How India Made Cricket a Billion-Dollar Business

Cricket, a quiet sport. Started by the British. Measured, considered, timeless. Just a couple of decades ago,

cricket

was struggling to attract audiences and its commercial future was very much in doubt. It now has the second largest sports franchise in the world, surpassed only by the NFL. At the center of its success is a country and its record-breaking tournament, the Indian Premier League. So there has been a revolution in

cricket

. Traditionally, what used to happen, when English cricket started, cricket in the rest of the world stopped. Now, such is the glamor of the IPL, such are the riches that the IPL provides, that English cricket has to bow to India.

There are currently 74 games in the IPL and each one is valued at over £10 million per game. There's no way other previous game formats would have had that kind of power or financial value. The figures being talked about is that 80% of world cricket revenue comes from India in one form or another. India currently has a population of 1.4

billion

people. IPL has an audience of almost 700 million people. The global cricket fan base is approximately two and a half

billion

people. We are 27% of that total fan base worldwide. So is there potential to grow this audience? Huge, massive. This is the story of how a country became the driving force behind the biggest sporting change of the 21st century.

Well, cricket is this unique English game. The English invented most sports, but cricket is probably unique in that the two groups of players do opposite things. One of them plays with a bat and the other with a ball. I think it's one of those quiet, enigmatic types of sports to describe. It's the battle between runs, the number of runs you can score versus the number of wickets. And a wicket is when a batsman gets out, so it's a contest between runs and wickets. The overall objective of the game is to score more runs than the opposing team.

A run is essentially one point and is awarded each time a batsman runs between the wickets, which is possible after the ball has been bowled. Four runs are awarded if the batsman hits the ball beyond the boundary of the field, when the ball has touched the ground. A six is ​​awarded to batsmen who can clear the boundary without the ball touching the ground. The fielding team pitches to the batting team. A fielder bowls in six-ball games, which is called an over. After each end, the bowler changes. The best way to prevent the batting team from scoring is by getting the batsman out or taking wickets.

This can be done in many ways: bowling, catching or running. Once 10 of the 11 batsmen are out, their innings end and they cannot score any more runs. The same thing happens if they run out of time, which varies depending on the type of cricket game and is where the most revolution has occurred in recent years. Its most traditional format is multi-day cricket, that is, it is played with a red ball and there are three possible outcomes: win, lose or draw. So I know people are completely perplexed by the fact that you can play a game for five days and still tie at the end.

Cricket's complicated rules and long playing time meant it struggled to attract fans outside of Commonwealth countries that had deeply historical links to the game. Invented in England in the 17th century, cricket reached other parts of the world in the late 17th and 18th centuries through British colonizers. The British brought the game to different parts of the world, as they expanded, sought trade, and then acquired territories. They didn't tell people that you have to play our sport. They practiced their sport and other people, seeing the British practicing it, were attracted to it. While several Commonwealth countries adopted the game as their own, one managed to turn the sport into big

business

.

I think the Indians, who haven't been given any opportunities, will probably cause a lot more problems than many people expect. When I was very little, that was a long time ago, in the fifties, when I was five years old, they took me to India, to Mumbai, to see England play India. Mihir Bose, the BBC's first sports news editor, is one of the best-known cricket commentators. His most recent book, "Nine Waves: The Extraordinary Story of How India Took Over the Cricket World" traces the country's rise from colonial dependence to global dominance within the sport. Cricket money came, and this was globally, through people at the gates buying tickets.

When a team arrived in England, Australia, the West Indies, New Zealand or whoever, there was what was called Test fever in the cities. People would want to buy tickets, there would be long queues to get them, etc., and that was the situation well into the 1990s. Television had shown its potential in India during the 1982 Asian Games, but it was not until the 1990s. 1990, when the national audience reached a critical mass, its full potential could be harnessed. Cricket authorities in India realized that television stations were willing to pay a lot of money. By then, crowds had thinned around the world.

