The Royalty Cheque Is Not a Relationship

Last week, I was speaking to a senior executive at one of India's leading licensing agencies, a man who has signed licenses with some of the biggest football clubs in the UK and Europe, and he asked me a question I haven't been able to shake:

That question is the signal for this issue. Because he is right on every count, and the clubs are leaving serious money on the table by proving him right. India has the fans, the platforms, and the purchase intent. What it doesn't have is clubs that treat their Indian licensing partners as market-builders rather than royalty lines on a global spreadsheet. Let's get into it.

European football clubs are monetising India without investing in India, and their licensees are paying the price for it.

India now counts an estimated 160 million football enthusiasts. The Premier League is the most-followed league in the country, official supporters clubs have sprouted in every metro, and a new generation of football creators is building daily-engagement communities. Yet the licensees who carry club brands into Indian retail report a near-total absence of support: no legitimacy signals, no amplification, no enforcement, no localisation. The market is growing despite the clubs, not because of them.

To fix that, you first have to understand it. The neglect isn't malice; it's machinery. So let's open the hood.

The complaint is consistent across licensees: clubs cash the cheque and disappear. The reasons are structural, not personal.

→ India is a rounding error on the global merchandise P&L. Club licensing teams sit in London, Manchester, Madrid and Munich, managing a hundred-plus licensees across dozens of territories. Resources follow revenue, and today India contributes a fraction of what Western Europe, the US or East Asia deliver. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: no investment, so no growth, so no investment.

→ The minimum guarantee model removes the club's incentive to care. Most India deals are structured around a guaranteed payment regardless of sell-through. Once the MG is banked, the club's downside is covered. The licensee carries inventory risk, marketing cost and counterfeit pressure alone.

→ Centralised social media leaves no room for market-level amplification. Club channels run global content calendars optimised for follower growth and sponsor obligations. A post supporting an Indian licensee's product drop doesn't fit the template, so it never happens, even though these clubs command tens of millions of India-based followers.

→ Player image rights sit in a separate, contested box. Getting a first-team player to feature a licensed product involves the player's personal agents, the kit partner's exclusivities and the club's commercial team. Licensees are rarely senior enough in the partner hierarchy to unlock that machinery.

→ Enforcement is treated as a cost centre, not a market-building tool. Clubs and rights bodies do pursue counterfeiters around flagship events in Europe, but a fake-jersey stall in Mumbai or a knockoff listing on an Indian marketplace rarely triggers action. With an estimated 40 to 60 million counterfeit jerseys circulating globally every year, clubs prioritise enforcement in their highest-revenue markets. India loses the triage.

→ And then there is the China template. For two decades, clubs built their Asia playbook around China: regional offices, state-backed league partnerships, premium-priced flagship retail. When India comes up, the instinct is to ask why it isn't performing as China did. That comparison is lazy, and it's costing everyone. China's football economy was driven top-down by state investment and a premium-spending urban consumer. India is being built bottom-up by fans, creators and value-conscious buyers in a cricket-first culture. Different market, different consumer, different playbook. Benchmarking one against the other guarantees the wrong strategy for both.

So if the China template is the wrong map, what does the right one look like? It starts where every serious licensing programme starts: with a clear picture of who is actually buying.

→ The Indian football fan is young, digital and urban-plus. The average adult Premier League fan in India is 34.5 years old, with nearly four in ten falling in the 25-34 bracket. Women make up roughly 30 per cent of the fan base. This is a consumer with disposable income, brand consciousness and a decade or more of purchasing ahead of them.

→ Fandom here is consumed on a screen, expressed on the street. Matches kick off at midnight IST, and fans show up anyway, on streaming apps, in watch parties, in fan-club screenings. The jersey, the scarf and the phone case are how that invisible 2 a.m. loyalty becomes visible the next morning.

→ Price is the gatekeeper, not passion. An official replica imported at European pricing lands in India at several thousand rupees. Counterfeits sell outside stadiums and on social commerce for as little as ₹200. Indian licensees who have cracked the code, like the cricket-merchandise players selling licensed replicas in the ₹999 to ₹1,799 band, prove the demand is real when the price ladder exists. The Indian fan is not choosing fake over real. They are choosing affordable over unavailable.

→ Discovery happens through creators and community, not club channels. Product discovery for this consumer runs through Instagram reels, YouTube watchalongs, fan-club WhatsApp groups and quick-commerce impulse buys. A licensee who cannot plug into that discovery layer is invisible, no matter how good the product is.

Put those four traits together, and you have a textbook licensing consumer: young, loyal, visible and willing to pay when the price is right. Which is exactly why, even with minimal club support, the category has started to move.

