Sports Minutes: Tanjong Pagar's new chairman Rajesh Nair on his aims, ambitions and the use of AI

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Sports Minutes with Zia-ul Raushan on MoneyFM 89.3.

**Zia-ul Raushan** (0:05)
MoneyFM 89.3, it's time for Sports Minutes with me, Zia-ul Raushan. Out with the old and in with the new. It's all change over at Tanjong Pagar United. New chairman, new ex-co, new signings on the horizon, and a new logo that's divided opinion on social media. So evidently, plenty to talk about with regards to the Jaguars. Who better than the new club chairman, Rajesh Nair, as of 1st of July, 2026, who joins me on the show. Rajesh, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

**Rajesh Nair** (0:36)
I'm doing fine. Thank you for having me.

**Zia-ul Raushan** (0:38)
Thank you so much for making time, Rajesh. I know you're a busy man before this. Even more so now, we talked about taking charge of Tanjong Pagar. It's been a month since Deepan Rajganesan, good friend of the show, broke the news. Before we talk about the club and everything else, I think it's only fair you tell the listeners yourself. Who is Rajesh Nair?

**Rajesh Nair** (0:57)
So first and foremost, I'm Singaporean. I'm a third generation Singaporean. Born and raised here. I am a product of Singapore, and I am an aerospace engineering by my undergrad training. I worked as an aerospace engineer in Singapore. I spent a great deal of my life overseas, a lot of it in Spain. And in the last few years in Spain, I was working basically in MNCs, in large corporations, doing business development, starting up new companies, doing a little bit of M&A, starting new countries, opening up markets, that kind of stuff. I also ran a renewable energy company in Spain.
And then around 2012, 2013, 14, around there, I decided I was going to come back to Singapore for various reasons.
I think one was basically my parents are here, my family is here, I'm from here, and Singapore was booming at that time, and I wanted to come back and be a part of it. And then I started my own companies at that period when I came back to Singapore, and over the last, I guess, 14, 15 years, that's what I've been doing. I've been starting up companies and building businesses in Singapore, in many different industries.

**Zia-ul Raushan** (2:03)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the introduction. And I've had to make a few calls prior to having you in the hot seat, only to just check out what people are saying about Rajesh Nair. It all corroborates. You have a reputation of being a bit of a fixer. You come in rescue struggling companies, entities, and then you turn them into gold, basically, right? Is that a transferable skill set to football?

**Rajesh Nair** (2:27)
I think so, yes. I think so. I think a football club, like anything else, has an element of the field.
There's a product, which is football, and then there's an element of management of the field. And I think you can bring best practices from the corporate world and from the business world into a football club. Absolutely.

**Zia-ul Raushan** (2:45)
I can't wait to find out about the Rajesh Nair methodology. We're going to talk about Tanjong Pagar, which before that, this is not your first foray into football.

**Rajesh Nair** (2:54)
No, it's not.

**Zia-ul Raushan** (2:55)
Barca Academy, successful, well-known, booming, to quote a word that you used much earlier, right? Tell me about how that happened.

**Rajesh Nair** (3:04)
Well, I think we've always been sports fans, you know, and my business partner and I, my business partner is from Barcelona, from Catalonia, and I guess around 2021, post-COVID, we realized that there was an opportunity to take over the Barca Academy, and I'm a Barcelona fan because I lived a certain part of my life in Spain and in Barcelona. In fact, that was the first place I lived in Spain.
And I think the opportunity kind of fell into our lap to take it over. They wanted a change and they wanted someone to come in and maybe inject a little bit of money and a little bit of professionalism in it and try and turn it around. And that's what we did, you know, so we took over in 2022 with about 80 kids in one venue and we rolled up our sleeves and we worked and tried again, putting the best practices of customer acquisition, a little bit of professionalism, how you retain players, customer service.
And we built it and over the years, we just kept growing and today we've got four venues, over a thousand kids across those venues. We've got a sports tourism business. We've got an academy with a lot of competitive teams. We send them overseas. We play in all the local competitions and we're supporting the Singapore football ecosystem through that.