Devesh Mangtani
Partnerships Director

What’s your name and position within the organisation?
I am Devesh Mangtani, Commercial Rights Sales Lead at Two Circles and Partnerships Director at the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) on secondment, as well as an Independent Director at Archery GB.
This year I am also an ESA Awards Judge!
What is your approach to sponsorship and partnerships?
The analogue model of sponsorship is dead. But an integrated, purposeful and audience-led partnerships platform can truly unlock the power of sport by delivering meaningful outcomes for fans, brands and the sport itself.
Partnerships are no longer measured by only eyeballs. They are measured by genuine impact and specific audience outcomes. For impact, you need ownership of a story, narrative and space in a sport that resonates with the ecosystem – fans, players, stakeholders – and works for the brand.

For audience outcomes, you need alignment and data upfront to identify relevant segments, map outcomes between both parties and create an objective framework built on shared goals. It’s a relatively new way of working for brands and rightsholders and is at the heart of how successful, long-term partnerships are delivered in sport.
Our work spans across every revenue line of a sports rightsholder. We focus on creating, selling and realising maximum value for all parties. This requires collaboration across rightsholder teams to get behind a partnership vision, story and goals to ultimately deliver impact and audience outcomes through every channel.
What approach differentiates Two Circles and makes your sponsorship strategy unique?
Two Circles’ vision is to build a better future for the sports industry – growing audiences and value with sports organisations to know their fans better.
Our approach puts brands and fans at the heart of each element of value:
- Creating value – unlocking audience, digital, experience and purpose-led IP rights to give each partnership an authentic narrative that works for brand and fans alike
- Realising value – run a premium sales engagement process through dedicated, specialist resource to emotionally connect with senior decision-makers across a wide market coverage of open brand sectors
- Delivering value – audience-led activations with cross-capability rightsholder and agency teams, collaborating in partnership delivery and year-round measurement of KPIs.
How has your approach to sponsorship changed since Covid-19? Have you created any new initiatives or altered your operations to reach sponsors and audiences in new ways?
Covid accelerated the above trends. From the digitisation of sport and sponsorships to the focus on delivering brand and business outcomes, not just eyeballs.
We’ve accelerated our support for rightsholders to enable this, helping them evolve the fundamentals of their sponsorship proposition to make it both more relevant and more outcome-led for brands.
Our work with the ECB is a great example of this. We’ve been working with them for 12 years building a data and digital infrastructure, as well as an insight engine to inform cricket’s key commercial decisions, from ticketing, membership and grassroots growth to the creation and delivery of major tournaments such as The Hundred and World Cups.
We are now helping them to package and realise value through partnerships, and 2023 marked a record year for new partnerships. This included Metro Bank, Rado Watches, Laithwaites Wine and Initial Hygiene, ECB’s first-ever strategic partner to support period dignity.

Each partnership has its own focus, story, audience goals and bespoke package to deliver through cricket’s brand and community platform, which this year delivered record results and measurable outcomes for every partner through the 2023 Ashes.
What are the current trends within sponsorship and how are they affecting how you work?
Brand demands have fundamentally evolved, which requires rightsholders to evolve in response. As a result, traditional sponsorship assets are under price pressure.
Media assets such as perimeter signage and digital display inventory are under more pressure from a rapidly commoditising market for display media and rising TV ad rates, with marketing budgets increasingly scrutinised. Hospitality benefits are also under pressure from regulation and competing corporate entertainment options.
Instead, growth is being realised through rights relating to direct and exclusive access to sport’s IP (i.e. impact of the story) and first-party audience (i.e. audience outcomes).
Increasingly our work with rightsholders is to support the evolution of their own sport and proposition to build IP rights that deliver inspiring stories, and audience rights that deliver measurable brand outcomes.

For example, ECB’s landmark partnership with Metro Bank – a challenger in a crowded banking field who are seeking to continue to grow by establishing themselves as a community leader – is focused on delivering community impact and ultimately measurable customer growth. This partnership stands as a milestone in the sport’s commitment to delivering transformational growth and helped establish Metro Bank as the first-ever Champion Partner of Women’s and Girls’ Cricket.
The partnership is activated across a variety of digital and physical touchpoints, campaigns such as Together We Rise, and through the new Women’s and Girls’ Fund, established to transform access to grassroots cricket.
The two organisations are working together to recruit 6,000 volunteers to inspire more girls to play cricket, with the vision of 2,000 clubs with a girls’ section and 6,000 girls’ teams by 2026.
Brand presence across international, domestic and recreational matches will amplify the partnership’s purpose, with title naming rights across Men’s and Women’s One-Day Internationals creating a prime opportunity to recruit allies and maximise reach.
What predictions would you make about how it’s going to change in the next five years?
The sheer number of sports fans will continue to grow and, ultimately, will continue growing their power to drive the future demand of sports rights. In fact, we wrote about the growth of sports fans, and what influences when they are created, in a recent Fan Origination report.
❓ How are sports fans ‘made’?
— Two Circles (@TwoCircles) November 16, 2023
🏟️ In the first chapter of Two Circles’ Fan Insights Series, we explore why, how and when fans are created – critical to growth in the sports industry and beyond in the coming years.
5⃣ Welcome to the 5 Foundations of Fan Origination. pic.twitter.com/bWJYwrynrX
Many deals are still being struck with analogue frameworks or tokenistic badging of sports, but these will struggle to sustain in their current form as they no longer deliver meaningful outcomes until they redress the foundations on which they are built.
Societal demands on sports partnerships and rightsholders will also become more stick and less carrot. Greenwashing, for example, and non-measurable partnerships will no longer be accepted by fans or stakeholders.
Sport England has already hinted that its governing body funding will have a direct link to a sport’s progress towards net zero and, in turn, this increased scrutiny will apply to brands entering the ecosystem too.
On the flipside, this creates powerful, generational opportunities for brands to have a genuinely meaningful role in the future of our sports and the positive impact we can have on our passionate communities of fans. And we can’t wait to see this come to fruition as ultimately this will make the sports, and the industry that we love, better.