S
amita Mannapperuma has always loved sports, so much so that her college admissions essay focused on how she wanted to work in sports. “From the time I was 16 years old, this was all that I wanted to do,” Mannapperuma said. “I feel very fortunate to be in a job that I love.”
Samita Mannapperuma
NBC Sports Group // Vice president, business development
Soon after graduating from Harvard, Mannapperuma was hired as an investment banking analyst in Goldman Sachs’ technology, media and telecommunications sector. “I loved sports so much, they pretty much just let me do sports and media deals,” she said.
NBC Sports Group hired Mannapperuma five years ago to head up its business development team. The group computes the financial modeling around NBC’s rights deals and figures out how much the network should spend. “What’s interesting is that we have a challenging and dynamic role that touches every part of the sports group,” she said. “I’m able to work with all our business unit leaders on the biggest deals for their division — not only within our own unit, but a lot of our deals touch NBC-Universal more broadly and even Comcast.”
Over the past year, Mannapperuma helped figure out everything from NBC’s plan to extend its Premier League deal to its local deal with the Washington Wizards and Capitals. She also was instrumental in setting up the streaming service Playmaker and buying youth sports software developer SportsEngine.
— John Ourand
