IN WHAT is fast becoming a controversy of the year, Boxer Vijender Singh’s recent decision to break ties with IOS, the Sports Agent/Management firm he signed with in 2005 for a period of ten years (until 2015), has sparked a debate over poaching, enforceability of contracts, exploitation, restraint of trade, and most importantly, questions the very foundation over whether or not support should be given to athletes from emerging/individual sports.
That Percept has offered to represent Vijender and make him an ‘action-sport icon’, in a lucrative deal valued at approximately Rs 50 million, may in future act as a deterrent for any talent scouts or sports agents looking at raw and young talent in spaces outside of cricket.
The fact remains that representing any athlete in a sport outside of cricket is a thankless job, with little external support from endorsers, sponsors, or any other measures of support, even from the federations’ side. Essentially, barring a handful of outstanding celebrity athletes such as Lee-Hesh, Sania, Karthikeyan, and now perhaps Saina Nehwal and Abhinav Bindra, the chances of actually recovering any sort of revenue via representation of athletes in emerging sports are slim to none.
Vijender Singh on the upswing. (Picture Credit: PTI)
Therefore, the fact that Vijender’s run at the Olympics was nothing short of a Cinderella story of a young, marketable athlete who won against the odds, and overnight became a bankable commodity in his own right. One could therefore be forgiven for sympathising with IOS, who in all likelihood was poised to taste its first real success in athlete representation, and would be justified in feeling aggrieved over the fact that the initial five year investment into Vijender will likely come to naught, despite the ten year contract that both parties signed.
This however, is the problem with Athlete representation in India: the contracts, if it ever comes down to dispute resolution or enforcement, are more likely than not going to come up short.
Simply put, a ten year contract with no escalation, bonus, exit, sunset, or ‘best-efforts’/performance-based clauses, is unlikely to be enforceable in an industry and area of law practice that while nascent in India, is fast growing and evolving, and also can draw from various global precedents. Factor in the grossly disproportionate 60% commission that IOS would receive from any endorsement or sponsorship contracts, and this contract is unlikely to see the light of day when it comes to enforcement. This is exactly why the contract drafting and signing process needs to become far more inclusive, discretionary, individualistic, and above all else, professional, with adequate legal representation emanating from both sides.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to evaluate the leverage and uneven bargaining power that IOS had over Vijender when he first signed the contract, and also the fact that he was unlikely to have possessed, or retained adequate legal representation for him to understand even from a ‘reasonable person threshold’, what he was signing, and contracting out of, when it came to rights and obligations.
