In a sharp intervention into the debate around FIFA media rights in India, businessman Lalit Modi has claimed he had already warned a prospective bidder months ago that the rights were being overpriced and made little commercial sense for the Indian market.
The remark came after a social media post highlighted the steep fall in the quoted value of India media rights for the 2026 and 2030 FIFA World Cups. The post said FIFA had cut the India media rights valuation from $100 million to $35 million, but was still struggling to find buyers. It also referred to Viacom18’s reported $62 million deal for the 2022 World Cup and argued that football rights in India have weakened sharply, pointing to a collapse in the value of ISL rights.
Responding to that discussion, Lalit Modi posted that he had given the same assessment privately in February this year when someone connected to a prospective bidder approached one of his family members for advice. According to Modi, he told the interested party that, as far as Indian media rights were concerned, the package was “best worth 5 million dollars,” and added that anyone paying more would essentially be doing so only if they had “money to burn.”
Modi did not stop at valuation. In the post, he also broadened his criticism to FIFA’s handling of the upcoming World Cup, saying the tournament was “doomed” and attacking what he described as “absurd unheard of ticket pricing.” He accused FIFA of ignoring football fans globally in order to please “one and only one person,” though he did not name that person directly in the post.
What gives Modi’s latest post added weight is that he paired it with screenshots of a WhatsApp conversation that he said took place in February. In those messages, he appears to have laid out in unusually blunt language why he believed the India rights were commercially unattractive.
In the WhatsApp exchange, the sender asks for Modi’s opinion on buying FIFA rights for India with a group of friends. Modi’s response is emphatic. He says the Indian market for such rights is effectively “zero,” and argues that anything above $3 million to $5 million for India rights would be excessive. He further says that established Indian broadcasters would never pay what he called an “absurd price” for a football event of this nature.
His reasoning, as seen in the screenshots, rests on three main arguments.
The first is timing. Modi says match schedules for the 2026 World Cup, to be held in North America, are poorly suited to Indian audiences. In one message, he says matches would fall roughly between 1 am and 8 am in India, making the inventory difficult to monetise. He adds that no advertiser would want to spend heavily during that window.
The second is television demand. In the messages, Modi argues that football ratings in India are negligible and suggests they were never strong enough to justify a premium acquisition strategy. He contrasts the situation with the perception of India as a highly sophisticated broadcasting market, saying that if there had been genuine value in the rights, serious Indian players would have already moved aggressively to secure them.
The third is broadcaster caution. Modi says the absence of bids from major Indian media companies is itself a sign of weak commercial viability. In the screenshots, he names large industry players such as Jio, ESPN Star, Zee and Sony as examples of companies he says have not pursued the package at the quoted levels. His conclusion in the exchange is unambiguous: unless the rights were available almost for nothing, he would not touch them.
Taken together, Modi’s public post and the February screenshots present a consistent position. He is effectively arguing that the challenge is not merely that FIFA’s asking price is too high, but that the underlying assumptions about football’s commercial pull in India may themselves be flawed, particularly for a tournament with unfriendly time slots.
That view also aligns with the broader concern raised in the social media post that triggered his response: that football rights in India are under pressure, and that the market may be reassessing what it is actually willing to pay for premium properties outside the strongest cricket-led ecosystem.
Still, Modi’s comments are not just a pricing critique. They are also a warning about how sports rights can be misread when global prestige is mistaken for local business logic. His message, both privately in February and publicly now, is that global scale does not automatically translate into Indian media value.
For FIFA, the optics are awkward. If a figure as high-profile and outspoken as Lalit Modi is publicly claiming he warned bidders away months ago, the conversation around India rights is no longer just about negotiation. It is now about whether the market ever believed in the valuation to begin with.
And that may be the more uncomfortable question.
Also Read: Greenvize Launches Hydrogen Cooktop That Runs on Water
