Bunty Sajdeh: The super-agent

The peaceful outdoors section of The Village Shop, a café that faces a church in the Mumbai suburb of Bandra, is an odd place for Bunty Sajdeh to be this Saturday afternoon. “It’s easy to look at Virat today and say he’s a rock star, but I spotted him back during the 2008 Under-19 World Cup and signed him up before he became a regular for India.” Sajdeh and his team are constantly tracking the Indian domestic circuit, looking for cricketers who display consistency in performance, but also confidence and flair in their personalities. Sajdeh admits he is not digitally savvy, but has a great social media team that manages players’ accounts, analysing data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to determine what kinds of posts excite people. “The Indian Premier League was being held in South Africa that year, and I was in Johannesburg doing some work for Yuvraj’s foundation,” Sajdeh recalls. “To be honest, even though I have a lot of friends and family from the film world, I don’t think I have watched a movie in five years,” he says.