→ The market numbers are finally moving. India's licensed sports merchandise market crossed the billion-dollar mark in 2024 and is projected to keep climbing through 2033. Football merchandise specifically is accelerating, with India's projected growth rate rising to around 7.9 per cent annually for 2025-2035, up from roughly 6.6 per cent in the previous five years, putting it among the fastest-growing football merchandise markets in the world.

→ Broadcast consolidation has supercharged reach. The Jio-Star merger created a single distribution giant carrying both the Premier League and the Indian Super League, with regional-language feeds in Malayalam and Bangla widening the funnel beyond English-speaking metros. The ISL itself drew over 157 million unique viewers in a recent season, up 18 per cent year on year.

→ A domestic licensee ecosystem now exists. Five years ago, "licensed sports merchandise in India" meant imported kits at import prices. Today, homegrown players have built the manufacturing, e-commerce and price-laddering muscle on the back of IPL cricket, and they are hungry for football IP to run the same playbook on.

→ The 2026 World Cup is a once-in-a-generation demand spike. With the tournament running this month across North America and football content saturating every Indian feed, casual interest is converting into club allegiance at scale. Every new fan minted this summer is a merchandise customer for the next twenty years. The clubs that are visible in India right now will own those fans.

But growth numbers only tell you that demand exists. Where that demand organises itself, where it becomes addressable, is in the community layer. And India's football community infrastructure is further along than most clubs realise.

→ Supporters clubs have gone from internet forums to institutions. Official supporters clubs for Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Tottenham now operate in virtually every Indian metro, many with city chapters, elected officials and decade-long histories. The Arsenal Kerala chapter alone traces its organised fandom back nearly twenty years.

→ They are the closest thing clubs have to physical retail in India. Screenings, trophy tours and watch parties organised with broadcasters routinely fill venues. Every one of those gatherings is a merchandising moment: a room full of verified, passionate fans with nowhere official to spend.

→ Fan clubs are the natural authentication layer. In a market drowning in fakes, the official supporters club is where fans learn what's real. A licensee endorsed inside that community gets instant legitimacy that no marketplace listing can buy. Clubs that connect their licensees to their official fan-club networks convert community into commerce overnight. Almost none do.

If fan clubs are the organised core of Indian football fandom, creators are its media layer: the voices that reach the millions who will never attend a chapter meeting but watch football content every single day.

→ An independent creator economy has formed around football. Creators like Tackle From Behind, Rivalry Room Team, Dhanraj Dhurve and Playmaker India have built six-figure cumulative audiences with daily tactics breakdowns, transfer news, memes and live watchalongs spanning the ISL, Premier League and Champions League. Even Indian cricketer Kuldeep Yadav now runs a football analysis channel, a sign of how mainstream the category has become.

→ Creators are already doing the clubs' marketing for free. Every watchalong, every tactical explainer, every banter reel deepens club fandom in India. The clubs capture the brand equity; the creators capture none of the commercial upside; the licensees, who could bridge the two, are connected to neither.

→ Some have already proven the merchandise model. Tackle From Behind has converted its community into sold-out calendars and magnets, demonstrating that Indian football audiences buy from voices they trust. Imagine that conversion engine pointed at an officially licensed club product. That is the pipeline nobody has built.

Take stock of the last four parts, and the picture is striking. The consumer is ready, the market is growing, the communities are organised, and the media layer is live. Every component of a thriving licensing market exists except one: the active participation of the clubs themselves. Which brings us to the playbook.

The licensee is not a vendor. The licensee is the club's market-entry strategy, wearing someone else's risk. And the fix is neither expensive nor complicated. In essence, clubs need to do three things. First, lend their credibility: publicly announce and verify their Indian licensees, amplify them on club channels, and put players in front of the product, because legitimacy is the one asset only the club can grant, and it costs almost nothing to give. Second, defend the market they are monetising: treat counterfeit enforcement in India as market development, fast-track India-specific pricing and product approvals, and plug licensees into the fan-club and creator networks where Indian fans actually discover products. Third, judge India on its own terms: replace the China benchmark with India-specific milestones on a realistic five-to-seven-year horizon. Credibility, protection, patience. That is the entire ask. Here is what each looks like in practice.

→ Announce the partnership, loudly and officially. A club press release, a listing on the official website's licensee directory and a verification page that fans can check. This costs nothing and is the single biggest legitimacy signal a licensee can receive. Its absence is what fuels the "is this even real?" doubt that kills conversion.

→ Commit to a social amplification quota. Two or three posts a year from official club handles, geo-targeted to India where the platforms allow, featuring the licensee's range. Clubs with 60 to 80 million followers and high single-digit percentages of their global interest coming from India have no excuse for zero India-facing commerce content.

