Vaibhav Sooryavanshi already commands ‘INR 1.5-2 crore a day’ at 15. But how well is the boy behind the brand protected?

None of that would have been possible without his IPL season. The 2026 campaign did what few sporting seasons can. Records fell with such frequency that conventional cricketing logic took a back seat. But midway through the season, Sooryavanshi’s story stopped being merely about what he could do with a bat and became a story about what the market pegged him at.

Houlihan Lokey’s IPL Valuation Study 2026 , a report otherwise built to value entire franchises, devoted space to a 15-year-old player and argued that his broadcast draw was comparable to Sachin Tendulkar’s. It also made the more consequential point: any brand signing Sooryavanshi today is, in effect, underwriting a decade of unproven potential.

That framing is, however, incomplete. A decade-long bet needs terms, a rate, a structure, a legal basis and an exit clause. HT Digital spent the past month testing that proposition, and learned that this is currently something closer to a risk memo the market has yet to write.

Sooryavanshi already has a rate card that, on paper, rivals players who are a decade into their careers. What he does not yet have is a floor under that value, a settled answer to what happens to his contracts when he turns 18, or clear accountability if the people advising him get the bet wrong. The contractual, legal and commercial architecture around a teenage star has yet to catch up with the speed at which his value is rising.

“Pre-IPL, there was really no benchmark… it’s fresh off the bat that he’s charging around ₹1.5 crore a day,” Indranil Das Blah, Founder & CEO of AMP Sports & Entertainment, told Hindustan Times.

Mind you, Sooryavanshi had already been compared to Tendulkar after his breakout season in 2025, and his 175 in the U19 World Cup final earlier this year added another high-profile performance to the story. But it was during this IPL season that glimpses of the commercial story around his batting numbers became impossible to ignore. The 15-year-old not only had a pull on viewership, but also triggered a genuine scramble for match tickets ahead of India’s tour to Ireland and England.

Das Blah already has him in the same category as Shubman Gill, Rishabh Pant and KL Rahul — cricketers with years of senior performance behind them. Yet, he says, it’s the theatrics that place Sooryavanshi in a league of his own: an unrelenting, zero-fear approach to bowling attacks that more experienced players routinely respect.

If his form holds over the next two years, Das Blah expects the endorsement value to double to ₹3–4 crore a day, putting him “on par with the biggest celebrities in the country.”

Currently, brands are not betting on a career’s body of work, but on roughly one exceptional season, a story, and the belief that the body of work will eventually arrive to justify a fee already being paid today.

There is no Indian equivalent of America’s NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) framework, the dedicated legal structure that lets US college athletes cash in directly on their fame. What protects a minor athlete’s identity in India instead is a patchwork of older, more scattered principles — privacy law standing in for a distinct right to publicity, backed by the tort of “passing off”, used to stop others from unfairly cashing in on someone’s identity and goodwill. That is the actual legal ground that Sooryavanshi stands on at the moment, explains Aahna Mehrotra, Founder of AM Sports Law and Management Co..

In practice, Sooryavanshi can’t sign his own endorsement deals without a guardian. The bigger question, however, sits under any multi-year deal he signs — what happens when he turns 18 mid-contract?

“There isn’t, as yet, established legislation or jurisprudence in India that gives us a definitive answer to that,” Mehrotra says.

The closest available guidance, she says, is a borrowed, not homegrown, legal idea. “There have been cases internationally that offer some guidance. The concept of a contract for necessaries, for example, looks at whether a contract was entered into for the benefit of the minor. If a contract is onerous on a minor, courts are less likely to enforce it.” This means there’s no fixed formula and it entirely depends on how the paper is drafted.

However, a structural reason allows Sooryavanshi to hold several deals without clashing. Indian cricket’s commercial rights operate at three levels — BCCI/league sponsors, team sponsors, and individual endorsements — each covering a different space. This allows a player to have one sponsor for national or franchise cricket and different brands for personal campaigns. “For example, when the Indian cricket team had a sponsorship deal with Nike and Virat Kohli had an individual endorsement deal with Puma, you would see him wearing Nike when performing duties for the Indian team, but Puma when fulfilling his personal commitments,” Mehrotra explains.

In the case of a minor athlete — especially Sooryavanshi, who is without an agency at the moment — this distinction matters, because it is also the reason no single institution is actually accountable for the totality of what he is committed to.

The bigger risk here isn’t the law itself — it’s the lack of legal literacy around it. Young athletes and their families, often navigating professional sport’s commercial side for the first time, are less equipped to catch a one-sided clause before it’s signed.

