Can Virat Kohli Make His ₹100 Crore-Plus Celebrity Brand The Biggest?

Virat Kohli has built a ₹100 crore-plus celebrity brand in quick time. Can he make it the biggest?

- Rajiv Singh

Early August, 2018. It’s the second day of the first Test match between India and England at Edgbaston. The conditions are overcast, with the swinging cherry making the Indian batsmen sitting ducks for the slip cordon. Two wickets fall cheaply in a little over a dozen overs. The prospects for India in the inaugural Test of the keenly followed five-match series appear bleak.

Enter skipper Virat Kohli, who is welcomed to the crease by hooting home spectators firmly behind their team. Standing far down the 22 yards is a belligerent and purposeful James Anderson, who had dismissed Kohli four times during India’s last tour of England four years ago. Ten innings with scores of 1, 8, 25, 0, 39, 28, 0, 7, 6 and 20, and an average of just 13.50 in 2014 are fresh in most minds at Edgbaston. Kohli finds himself hemmed in by a bunch of chatty closein fielders. The setting looks ominous.

By the end of day’s play, however, it was anything but that. Kohli played a gritty captain’s knock of 149, setting the tone for the series; he finished the five Tests with 593 runs at an impressive average of 59.3, emerging the highest run scorer in the series.

Since then, there’s been no stopping Kohli, who last fortnight became India’s most successful Test skipper after the 2-0 sweep against the West Indies in the Caribbean. His winning record of 58 percent takes him past accomplished leaders MS Dhoni (45 percent) and Sourav Ganguly (43 percent).

For Kohli, going where few have ventured before is a way of life—off the field, too. Some 10 months before the England series began, Kohli was readying to make a major splash in business. Brands weren’t alien to him, after establishing youth fashion label Wrogn with fashion startup Universal Sportsbiz in 2014. He was also endorsing a slew of big-ticket brands from Audi and MRF to Uber and Hero. Now, though, was the time to push the entrepreneurial envelope.