There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a stadium and quite a few tears are shed when a cricketer walks back to the pavilion from the pitch for the last time. It hasn’t happened to Rohit Sharma yet, but certain rumours on the platform, X, gave way to a plethora of tearful videos on Instagram. While the rumours were shut down with confirmation of his participation in the next ICC World Cup, the conversation around this probable retirement has already reached boardrooms, media plans and brand strategy decks.
A few years earlier, a cricketer's role in advertising began and ended with television commercials, but today, the story is a tad different. A Rohit Sharma dancing to a viral Reel song with his squad can give way to a social media-wide dance-off. Every moment that a player like Virat Kohli or Sharma is in the public eye is captured and added to an Instagram algorithm that has no connection whatsoever with a cricket match.
While cricket lovers find their own ways to showcase their love for their beloved legends, marketers cannot help but think what happens to a brand's endorsement equity when the athlete behind it stops playing the game that made him famous?
It is not a new question.
India has been here before. Sachin Tendulkar's transition from active superstar to elder statesman of the sport gave marketers a template for how legacy can be repackaged rather than retired. MS Dhoni offers an even sharper example—years removed from international cricket, he continues to command premium endorsement fees, proving that trust, once built, does not necessarily expire with a scorecard.
Darshana Bhalla, Founder and CEO, D’Artist Talent Ventures, points to the same pattern globally. Roger Federer, David Beckham and Michael Jordan have all built commercial identities that have extended well beyond their playing careers. For marketers, the lesson is straightforward: legacy can be an asset in its own right.
That durability matters in a market where cricket functions less as sport and more as shared cultural infrastructure. IPL viewership runs into hundreds of millions every year, giving established players an audience that extends across generations. A name such as Sharma, therefore, is not simply a media property whose value expires when the player stops appearing on the field. It is a trust asset built over years. And that trust can take on a different role.
“A player who has spent over a decade building credibility on the field carries that credibility into whatever comes after: mentorship, commentary, entrepreneurship, ambassadorial roles,” says Keith Braganza, Sports Lead at TheSmallBigIdea. “The equity doesn't disappear when the playing days end; it simply changes shape.”
This is where the conversation around Sharma and Kohli becomes bigger than the two players themselves. The traditional endorsement model was built around the idea of identifying the biggest star, building an association and eventually finding the next biggest star when that relationship reached its natural end. The next chapter of sports endorsement may not begin when Rohit Sharma or Virat Kohli finally walk away from the pitch. It may already be underway around them. For brands, that change in shape could be significant. Braganza believes legacy and authenticity can often land harder with mature audiences and long-horizon campaigns than an association built purely around current sporting performance. So, while the playing career may be entering its final overs, the commercial career does not necessarily have to follow.
Many veteran players have moved on to host sports-related talk shows, taken up channel-led commentary jobs and even moved on to the television screens and silver screens of entertainment. Virender Sehwag and Harbhajan Singh can often be seen serving cameos in films, while Sourav Ganguly has taken up the Bengali entertainment industry by a storm with hosting over 15 seasons of the quiz show, Dadagiri and now, the Bengali version of the pan-Indian blockbuster reality TV show, Bigg Boss.
From one hero to a roster
While this shift is evident, there is a slightly less visible yet more interesting shift, when it comes to brands choosing the endorsers and it is not always established stars. Brands are increasingly recognising that they do not need to find one athlete capable of replacing everything Kohli or Sharma represents. Instead, they can build a portfolio in which different athletes perform different jobs.
Kushal Bhuva, Associate Vice President for Influencer Marketing and Video at White Rivers Media, sees this partly as a risk-management exercise. When a brand's identity is heavily tied to a single face, a dip in form or controversy can affect the entire association. Spread that investment across three or four athletes, however, and each can bring a different kind of value—mass familiarity, youth appeal, regional relevance or credibility in a specific format.
Ankit Shastri, Senior Group Director at Gozoop Creative, sees the same development as an evolution rather than a replacement. Kohli and Sharma still bring enormous scale, trust and familiarity. But the IPL has made younger and regional talent nationally visible much earlier, giving marketers a broader pool from which to build associations. The question, as Shastri puts it, is becoming less about who the biggest name is and more about who is right for the audience and the role a brand wants filled. That changes the economics of the next generation too.
The value of being discovered early
For younger cricketers, the appeal to brands lies partly in getting in before the market has fully priced their fame. Bhuva points out that an athlete who has just broken through is still being discovered. A brand can become part of that story rather than arriving once the success narrative is already established—and can potentially sign several emerging players for the cost of a single established superstar.
Braganza sees a similar opportunity in building an association while an athlete's personality and audience are still taking shape. There is an accessibility to an emerging cricketer that can be harder to find in a fully established superstar. The IPL has accelerated this opportunity, giving young players visibility, personality and regional fan bases at scale well before international recognition necessarily arrives. That means the next big sporting endorsement does not have to be about predicting the next Kohli. It can be about identifying the athlete who is becoming relevant to a particular audience right now.
Women enter the equation
The portfolio approach also widens the playing field for women cricketers.
Bhuva, Braganza and Shastri point to women's cricket as another dimension of the evolving endorsement market. The category gives brands access to an increasingly engaged audience while opening conversations around ambition and representation that an established men's cricket star may not necessarily be positioned to own.
The significance is not simply that brands are adding more women athletes to their endorsement lists. It is that they can bring a different audience, narrative and cultural context to the portfolio. The same principle applies to athletes from other sports, whose value can come from passionate communities and sport-specific credibility rather than sheer mass reach.
The audience has changed too
The fragmentation of the athlete endorsement model reflects a fragmentation in how audiences consume sport. Bhuva argues that viewership has splintered across formats, platforms and languages. Even an exceptional young batter may therefore inherit a smaller share of attention than Kohli once commanded outright. That makes the idea of finding a single successor increasingly difficult—and perhaps unnecessary. Instead, brands can retain established names for scale while adding athletes who bring specific forms of relevance.
Social media has only accelerated this shift. As Shastri notes, audiences now follow athletes' lives, personalities and opinions far beyond the field. Fans are connecting with identity and story as much as performance, allowing different athletes to contribute different forms of value. One might bring scale. Another youth appeal. Another regional relevance. Another cultural currency. Another connection to women's sport. The portfolio, in other words, becomes greater than the sum of its players.
So does the question for brands move away from a simple ‘who comes after the icons’ to choosing an icon who is the most relevant to their brand? Kohli and Rohit may be difficult, perhaps impossible, to replace as individual icons. But brands may no longer need to replace them.
They can simply build around them to cater to the bigger structural shift that Indian marketers no longer see athlete endorsement as a single relationship to manage, but as an ecosystem to design.