→ Put players in front of the product. One content day per season, shot during pre-season or a promotional window, where two or three first-team players feature the India range. Build the obligation into kit-partner carve-outs and player appearance agreements upfront rather than negotiating it after the fact.

→ Treat counterfeit enforcement in India as market development. Joint takedown programmes on Indian marketplaces, shared legal resources and authentication tech (QR-verified tags priced for the Indian SKU range) protect the licensee's margin and train the consumer to look for official. Every fake removed converts demand the licensee already created.

→ Approve India-led pricing and product architecture, fast. The European replica price point does not work here, and everyone knows it. Licensees need rapid approvals on India-specific lines: entry-price fanwear, regional-language designs, festival drops, collegiate-style casualwear. Slow approval cycles from headquarters are a silent killer of seasonal businesses.

→ Plug licensees into fan clubs and creators. Give licensees sanctioned access to official supporters club networks for screening-day retail, and co-fund creator collaborations. The discovery infrastructure already exists; the club's job is simply to connect its licensee to it.

→ Retire the China benchmark. Measure India against India: year-on-year licensee sell-through, fan-club growth, creator engagement, and counterfeit displacement. Set a five-to-seven-year market development horizon with shared milestones instead of judging a bottom-up market against a top-down one.

→ What the clubs get in return. Compounding royalty growth in one of the world's fastest-growing football merchandise markets. A counterfeit problem that shrinks instead of metastasising. First-party data on millions of fans they currently know only as anonymous followers. Sponsorship leverage, because brands pay more to reach markets where the club can prove commercial activation. And licensee loyalty in a market where, soon enough, the best Indian partners will be able to choose which global IPs deserve their capital.

Which is the real stake in all of this? Not this season's royalty cheque, but who the next decade's Indian partners choose to build with.

The executive who sparked this issue wasn't asking for charity. He was asking for a partnership, and the distinction matters. Indian licensees are not asking clubs to spend big in India. They are asking clubs to spend credibility: an announcement, a post, a player photo, a takedown notice, and a fair benchmark. These are the cheapest investments in football's commercial arsenal, and they are precisely the ones being withheld. The clubs that fix this in the next three years will own the loyalty of a 160-million-strong fan base entering its peak earning decades. The clubs that don't will keep cashing modest minimum guarantees while counterfeiters, and eventually rival IPs, harvest the fans they took for granted. The fans will spend either way. The only question is whether the clubs' partners, the people who actually built the market, get to share in it.

Creators across categories with the foundations for a serious licensing programme.

Radhika Bapat (@psychotherapybar) — the clinician whose brand is already split across two handles. A PhD-qualified clinical psychologist from Leiden University with 150K followers, Bapat built her audience through free mental health content during the pandemic, grounding her work in cross-cultural storytelling and indigenous metaphors rather than the Western therapeutic frameworks that dominate the space. She has already spun off a separate book club handle, @psychotherapybarbookclub, which signals the instinct to extend her IP rather than keep it confined to a single account. The licensing angle is unusually clear: a mental wellness stationery and journaling line (guided reflection notebooks, mood-tracking journals, prompt cards drawn from her clinical frameworks), a book-club subscription box curated at the intersection of psychology and literature, and eventually a home and ritual-object range for the growing Indian consumer who treats mental wellness as a lifestyle category. The cross-cultural and indigenous-metaphor positioning also opens a lane that no other Indian mental health creator currently occupies in product form.

Sankalpita — the multilingual Bookstagrammer bridging Indic content and global readership. A blogger, YouTuber and Bookstagrammer who covers Indian literature in multiple languages alongside children's books, spiritual texts and literary fiction, Sankalpita has built one of the few reading communities in India that travels between English and regional language content. The licensing angle is distinct from the urban-English-bookstagram plays above: regional language reading accessories, a children's literary merchandise line (bookmarks, illustrated storybook bundles, character plushies from Indian mythology picture books), and educational stationery for young readers, a category almost entirely uncaptured by Indian creator IP.

The Dark Academia India community — a category waiting for a licensee. Indian Bookstagram has matured into a major cultural force in 2026, with tight micro-communities forming around dark academia aesthetics, mythology readers, regional literature advocates and romance fiction. A Malayalam novel or a Hindi poetry collection can now trend nationally. What does not yet exist is a licensed product ecosystem built for this community: literary-themed apparel, reading accessories, candles and stationery with the visual language that these communities already use organically. The first Indian creator or agency that builds a "reading lifestyle" licensed brand for this audience has very little competition.

If this issue was useful, the next one will be too. Licensing Radar lands every week — one signal worth your time, written by someone operating in this market.