Kohli, Dhoni and Ronaldo among India's favourite sportsmen: Ormax report

Ormax Media, a Mumbai-based media analytics and consulting firm, has released the first edition of Sports Audience Report: 2024 highlighting a number of interesting insights about the sports category in India.

In accordance to Ormax, despite being a flourishing market valued at about $15 billion, sports entertainment in India does not have a lot of primary research data available in the public domain, except when it comes to TV viewership estimates. In a deeply heterogeneous country where digital consumption has grown manifold in the last five years, an understanding of the Indian sports audience market is important for various stakeholders (associations, league & team owners, broadcasters & advertisers), enabling them to take sound business decisions in a typically expensive category. 

The analytics firm aims to plug this gap through its large sample primary research. The report, conducted between November 2023 and January 2024, tapped into insights from 12,000 Indians across urban and rural India. It covers 21 sports, 53 sports tournaments, and 52 clubs and franchises, apart from several aspects related to the sports viewing behaviour of Indian audiences.

For the purpose of the report, the ‘sports audience' is defined as someone who watched sports content on TV or OTT in the last one year for at least 30 minutes. The report pegs sports audience base is a staggering 678 million (67.8 crore), estimated 47.9% of the total Indian population (2023).

The report sizes and profiles the sports audience universe by demographic and market variables, such as gender, age, NCCS, pop strata, and states. Audiences of each sport have been segmented into three categories—heavy, medium and light—based on their frequency and time spent on that sport in the last one year.

It also covers 21 sports including cricket and football, as well as lesser researched ones like kabbadi, arm wrestling, basketball, chess, golf, handball, Kho Kho, MMA, shooting, swimming, table tennis, and tennis.

Cricket, football & kabaddi are the top three sports in India, with an audience base of 612 million, 305 million and 208 million, respectively. Of these, the Chennai Super Kings, Manchester United and Patna Pirates are the most-recalled franchises in each of these sports.

For IPL Chennai Super Kings (CSK) emerge as the biggest sporting franchise in India with 18% share (% of unaided recall), with the Mumbai Indians taking the second spot with 16% and Royal Challengers at the third spot with a 13% share.

Given the cricket-craze in India, four of the top eight favourite sportsmen in India are cricketers, with Virat Kohli taking the top spot. Despite having retired from professional cricket, MS Dhoni is second, followed by Rohit Sharma. Sachin Tendulkar is placed fifth with Cristiano Ronaldo taking the fourth spot. Lionel Messi, Neeraj Chopra and Sunil Chhetri take the remaining three spots.