Sachin Tendulkar

Timeline

1. 1973Born on 24 April in Dadar, Bombay, to Ramesh Tendulkar, a Marathi novelist and poet, and Rajni Tendulkar, who worked in insurance.^[2]
2. 1989Makes his Test debut against Pakistan in Karachi on 15 November, aged sixteen.^[2]
3. 1990Scores his first Test century, an unbeaten 119 against England at Old Trafford, which remains one of the defining innings of his early career.^[2]
4. 2003Named player of the tournament at the World Cup in South Africa, where India reached the final.^[2]
5. 2008Receives the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, after the Padma Shri in 1998.^[2]
6. 2011Part of the Indian team that wins the Cricket World Cup at home, his first title in six World Cup appearances.^[2]
7. 2012Nominated to the Rajya Sabha and serves as a Member of Parliament until 2018.^[2]
8. 2013Retires from all cricket in November after his 200th Test match, at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.^[2]
9. 2014Awarded the Bharat Ratna, the first sportsperson to receive India's highest civilian honour.^[2]
10. 2019Inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.^[2]
11. 2026Invests in Metasports Interactive, the studio behind the cricket strategy game Hitwicket, for an undisclosed amount.^[1]

Who Sachin Tendulkar is

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar is the most statistically complete batter the sport has produced. He played 664 international matches across Tests, one day internationals and Twenty20 cricket, scored 34,357 runs and made 100 centuries, a figure no other player has approached. He holds the record for the most player of the match awards in international cricket and was the all time leading run scorer in both Test and one day cricket when he retired.^[2]

He was born in Dadar in 1973 and grew up in a Marathi household where cricket was not the family trade. His father was a novelist and poet, his mother worked in insurance, and the story of how a schoolboy from Shivaji Park became a national figure is one of the most documented childhoods in Indian sport. He took up the game at eleven and was playing first class cricket for Mumbai before he turned sixteen.^[2]

The debut came in Karachi in November 1989, against a Pakistan attack that included Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. He was sixteen. Within a year he had a Test century at Old Trafford, and by the mid 1990s he was carrying an Indian batting order that had few other reliable contributors, especially away from home. That period shaped the way a generation of Indian fans thinks about him: not simply as a great player but as the one constant in a team that kept changing around him.^[2]

Wisden ranked him the second greatest Test batsman of all time in 2002, behind Don Bradman, and the second greatest one day batsman, behind Viv Richards. In 2013, the year he retired, he was named in an all time Test World XI chosen to mark the 150th anniversary of the almanack. Those are judgements rather than records, but they explain why his career is treated as a benchmark rather than a statistical curiosity.^[2]

The record

The numbers are the easiest part of the story. Tendulkar played 200 Test matches, the first man to reach the figure, and 463 one day internationals. He scored 15,921 Test runs at an average of 53.78 and 18,426 one day runs at 44.83, with 51 Test centuries and 49 in one day cricket. The hundredth international hundred came in March 2012 in Dhaka, against Bangladesh, and it closed a chase that had run for more than a year.^[2]

His longevity is the part that is hardest to explain. He debuted as a teenager against the fiercest fast bowling of the era, played through a back injury that nearly ended his career in 1999, reinvented his game after the 2007 World Cup failure, and was still scoring hundreds in his late thirties. The 2011 World Cup, won at home, was the only major trophy he collected in six attempts, and it is the achievement he has spoken about most often since retiring.^[2]

The awards followed the records. The Arjuna Award came in 1994, the Khel Ratna in 1997, the Padma Shri in 1998 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2008. After his final match in November 2013, the Prime Minister's Office announced the Bharat Ratna, making him the first sportsperson and, at the time, the youngest recipient of India's highest civilian honour. In 2010 Time included him in its list of the most influential people in the world, and in 2019 the ICC inducted him into its Hall of Fame.^[2]

After cricket

Tendulkar retired from one day cricket in 2012 and from all forms in November 2013. He did not disappear from public life. Between 2012 and 2018 he sat in the Rajya Sabha as a nominated member, a role that produced little legislation but a great deal of scrutiny, because his attendance and questions were tracked more closely than those of most nominated members. He used the platform mainly for sports and education related interventions.^[2]

His commercial life grew in parallel. He had been the most valuable endorser in Indian sport for two decades, and after retirement he became an investor and a brand partner rather than a pure endorser. The pattern in his portfolio is sport and consumer businesses, and the deals are usually small enough that he is not required to run anything. The Metasports investment fits that mould: a game built on the sport he played, aimed at the audience that grew up watching him.^[1]

He has also remained a public figure in a way that few retired athletes manage. He commentates sparingly, appears at ICC and Board of Control for Cricket in India events, and is routinely named in discussions about the administration of the game, although he has never taken a formal board role. His public statements are careful, and he has avoided the political entanglements that have caught other cricketers of his generation.^[2]

The Metasports investment

In November 2026 Tendulkar invested in Metasports Interactive, the company behind Hitwicket, a multiplayer cricket strategy game. The amount was not disclosed. Metasports said it would use the money to take the game to 100 million downloads over three years; it currently has more than 20 million players across 120 countries, and the company says players spend an average of 51 minutes a day in the game.^[1]

Hitwicket is a management simulation rather than an arcade cricket title. A player picks a squad, sets tactics and competes against other players rather than the computer. That format retains users for longer than action games and monetises through repeated small purchases, which is why the daily play figure matters more than the download number to anyone valuing the business.^[1]

For Metasports the value of the cheque is not only capital. Tendulkar's name carries weight with exactly the audience the game targets, and a celebrity investor who is also the sport's most recognisable figure gives a small studio a credibility that performance marketing cannot buy. The risk is the standard one for celebrity backed products: attention arrives on announcement day and decays, and the game still has to be good in its third year.^[1]

The deal also says something about where Indian gaming capital is moving. The 2025 ban on online real money games pushed money and talent towards skill based and casual formats, and a cricket strategy game with in app purchases sits comfortably inside the new rules. Tendulkar has backed consumer and sports adjacent businesses for years, and this is the first time in the recent record that he has put money into a game rather than a brand or a team.^[1]

What has not been confirmed

The size of his investment in Metasports has not been disclosed by either side. The company confirmed the investment and the growth target, and no filing or statement gives a figure, so any number in circulation is an estimate.^[1]

His personal net worth is not public in any audited form. The endorsement figures and the valuation of his stakes in various businesses are reported from time to time, but they are estimates built from deal reports rather than disclosures, and this record does not repeat them.^[2]

The full list of companies he has invested in is not published by him or by a family office. Individual deals are reported when they are announced, and the portfolio that can be compiled from those reports is incomplete by definition.^[1][2]

His exact role at Metasports beyond investor has not been set out. The announcement describes an investment, not an advisory or ambassadorial position, and the company has not said whether he will be involved in product decisions or marketing.^[1]