers and shakers of esports in India.”
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
