Ahead of the fourth edition of the Indian Super League, Mumbai City "has upped the ante on its marketing and sponsorship," according to Shekhar Pundir of INDIAN TELEVISION. Mumbai City CEO Indranil Das Blah said, "Sponsorship has been significantly better than the last three seasons. We sold our entire inventory and the sponsorship amounts have been increased by 50 percent compared to last year." A source said that teams in the smaller markets have a sponsorship range of 50M rupees-60M rupees ($770,000-$920,000) and the teams in big markets including Kerala, Chennai, Goa, Mumbai and Kolkata have a sponsorship range of 120M rupees-150M rupees ($1.8M-$2.3M). Mumbai City's title sponsor has been Ace Group for three years. Its back-of-shirt sponsor is Spicejet and "on the right chest the jersey has OkSir," one of India's app-based service aggregators. The team "is expecting to close four other sponsors." It is planning to add more sponsors "through licensing deals that will not be on the jerseys." The club is "planning to go with outdoor and digital marketing this season." Blah: "We are concentrating a lot on digital marketing because our young audience spends more time on internet than on TV. ... Our marketing is not focused towards generating revenue but to improve the Mumbai City FC brand." The team will also increase its fan engagement activities this season (INDIAN TELEVISION, 11/16). TELEVISION POST reported Blah said, "We are expecting a 20-25 percent revenue growth this year. While ideally, you would want long-term deals, this season will be different. That is because matches will be played from Thursday-Sunday as opposed to every day." He added, "The sponsorship market will see how this season pans out before taking longer-term bets. If the league does well then the price point will increase. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to a certain amount. So we decided to see how this year goes" (TELEVISION POST, 11/16).
