Pakistan has the athletes. It has not built the audience to pay them.

Sixteen years of managing Pakistan’s sports stars

Muzamil opens with a confession. The Endeavor Pakistan series has taken Thought Behind Things across many industries and startups, but one industry has stayed out of reach. Every Pakistani is attached to it, it is full of politics and competing interests, and the people inside it are hard to reach. Cricket, and sport in general, is the one business he says he has never properly understood.

His frame is economic. If money is made, more people enter a sport, the sport gets better, and the fan base grows. Athletes from MMA and other sports often ask him why the government does not do more. His answer is that a developing economy will not carry a sport indefinitely. A sport needs a business case to grow. In his view, that business side only started to rise when PSL showed that real money and value could be made from cricket.

The guest, introduced through the Endeavor team, is Arsalan Hyder Shah, founder and CEO of Game Sports Management. The agency has been running since 2009, and Muzamil names Wasim Akram, Shoaib Malik and Shahid Afridi among the stars it manages. He also thanks Kickstart, the coworking space in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad that hosted the shoot.

From an outsourcing boom to the 2008 crash

Arsalan calls himself a typical Karachiite who cannot imagine living anywhere else. His father served in the Pakistan Air Force, and postings every three years took the family to Peshawar, Islamabad, Hasan Abdal and Mianwali. He studied at Air Force schools and colleges around the country and finished high school in Karachi.

He enrolled for a BBA at SZABIST and remembers it as one of the best times of his life. He dropped out by choice, because his own work had already started. In 2003 he set up a small tech firm with class fellows, doing software and design work, mostly outsourced from the United States through a friend based there. He also ran a magazine, which is where his advertising work began.

The money was good. Earning in dollars at a time when, as he recalls, a dollar cost 60 or 80 rupees went a long way. The firm started with two or three people and grew to around 60 or 70. Arsalan was 26 or 27 at the time.

Then 2008 arrived. “Business just stopped,” he says. Overheads were high, and the partners decided to shut the company down. Muzamil pushes on why they did not cut to ten people and pivot. Arsalan’s answer is about skills. He was the sales and strategy partner. There was a finance partner, an operations partner and a development team, and the synergy between them broke as each partner went his own way.

“I am not a techie. I never was a techie,” he says. “But I know how to sell. I know how to connect the dots. I know what you need even if you don’t know what you need.”

What followed was a year he calls hibernation. He tried a few jobs, which did not work out because he was not technical. He built Chemist Pakistan, a site to deliver medicines to homes, but there was no third-party delivery network yet and running delivery in-house meant losses. He tried property, and that did not work either. That year, he says, is what gave him the idea for what came next.

A phone call about Wasim Akram

The turn came out of the blue. A friend called and pointed out that Arsalan already owned a magazine and ran fashion shows and events. Why not work with Wasim Akram? Wasim had relocated from Lahore to Karachi and was looking for someone there to manage his affairs.

Arsalan had never met him. He had grown up with posters of Wasim and Waqar on the wall. He called, and Wasim asked him to come and meet. Arsalan was about to fly to Germany and said he would come in two months. On the flight he realised he should have closed the deal on the spot. When he returned two or three months later, Wasim told him he had interviewed many people in the meantime. Something clicked at that first meeting anyway. Wasim became his first client, and the relationship has now lasted sixteen years.

Arsalan is firm about what the job is. “We are not an agency which just takes a cut off what they bring,” he says. “A management agency is supposed to do everything for you.” His list runs from investments and daily routines to deals, contracts, portfolios, business development, crisis management, image management and digital management. The agency also screens who it takes on.

The market he walked into had no such thing. The common pattern, he says, was a cousin acting as manager or agent. Between 2009 and 2015 he doubts he came across a single other sports management agency in Pakistan. Players, cousins and wives handled the deals. Things improved after PSL. Today he describes Game Sports Management as a full-service agency and, as far as he knows, the only one in Pakistan that covers every sport, from cricket to football and hockey.

The cheque Wasim tore up

There was no benchmark to learn from, so Arsalan learned on the job. The lesson he remembers most came in 2011. He closed a large deal in Dubai for Wasim to open an outlet. When he landed, the client paid part of the fee upfront and gave a cheque for the rest. The event went well. The cheque bounced. The client had disappeared from Dubai.

It was, he says, a very substantial amount, and he had no money of his own at the time. He went to Wasim and handed over his own cheque to cover it. Wasim asked whether he had done his homework on the client. Then he tore up Arsalan’s cheque and said one word: learn. Arsalan says anyone else would have penalised him. The lesson stayed with him. Cheating, he says, sits inside the culture, so you double-check and triple-check.

