Goenka's growing interest in the business of sport

Red lights are necessary irritants but stopping at one gave Sanjiv Goenka a moment he hadn’t experienced in years of being chairman of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group. Sanjiv Goenka His car got spotted by a group of young men on motor-cycles and they hollered his name before telling him, in Goenka’s words, “don’t worry, you will win, we are praying for you.” At this point, Goenka paused — he did that a lot between speaking softly in measured sentences. Now owner of the new team from Lucknow in the Indian Premier League, Goenka was narrating this story on a late December morning after getting the rights of IPL’s Pune franchise. East Bengal, Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting, the Maidan’s iconic sports clubs, were less than a brisk 20 minutes’ walk away but despite having lived all his life in Kolkata —Goenka is comfortable speaking in Bangla—sport really wasn’t his thing till April 2014 when he, businessmen Harsh Neotia and Utsav Parekh joined Sourav Ganguly to successfully bid for Kolkata’s ISL team. With football and table tennis, where the money spent is a fraction of the IPL, brand promotion may not be that big a deal though Goenka did say the experience of having CESC on ATK’s shirt in 2015 “was way more than the investment.” With cricket it could well be an important vehicle for the group’s myriad business interests from power, fast moving consumer goods, media and entertainment, retail, IT-enabled services and carbon black manufacturing.