Fight Club

Saurabh Mittal and Chatri Sityodtong’s friendship has sustained them through good times and bad. Now, it is the secret weapon they are wielding to make One Championship Asia’s largest sports league, says Hong Xinyi

- Hong Xinyi

ROUND 1

JUST KIDS

In most photographs that accompany articles about One Championship founder, chairman and CEO Chatri Sityodtong, the lifelong martial arts practitioner looks dead serious. Often his arms are folded, sometimes his fists are clenched, and he is almost always not smiling. That intensity befits a man who started learning muay thai at age 13, still trains every day, and now heads a company whose mixed martial arts (MMA) matches are broadcast to 1.7 billion viewers in 128 countries and counting.

Today, however, we are shooting Chatri together with his close friend and business partner Saurabh Mittal, who sits on One Championship’s board of directors and has been instrumental in helping Chatri with key decisions since he first dreamed up the idea of creating a major Asian sports league in 2011. And it is hard not to smile when you are horsing around with your buddy for the camera. The two first met in their 20s, during orientation at Harvard Business School. “But we really became friends in the cafeteria a few days later, when I asked him to join me in a study group,” Chatri remembers. “I don’t know why I asked him. He was just walking with a tray of food. I didn’t even know if he was a smart person or not, he could have been an idiot.” They both laugh, before Saurabh calmly counters with a wisecrack of his own: “The others had all run away. I was the only gullible guy left.”

All jokes aside, it turned out to be a great ask. Saurabh, trained in electrical engineering in India, was new to the world of business. “In the first month or so, it was very apparent that my business knowledge was far ahead of his,” says Chatri, who had studied economics as an undergraduate at Tufts University in the US. “But it also became clear that he was the smartest guy I’d ever met in my life, full stop.”