When Mumbai Indians handed Rohit Sharma the captaincy ahead of the 2013 edition of the Indian Premier League, the franchise had nothing in terms of silverware despite years of expensive investment. What followed across the next decade was a systematic, methodical accumulation of authority — five titles under his leadership before a sixth arrived, cementing a record that no other figure in the competition's history has matched. The story of how that transformation happened is as much about institutional decision-making as it is about individual brilliance.