“Product endorsements have adversely impacted the performance of the men in blue in india??”

Farooq Engineer was the first cricketer to endorse a brand. Other cricketers including Srinivas Venkataraghavan (Philips bicycle, Nescafe), Erapalli Prasanna, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar and Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi followed suit. Today several contemporary cricket players like Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Yuvraj Singh, Virendra Sehwag, Rahul Dravid and former test players like Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev have all been signed up by MNCs as their brand ambassadors. A famous newspaper quoted.”With 105 million cable TV homes in India, which add up to 500 million viewers, no marketer worth his salt can ignore a cricket-crazed country” and these statistics are enough to explain the crores of rupees offered to the cricketers who make a real difference in the sales of the brand they are endorsing. Sports have always signified positive results and thus sports related advertisements have received an encouraging response from the consumers, thus benefitting the companies.
But the belief that product endorsements have affected the performance of these men in blue appears pretty illogical like asking a child that eating ice-cream has affected his academics. What is the harm if the cricketers choose to earn some extra bucks and they get more popular too but nowhere has a cricketer cancelled a match because he has to endorse somewhere! It is completely his personal life and wish and a match stands way away from it. The life of a cricketer is short and if he wishes to make a personal fortune, then what’s the misdeed?
People did come up with this conclusion after the bad performance in the World Cup, but as per comments of Kapil Dev,” India fell short of effective bowling coupled with absence of all-rounders in comparison to the Indian team in the early eighties to fight against the fittest Australians” and this has nothing to do with which brand a player endorsed and how can somebody’s talent and skill be overwhelmed especially on the field because of him smiling for some product on TV?
If we think that the players would under-perform because they are already receiving a huge amount of money, it is a wrong perception because they know very well that all their endorsements are closely linked with their performance and popularity and not in just an abstract manner or for how handsome they are, there are specific 'clauses' in the endorsement-agreements which state the conditions related to this. Also, if we think that players perform poorly because they spend most of the time in ad-shoots rather than practice, it is again a wrong perception. Just because an ad featuring a player comes every 5 minutes on TV doesn't mean the player has devoted that much amount of time in doing that ad. A player hardly devotes 24 hours PER YEAR in ad shoots. While the time devoted in practice is a hundred times more than this an. because he is playing for our country doesn’t mean he can have no other life, that is being too much to demand and expect.
While international players like Roger Federer, Michael Schumacher, Anna Kournikova too sport a brand and have collections on their names, their performance was never hampered by the endorsements, then why do we have a problem if any Indian cricketer is making some money because of his own popularity and is capable of selling himself? Of the 11 players only handful get endorsements because of their performance and charisma and not otherwise, while Dhoni gets it ,Kaarthik does not. There might be issues with ego coming in as in how popular the cricketer gets, thus might be a flaw in the team spirit, but let them handle their personal issues rather than we as the crowd being judgemental and deciding everything for them.