He describes the craft he built over the years as finding a sweet spot. He will not devalue a star, and he will not squeeze a brand. “The more you make, the more I make,” he says, and he calls it a commercial industry where everyone is there to make money. In the early years he did not ask players to sign contracts. His promise was to bring work and not bury them in paperwork. One client led to the next, and the roster grew a step at a time.

Why the market stays too small

Arsalan blames brands for ignoring the country’s legends. He names Wasim Akram, Shahid Afridi, Waqar Younis and the hockey great Sohail Abbas, and says brands should highlight and invest in them. Muzamil pushes back. Brands, he argues, are not in the business of supporting talent. They pay for recall. His example is the Tekken player Arslan Ash, who told Muzamil after his first EVO title that he did not care about sponsors. He played at a local gaming shop, became a six-time champion, and the sponsors came once the results did.

Muzamil’s view is that the weak link sits in the middle, with the managers who should be building each star’s brand. A young squash champion, or even Arshad Nadeem, he says, may have no idea how to deal with the media. Someone has to turn the hype into a brand and then monetise it. That is why he values exclusivity: a manager who builds a player’s brand should share in the deals it later brings.

Arsalan does sign contracts, he says, but not with everyone. A contract brings expectations of a guaranteed income, and if the money does not come, the player will speak badly of the agency. Players also leave for a small increase elsewhere. So the agency gives a three-to-five-year plan only to players who share the vision. “Knowing what not to do is more important than knowing what to do,” he says.

Then he makes the market case plainly. Padel, he says, is a fad in his view. It is good exercise and serious people are behind it. His agency works with Padel Wars, a facility in Karachi with foreign trainers and tournaments. But the sport is small. “I cannot make a star out of a small puddle,” he says. A brand will pay for hype or an event, but it will not invest in a player without a long-term vision of its own.

He also points to cost. With a racket at 3,000 rupees and a court at 5,000 or 6,000, an evening of padel can come close to 10,000 rupees. Eleven boys can book a cage cricket pitch for about 100 rupees each.

Who should grow the market? Muzamil wants the government to stay out, pointing to football and to new padel bodies run by people who have never played. Arsalan agrees the answer is primarily the private sector. He praises Activate, a Lahore brand run by Dr Rizwan, for backing players across sports, and says more companies have started to step up recently, but not enough. “You have the supply,” he says. The country has footballers, padel players, table tennis and squash players. The demand is missing.

Sport is entertainment, and storytellers are missing

Muzamil reframes demand as eyeballs. The best player in the world, he notes, did not create an esports industry in Pakistan. What brought attention was rivalry, such as Pakistan versus Korea. “Sports as an industry is an entertainment industry,” he says. “It’s plain and simple.” News, drama and sport are the three pillars of mainstream entertainment, and most fans want a nail-biting India and Pakistan match that Pakistan wins.

His example is cricket itself. Before PSL, domestic cricket meant departmental sides such as PIA against OGDCL, and no fan felt attached to them. City rivalries, team anthems in Pashto and Saraiki, and storytelling changed that. Nobody, he says, watched PSL for the quality of the cricket alone. The glamour was in the story. His idea for a sport like padel is to sign rising players on long exclusive deals, pick for charisma as well as skill, and run quarterly city leagues of Islamabad against Lahore against Karachi, the way MMA promoters in Pakistan have started borrowing from the UFC. Brands that invest early, he says, should expect a return, because sport is a business.

“That, my friend, is a vision, and that’s missing,” Arsalan replies. He says his agency has pitched squash and table tennis tournaments and has run badminton and chess events. Nobody steps in because the eyeballs are still on cricket. He says Pakistan still lives in a 1992 mindset, because the people who were young in 1992 now run the brands and the governing bodies.

He adds two examples. Nobody took ownership of Arshad Nadeem until he won, and then everyone did. And Pakistan’s Olympic contingent, which once numbered seventy or eighty people, was down to fourteen last time. He also describes prize money of one or two million rupees that takes three years to arrive after the photo opportunity is over.

When he asks Muzamil which sports he watches besides cricket, Muzamil says esports, and that he does not watch hockey because it has not been made exciting enough. Arsalan agrees and lists what sells in Pakistan: cricket, music, religion and politics. Hockey is the national sport. Netball, volleyball and basketball, including a basketball league in Karachi, all need more people. One hand, he says, cannot clap alone.

