Sports business news from Indian football, Adidas sneakers sales in India, Fantasy sports, WWE and other news

Chennai City FC seeking INR 170 Crore International investment to develop their proposed football academy

Times of India reported that iLeague franchise Chennai City FC are in talks with an European investor and are in advanced stages to close investment close to INR 170 crores.

After selling more than 25% stake to Swiss club FC Basel, Chennai City FC have decided to go in for another round of investment to become financially stable and focus on building their football academy.

It is believed that Chennai City FC and FC Basel have already started talks with investors in Europe and are confident that they will have INR 140 crore invested in their project soon.

The Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports appoint former IAS officer Bimal Julka as chairman

The Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports (FIFS), the self-regulatory industry body for fantasy sports, has appointed Bimal Julka as its chairman. In his new role, Julka will work closely with all the stakeholders to further strengthen the operating standards of the Indian fantasy sports industry.

Julka, who is a former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, takes over from John Loffhagen, who served as the Chairman of FIFS for over three years. Loffhagen will assume the role of a strategic advisor and support FIFS on collaborating with relevant international bodies in the industry.

FanCode acquires FanDuniya to enhance sports data analytics for statistics hungry Indian sports fans

Since the launch in 2019, FanCode has garnered over 1.5 crore+ users and launched interactive live streaming of matches with multimedia commentary, fastest live scores, news on the sports industry across the globe, bite-sized video content like match highlight packages, chat shows with sports personalities in a new-age format.

To round up their services, FanCode has now acquired FanDuniya, a sports research platform, to accelerate the growth and development of its comprehensive multi-sports research and statistics service for all sports fans.

FanDuniya was founded by Viswanath K and Ramkumar V in 2019 to provide meaningful statistics assistance for fantasy sports players. Currently, there are about 20 experts on-board with FanCode across sports categories to provide data and predictions through a detailed analysis of players and teams, supplemented by video representation, infographics, and even blogs as official authors.

Adidas India has witnessed a 3x increase in sneaker sales over the last 3 years, aims to drive sneaker culture in India and have a pan-India footprint

Adidas India witnesses a 3x increase in sneaker sales over the last 3 years, aims to drive sneaker culture in India and have a pan-India footprint.  Adidas has tried to incubate and drive street culture in India by building awareness around its new launches and bringing global stories of sneaker culture to India. It is also believed that Adidas are bullish about selling their range of sustainable sneakers in India.

Around 60% of winners in fantasy sports of Paytm First Games hail from smaller towns as their userbase expands rapidly

It is claimed that Paytm First Games is downloaded by 400,000 people every day. Pre-COVID-19 Paytm First Games had about 40-50 million registered users, post COVID-19, this number grew to 80 million. Their monthly active users quadrupled during the lockdown.

Currently Paytm First Games see about 20 million monthly active users. This is growing pretty fast because of the ongoing IPL match that has fuelled the fantasy game right now. During this season we are acquiring a quarter of a million users every day.

Dream11 reports 5.3 million-plus concurrent users during ongoing IPL season resulting in a surge of 44.4% traffic volume of active users during the opening IPL match

It has been reported by Forbes India that the Indian fantasy sports platform Dream11 has touched more than 5.3 million concurrent users on October 14. Dream 11 has experienced a surge of 44.4 per cent traffic volume as against the final match of IPL 2019.

Dream 11 has managed 60 million requests per minute, witnessing more than 8,000 contestants join per second. The company reported that more than 18 million contestants join in a single match and over 7.9 million entries in a single contest.

Considering the users who continue to use 2G internet connection with low-end devices, Dream 11 has created a UI that helps users complete their interactions 15-20 per cent faster than before. The UI also helps in reducing the app start time by 7 per cent.

WWE post a 19% year-over-year quarterly revenue increase despite the absence of ticketed events

WWE also saw an increase in content rights and decrease of event-related production costs drove income to grow nearly 900%. E-commerce revenue increased 60% to $9.1 million in the quarter. WWE Network subscribers also grew 6% and digital video views and hours consumed were both up 3%.

CEO Vince McMahon credited the successful quarter in part to WWE’s new management team, including President and CRO Nick Khan and CFO Kristina Salen. Khan was the co-head of CAA’s television division prior to joining WWE this summer.

WWE Q3 By The Numbers:

$221.6 million in overall revenue

$201 million in media rights revenue

$19.9 million in consumer products revenue

$700,000 in live events revenue