Sports Administration, Federations, Scouting and Event Management: What the Jobs Are

R Vinay Kumar captained Karnataka to 2 consecutive Ranji Trophy titles, in 2013-14 and 2014-15. His international career was real but modest: 1 Test, 31 ODIs and 9 T20Is for India between 2010 and 2013. When he retired, he did not disappear from cricket. In 2021 he joined Mumbai Indians as a talent scout, and by August 2026 he was named head coach of Karnataka, as reported by India TV News.

Parthiv Patel followed a similar arc. After retiring in 2020, he joined Mumbai Indians as a talent scout the following year, then moved to Gujarat Titans ahead of the 2025 IPL auction as both assistant coach and scout, as recorded by Gulf News.

This is the shape of the route covered here, one of the four described in the opening article of this series. It splits into three different doors, and they are not equally open.

Scouting: the most reachable of the three

Talent scouting is franchises watching domestic matches, academy trials and age-group tournaments to flag players before anyone else notices them. Vinay Kumar and Patel both show what makes someone credible for it: a real domestic career and years spent inside that circuit, not international fame. Neither was scouted into the role for having been a superstar. They were hired because they already knew where to look.

IPL teams actively hire recently retired domestic-anchored players for this reason, and both examples above moved between scouting and coaching within a few years, a reminder that this route and the coaching route covered in this series are not sealed off from each other.

Federation and association administration: the harder door

The top posts in India’s sports federations tell a different story. Bahadur Singh Sagoo, an Asian Games gold medallist in shot put, was elected president of the Athletics Federation of India in January 2025, as confirmed by The Tribune. Anju Bobby George, an Olympic-tier long jumper, is the federation’s senior vice-president and, since January 2025, chairperson of its Athletes Commission, according to Olympics.com.

Both reached the top of their sport as athletes before they reached the top of its administration. The national-level posts that get publicly documented skew heavily toward people who were themselves elite or Olympic-tier competitors, not domestic-level players. State association roles below that level are less documented and may be more reachable, but nobody should walk into this expecting it to be as open as scouting.

Sagoo’s own career also shows these paths do not have to be exclusive. Alongside his federation role, he holds a separate government post as Commandant of the 4th India Reserve Battalion in Pathankot, a reminder that sports administration is often built alongside another career, not instead of one.

Event management: real jobs, no single face

State associations, the IPL and BCCI and private sports-event companies all run and staff live tournaments, and all of them hire operations and logistics roles. Real research for this article did not turn up one clear, individually documented case of a domestic-level player moving specifically into event management the way it did for scouting or administration. That absence does not mean the jobs are not there. It means this particular door gets talked about less.

What it takes

Scouting is reachable soon after a domestic-anchored career ends, and it rewards network and a trained eye more than fame. Federation administration is harder to enter and, at the national level, currently dominated by people with elite playing records, though state-level roles remain a less charted, possibly more open option. Event management asks for persistence and logistics skill rather than a playing pedigree at all, which makes it worth investigating even without a documented case to point to.

For the qualification side, Sports Management as a Career in India covers what the roles pay and which institutions matter, and LNIPE Gwalior offers a Master’s in Sports Management. Neha Aggarwal’s story shows one athlete’s route from the court into sports management.