Indian sports lawyer Aahna Mehrotra named to Leaders Under 40 Class of 2026

NEW DELHI: Aahna Mehrotra, founder of AM Sports Law & Management Co. (AMSL), has been named to the Leaders Under 40 Class of 2026 by Leaders in Sport, the clubby global network that counts FIFA, the NBA, City Football Group and Formula 1 among its alumni’s former employers. The list runs to just over 300 executives across 29 countries. Mehrotra is one of a handful based in India, and rarer still, one of very few lawyers on it at all.

That scarcity is the story. India’s sports economy is worth roughly $19bn today and is tipped to hit $40bn by 2030, a number that has finally made global boardrooms sit up. Money is arriving fast: leagues, broadcasters, private equity and now, belatedly, governance and legal infrastructure. Mehrotra has spent fifteen years building the plumbing nobody wanted to think about until it broke. She entered sports law in 2011, when the discipline barely had a name in India, and set up AMSL in 2017 at 29, wagering that a market obsessed with cricket television deals would eventually need contracts, integrity codes and athlete representation too. It did.

Her CV since reads like a checklist of the unglamorous work that keeps an industry honest. More than twenty national and international leagues advised on. Stints across media rights, league structuring, athlete representation, esports and online gaming, sectors that in India often operate in regulatory grey zones. As vice-chairperson of the National Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel, she chaired hearings on doping charges, hardly the glamorous end of sport. She also sits on the committee redrafting the National Code Against Age Fraud in Sport, a distinctly Indian headache in age-group competitions, and was one of only two Indian experts asked to feed into the UNODC’s Global Report on Corruption in Sport.

There is an obvious gender story here too, and Mehrotra does not dodge it. “I explained it at dinners. I defended it in rooms that did not expect a young woman to be the one talking about the business of sport,” she said. That a woman had to argue her way into relevance in a sector still dominated by ex-players and administrators, mostly men, is itself a marker of how far India’s sports establishment has to travel even as its balance sheet grows.

The broader point is sharper than one lawyer’s biography. As Indian sport professionalises, courtesy of the Indian Premier League’s copycats, a booming esports scene and increasingly assertive private capital, the legal and governance layer is becoming as commercially relevant as the athletes themselves. Deals collapse without proper structuring. Leagues lose credibility without integrity oversight. Mehrotra’s recognition is less a personal victory lap than evidence that India’s sports economy is finally being built on foundations rather than vibes. For a market this size, that shift cannot come fast enough.