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JEDDAH: Al-Ittihad has confirmed the signing of Serbian defender Jan-Carlo Simic from Belgian side Anderlecht on a four-year contract.

The club announced the deal on Wednesday evening, its third foreign signing of the summer, following the arrivals of Portuguese winger Roger Fernandes and Malian midfielder Mahamadou Doumbia.

Simic is regarded as one of Europe’s most promising young talents and is expected to add strength to Al-Ittihad’s backline. The 20-year-old central defender has made five appearances for the Serbian national team and played 53 times for Anderlecht, who signed him last summer from AC Milan.

During his time at Milan, he played six matches, all in the 2022–23 season.

Team India’s shirt front, for both men and women, has displayed Dream11 since 2023. This prominent sponsorship has disappeared with immediate effect, starting with the men’s Asia Cup, which opened on Sept. 9 in the UAE.

Dream11’s disappearance is a casualty of India’s newly assented gaming bill, The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, which prohibits all forms of money-based online gaming and seeks to promote e-sports and online social games. The new law was passed by the Indian Parliament on Aug. 21, with an element of surprise and alacrity. It includes provisions to set up an Online Gaming Authority that will oversee the sector and provide policy guidance, along with harsh penalties for non-compliance. 

Its impact on Dream11, India’s largest fantasy sports platform, is severe, causing it to cease all paid contests and switch to a free-to-play model. It may be assumed that the company’s owners would be upset, since 95 percent of group revenues and profits have been erased overnight. Instead, it has been sanguine, at least publicly, expressing respect for the law. Harsh Jain, the CEO of Dream Sports, the parent company, has said that jobs are safe and that sufficient reserves are available to allow transition away from the fantasy sports platform, which was valued at $8 billion.

Even before the new bill came into force, Dream11 and its competitors had been subject to rising regulatory costs, the government having quadrupled the goods and service tax rate on online games. Profit margins were squeezed and Dream Sports registered losses in its latest financial year, its first in years. Although Dream11 is upbeat about its capacity to rebuild, the wider gaming industry, valued at $25 million and comprising about 400 companies, faces a shake-out. Its contribution to India’s economy, through its spend on advertising and services, will drop sharply.

The implications for the Board of Control for Cricket in India, or BCCI, are less problematic. Its revenues have almost doubled over the past five years, to the point where its cash and bank balance records show about $2.25 billion, with 60 percent generated by the Indian Premier league. It is by far away the richest cricket board in the world, Cricket Australia a distant second with $79 million. Dream11’s three-year contract with the BCCI was valued at Rs 358-crore (circa $41 million) and was due to run until March 2026. The board has released a tender to invite new sponsors for a tenure of two-and-a-half to three years. A bid submission deadline of Sept. 16 has been set. 

Despite each of the BCCI’s five previous main team sponsors having problems that led to early contact termination, there is unlikely to be a shortage of interest. The Indian front-of-shirt spot is probably the most visible in world cricket, something which the BCCI clearly believes, because it has increased its base asking price by 10 percent. It is keenly aware that sponsoring the Indian cricket teams provides brand visibility to upwards of a billion people. It is coincidental that the previous sponsors ran into trouble. Sahara, which sponsored between 2001 and 2012, foundered because of legal issues for its owner. Star Indian, 2014 to 2017, encountered ant-trust scrutiny and rising costs, while Chinese smart-phone company, Oppo, suffered from poor returns and Indo-Chinese geo-political tensions between 2017 and 2020. Prior to Dream11, edtech company, Byju’s, faced severe financial and operational difficulties that ultimately led to insolvency.   

Whoever lands the new deal will hope that the so-called curse or “jersey-jinx” of sponsoring India’s cricket teams does not strike again. It is reminder that, even in India’s cricket-obsessed society and market, there are latent risks lurking in changes that emerge in regulatory regimes and market dynamics. While the BCCI seems to be immune from risk in its sponsorship strategies, apart from inconvenience caused by a sponsor’s early termination, the cessation of Dream11’s activities has affected other parts of cricket’s ecosystem.     

The company had partnerships with the Caribbean Premier League, New Zealand’s Super Smash and the Big Bash League in Australia. It had also been the “official fantasy game partner” for all ICC events. Although Dream11 had deals with the Pro Kabaddi League, the Indian Super League and the International Hockey Federation, it is cricket where the main impact has fallen. Apart from the immediate effect in India, European Cricket, which was backed financially by Dream11, announced a temporary suspension of matches on Aug. 25. This included all games part of the European Cricket Network, or ECN, the European Cricket Series, the European Cricket League, the Women’s European Cricket Championship and all international matches involving European countries.

ECN started in July 2019 with a single tournament in Spain, with eight clubs and 16 matches. It had an ambition to kindle the unrealized potential for cricket in Europe. In 2024, it had more than 1,800 televised games in 20 countries, following on from 1,700 matches in 2023, when events were organized on 330 days across 16 countries. Europe’s cricket infrastructure has been built from a very low base. Each host country earned about 10,000 euros per tournament, critical funding for national boards outside of mainstream cricket. This funding is now in jeopardy and the ECN has to find ways of completing its 2025 tournament schedule, as well as finding new sponsors.

Fantasy sports platforms became essential infrastructure for cricket development in Europe and other emerging markets. Dependency on revenue streams from those platforms was shattered overnight by the elimination of their business models by regulators in another country. The fact that the country is India adds another dimension to its already evident burgeoning influence across large swathes of cricket’s landscape. The evidence lies in the affluence of the BCCI, its control of its own players, the close linkages between the BCCI and the ICC, and the levels of Indian ownership in franchise leagues, of which The Hundred is the latest incarnation.

The motivations for the online gaming bill are honorable. It seeks to address addiction and financial ruin caused by compulsive playing, mental health and suicide caused by heavy financial loss, as well as opportunities for money laundering and threats to national security by illegal messaging. Although gambling and betting have long been restricted by Indian law, the online domain remained largely unregulated. Digital engagement of a healthy variety, such as social and educational games that build skills and cultural values, are supported. Nonetheless, one bill enacted in Mumbai has impacted sport in the physical arena, exposing the fragility of building cricket development and sponsorship strategies on gaming platforms.