It is hard to escape sports marketing. Switch on the TV, surf the web, walk into a mall, and there it is, a sports celebrity - a Federer, a Tendulkar or a Dhoni - staring you in the face. Globally, sports marketing is an over $100 billion industry. In India too, the sector has seen a rapid rise in the last thirty-five years, and this informative and entertaining book charts how the market for it was established in the 1970s, how it grew between 1980 and 2000, and finally exploded post 2000. The latest and the biggest sports marketing innovation in India, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has fused India's biggest passions - cricket, Bollywood, politics and business - to create a multi-billion dollar market. So all-pervasive is sports marketing today that the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, has started a course on the subject from this year. A very timely book!