Conscient Sports appoints Abhishek Goel as chief executive officer

DELHI: Conscient Sports has gone shopping in the consulting world, and the catch is a big one. The grassroots sports organisation, part of Conscient Infrastructure, has named Abhishek Goel as chief executive officer, tasking a career strategist with turning ambition into disciplined execution as the company enters what it calls its next phase of growth.

Goel’s credentials are not the usual sports administration fare, and that is rather the point. He spent more than a decade at McKinsey & Company as a senior expert in strategy and corporate finance, advising boardrooms on growth and value creation. Before that, stints at PwC, EY, Grant Thornton and Citibank gave him a grounding in financial advisory, valuations, M&A and credit risk that few sports organisations in India can claim on their leadership bench. A chartered accountant and commerce graduate from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Goel pairs strategic firepower with hard commercial instincts.

Kriti Jain Gupta, director at Conscient Sports, framed the hire as a deliberate bet on transformation rather than continuity, welcoming Goel at a moment when the organisation is building on a strong foundation and looking to scale its impact in grassroots sports. That framing matters. Conscient Sports is not a startup searching for legitimacy, it already carries a 15 year legacy and marquee partnerships with Real Madrid Foundation and Delhi Capitals. What it evidently wants now is the operating discipline of a big-four and McKinsey alumnus to convert goodwill into scale.

Goel himself struck a similarly systems-first tone, saying his focus will be on strengthening the organisation’s capabilities, creating robust systems and processes, and working closely with the team to translate long-term strategy into disciplined execution and sustainable growth. It is a mandate that reads less like a typical sports appointment and more like a corporate turnaround brief, reflective of how seriously the Conscient Group is treating its sports vertical.

The wider context helps explain the ambition. Conscient Group carries over 50 years of legacy in real estate, with more than 20,000 units completed across a 35 million square foot portfolio, and has been steadily diversifying into infrastructure, education, IT and AI. Conscient Sports, established in 2010, is the group’s play in grassroots athlete development, and handing it a McKinsey-trained CEO signals the parent company wants the sports arm run with the same rigour as its core property business, not treated as a side hustle.