Legends, equity and a new audience

Muzamil asks how many legacy stars have moved into the business of sport, the way actors move into production. Arsalan answers with a line about money. “Medals don’t feed you,” he says. He names cricket academies run by Moin Khan and Rashid Latif, Jahangir Khan’s role at Legends Arena, and Wasim Akram’s work at a UBL sports complex and at Padel Wars. Asked directly, he confirms that Wasim holds an equity stake in Padel Wars and in other places. These stars work at a micro level, he says, and do not advertise it.

Muzamil suggests going further. Give a name like Wasim a stake in the agency itself and use his network to build a full sports company. He points to Atif Aslam’s recent Instagram reinvention, which he believes is a deliberate move to reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha by working with younger stars. He contrasts this with India, where, he says, every industry has been commercialised and Shah Rukh Khan appears on podcasts and works with young sketch artists. In Pakistan, big stars often ask to be paid to appear.

Arsalan agrees that understanding is the gap. He asks why Wasim Akram is still visible at sixty, and Muzamil answers that Wasim kept investing. Arsalan adds that it is about legacy: Wasim’s posts show a sixty-year-old working out in the gym. Many other stars, he says, simply repeat the same routine.

He also describes how the audience has changed. Since COVID, brands ask first for the star with the biggest following. Several older players still have no social accounts of their own, because no one managed them properly. Gen Alpha, he says, never saw the Wasim of 1992. It knows him from an Ariel advertisement, and it knows Shahid Afridi through his foundation. Shoaib Malik owns the recall for fitness.

Contracts, cuts and the trust deficit

Muzamil compares sport with the creator economy, where he has spent about fifteen years. Too many managers, he argues, take ten percent for locking a deal over WhatsApp. If he earns five million a month, he wants a manager with a plan to take him to fifteen. He shares a story he heard about two years ago: a TV commercial deal for a well-known YouTuber was locked at about 1 crore 60 lakh rupees, and the creator received about 40 lakh while the agent kept the rest. He adds that the numbers may be off by ten percent either way. His own agent never routes money through her account. The client pays him directly, and she then bills her share.

Arsalan calls that the right practice and explains one common trick. A contract is signed on the first and last pages, and the page with the fee is swapped in between. A player sees a one crore deal when the real figure was two crore. Sooner or later it leaks. His rule is to keep it black and white. All the money goes to the player first. The agency takes a small, agreed percentage, or says upfront that it is taking equity for the long term. Most agencies in the market, he says, appeared after PSL without seasoned sports managers. Trust takes time and there is no shortcut.

He does hold five-year contracts with a small group of young players he believes in. The rest of the trust problem, he says, comes down to education. Players need to see where they are sitting, who they are sitting with, and what it will bring them.

Perform first, then build the brand

For young players, Arsalan’s advice is simple: put your head down and focus on the game. He says players today are lost in clutter, with so many leagues that, in his words, one turns up under every stone. “On-ground performance doesn’t guarantee that you are a big star,” he says. “It’s a mixture of on-ground and off-ground performance, how you handle media.” The order matters to him. Perform on the ground, then off the ground, then carry a personality and a small aura, and build from there.

He tells players to speak proper Urdu without worrying about English, to own their Sindhi or Punjabi roots, and to keep two loyal people close. Hunger, he says, decides who rises. He also faults the public for building players up and pulling them down, citing the years of criticism over a dropped catch by Hasan Ali.

Muzamil disagrees. Fans everywhere are emotional, from Indian crowds to the English Premier League, and a star who is shaken by bad press has a weakness to fix. Arsalan concedes the point in one line: “A player’s job is to play and perform, irrespective, without any excuses.”

On his own plans, Arsalan says the agency works to one-, three- and five-year plans, wants fewer clients and more focus, and tries to educate players about what sports management is for. His message to the new generation is direct. “If there is a deal on the table worth one million, shut up and take it,” he says. It can become a two million deal in a few months and a five million deal after that, if the player trusts the process.

Pakistan in 2050, or in five years

Muzamil closes with his usual question: extrapolate what you see today and describe Pakistan in 2050. Arsalan refuses the timeline. If everyone plays their part honestly, he says, it will take five years at most. Pakistan has held world titles in cricket, hockey, snooker and squash, and Jahangir Khan won 555 matches in a row. The talent and skill exist. They are not being nurtured.

Muzamil adds one more factor: distribution. Conventional TV never made room for sports beyond cricket. He believes streaming platforms such as Myco and Tamasha are now investing in a distribution network, and that the private sector will arrive within a year or two. He hopes Arsalan, with his roster and experience, will be one of the leaders who brings people behind one vision.

Arsalan’s last point is that his agency already sits inside that shift. When streaming platforms need sports talent for their shows, he says, they source it from agencies like his. He expects the full circle to close in another three or four years, with the public sector slowly taking on its share.