The Indian Premier League is, by all accounts, a sporting behemoth. Attracting superstar cricketers from all over the world — including the likes of Glenn Maxwell, Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler — while providing burgeoning Indian talents such as Rinku Singh and Shivam Dube a step up into the big leagues and more often than not, a shot at the national team.
In its 15th year, the tournament is raking in incredibly large amounts of money, recently adding a $6 billion broadcast deal to its kitty, one of the many deals that has taken the league’s valuation to $10.9 billion, effectively making it a decacorn, a startup term to indicate a company valued at over $10 billion. The latest valuation makes the cricket league the second-most valuable sporting league in the world, slotting in between America’s National Football League (NFL), valued at $16 billion, and Major League Baseball, valued at $10.7 billion.
When the tournament began in 2008, it quickly rocketed to a billion-dollar valuation, making it one of India’s first unicorns, even before online retailer Flipkart — valued at $37.6 billion as of 2022 — managed the feat, in 2012.
Since then, the league has gone from strength to strength, with the very first player auction seeing Mahendra Singh Dhoni go on the block for Rs 9.5 crore, while the most recent auction in 2023 saw Sam Curran bought for Rs 18.5 crore, an all time record in the tournament and almost double of what the very first auction witnessed.
How did the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) pull all this off, in just a decade and half?
Sponsorships
In addition to the aforementioned media rights, the cricketing body relies on sponsorships and the league’s global profile to rake in the moolah.
From lavish opening ceremonies to superstar franchise owners, the IPL has it all. And it began with one man, Lalit Modi, who lured broadcasters and corporates alike, bagging over $1.7 billion for the BCCI. The very first edition was sponsored by DLF, whose name was splashed all over the tournament, with every six hit over the course of the tournament tagged with a "DLF Maximum" banner. With 99 million viewers tuning in that first year, the Indian cricketing body made a neat Rs 350 crore profit.
That number has only risen with each passing year, with the last edition in 2022 netting the BCCI Rs 800 crore in revenue.
Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/sports/ipl-how-india-became-home-to-the-biggest-baddest-cricketing-league-in-the-world/articleshow/99885321.cms
Comments