“The biggest blind spot is a lack of awareness and the wherewithal to have the kind of legal guidance that athletes at a higher level typically have,” Mehrotra says.

That said, the BCCI’s structure — salary caps and the absence of an open marketplace — makes India’s system more protective of young athletes than America’s, as per the Houlihan Lokey report.

The catch here is that endless endorsements may end up eating into the player’s performance, the very source of his fanfare and brand value. “There needs to be a balance between an athlete’s commercial and professional commitments. If endorsement work starts affecting training and performance, that ultimately becomes counterproductive for the athlete,” Mehrotra explains.

Therefore, the protection perimeter around Sooryavanshi today isn’t a legal requirement — it’s a boundary his family draws around him by keeping endorsement commitments from eating into competition and training time or not letting a contract quietly demand weeks he cannot spare. “An endorsement contract shouldn’t suddenly require a young athlete to give up 20 days in a year,” Mehrotra says. Right now, that’s advice, not law.

But what stood out in the deal was the right ‘fit’. “A fit with his personality, what he stands for and also the sports ecosystem,” is what Das Blah had said. Only in this case, the fit worked both ways. Complan has long leaned on the idea of the ‘Complan Boy’, a symbol of a child’s effort and a parent’s quiet support behind it. Sengupta sees Sooryavanshi as a natural, modern update of exactly that character.

“For Complan, Vaibhav represents a natural, contemporary expression of the iconic Complan Boy… Complan and Vaibhav are telling parallel stories of potential taking shape through consistent inputs and a strong support system, particularly from parents,” he added.

The idea sits directly with Complan’s current campaign line, “Thoda Plan, Thoda Complan”, built around the notion that every ambition needs the right kind of support to get the right results.

More importantly, Sengupta emphasised that brand was never chasing scoreboard moments.

“We are not associating with him because we expect a particular number of runs, a particular tournament performance,” Sengupta said. “We are associating with his potential and with the process of growth.” Being under 18, he added, “naturally brings an additional level of brand responsibility” — a deliberate hedge against exactly the volatility everyone else in this story is pricing in.

This resets the whole conversation. Forget the runs, the fits, the 18th-birthday talk — the concern comes back to cricket itself, and he worries that Sooryavanshi could be swayed into short-term gains at 15 instead of staying focused on his career. “The real concern is that he should not get swayed into wealth creation right now,” he said. “His focus should be fitness and growing as a cricketer.”

This caution shapes how he’d advise a brand. “If I were a brand custodian, I would be very, very wary of getting into long-term deals.” His underlying principle is simple. “Long-term wealth creation is always more important than short-term gains,” he said. “So right now, what we are seeing is short term.”

“It takes years for brands to be created because there has to be character, consistency and discipline,” he says, offering the instances of Smriti Mandhana and Jemimah Rodrigues to show how it is “done right”. Both cricketers built genuine commercial pull over years of consistent performance, not one explosive season.

Rajasthan Royals had not responded to HT Digital’s request for comment on its advisory role in Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s commercial affairs at the time of publication.

The arrangement with RR, however, is understood to be temporary. Eventually, continued growth in the teen’s commercial stature may necessitate professional services. An informal set-up may no longer suffice.

“At some point in the short to medium term, he could set up his own agency or sign with a professional management agency,” Das Blah said. “That’s a while away.” For now, an unrepresented 15-year-old is relying on a franchise’s goodwill to keep the deal flow from getting ahead of him.

The question that ultimately arises is: what happens to Sooryavanshi if a brand deal signed eventually turns malevolent ? Who is legally accountable? Courts can refuse to enforce an onerous contract involving a minor, Mehrotra had earlier noted. But that is a backstop, not a safeguard, for it does not prevent one from being signed. A guardian signs, the franchise advises, but neither carries the enforceable mandate of a licensed agency.

The numbers are indeed real, but there is little downside protection. The legal structure holds water on paper, but remains largely questionable at the points that matter most. The closest thing Sooryavanshi has to real oversight seems to be informal goodwill within the Rajasthan Royals franchise.

Yet nothing makes the bet wrong. Sooryavanshi might still go on to be the generational cricketer that comparisons with Sehwag and Tendulkar suggest. If that happens, cricket may eventually justify the price.

For now, the paperwork has yet to catch up with the hype and the hope—and the risk sits largely with a 15-year-old who cannot legally agree to take it on himself.