People watched English cricket and Australian cricket on television and discovered that when they played in India, they could sell their television rights to these Indian television stations for a lot of money. And that is where India, so to speak, took over the world game. While the original multi-day sporting format continued to have appeal among long-time fans, cricket struggled to attract new, younger audiences. This pressure only intensified as the unparalleled popularity of mega-franchises like the NFL and EPL continued to proliferate. In a bid to revitalize the sport, a variety of shorter formats with fewer overs were created.

England, finding that the public were not coming to the cricket, the spectators were not coming to the cricket, devised a new format of the game in which each side bowled only 20 overs. You know, shorten the game because then you could play it in an English summer, start at one or two, play until seven, eight, and someone could finish their work at five and just come in for two or three hours. That was the idea. England's 20 over format, also known as T20 or 20-20, launched its first professional tournaments in 2003. The shorter format

made

it much more suitable for broadcasters.

Sky Sports televised eight group stage matches and the entire final day live. England's T20 World Cup was a success domestically and demonstrated the potential of a more explosive version of the game. But it would take a complete disruption in 2008 to change the course of cricket. And that disruptor came in the form of the Indian Premier League. No matter how many times on your part, for the next 51 days, it will only be once. And that's to celebrate cricket's biggest festival. Welcome to the Vivo Indian Premier League. They turned it into a spectacle and old school traditionalists find it abhorrent.

For them, that's not cricket. Cricket is a theater where, you know, you have intellectual discussions about where the ball is played and so on. Here they said, no, no, you don't need all that. You want entertainment. You want to compete with what cinema offers you, with what any other form of entertainment offers you. The IPL was not only inspired by America's pre-show entertainment and pyrotechnics. It also adopted a similar league structure where the same teams compete each year. For the IPL they came up with completely new teams. So they became Mumbai Indians, owned by one of the richest

business

men in India,

made

up of some of them from Mumbai, made up of players from all over the world, or the Chennai Super Kings, or you know, the Kolkata Knight Riders.

So they came up with these exotic names. You know, the only difference is that it's not about one country playing against another. The only difference is that as a franchise you can attract the best in an auction, held before the start of the season, where you bid on the best players in the world for a certain price. To what extent has the IPL changed the face of cricket because of the money involved? Yeah, well, I mean the money involved is huge for gamers these days. We are in a time of upheaval in sport, where deep-pocketed new leagues promising big payouts threaten to disrupt the status quo.

From Saudi Arabia's controversial LIV golf tour, which golfers signed up for despite concerns about the country's human rights record and then lost their spot on renowned PGA tours, to the proposed European Super League, a breakaway soccer competition designed to secure millions of

dollar

s for a select few at the expense of long-established leagues. And the IPL is no different, with just 10 teams competing, each under deep-pocketed owners. It quickly attracted the best players in the world, causing problems for other tournaments that took place during the IPL season. The choice of players, the scheduling, the kind of proliferation of short format leagues and at the same time trying to schedule international cricket, be it a Test match, the domestic game and other international formats.

You know, it's a pretty challenging puzzle. The organization unofficially tasked with putting that puzzle together is the Board of Control for Cricket in India, or BCCI. While the International Cricket Council is appointed global watchdog, money, as is often the case, wields power. The humble truth here is that the BCCI is the richest body in world cricket today. And I think it is solely due to the massive success of IPL, so there are sponsorship deals coming up that reach every corner of the BCCI hall. 80% of world cricket revenue comes from India in one form or another. There are television rights, there are commercial deals when India plays abroad, if you look at the stadiums, the marketing of the sponsors' names are names of Indian sponsors because they have the rights.

They want their names on TV because Indians watch them and therefore will sell the product. So the BCCI obviously continues to add power in a sense simply because of the type of consumers it has at its disposal. The Indian consumer, like I said, 700 million people watch IPL, which probably has the least number of games in any sports format, you know, around the world. I'm not just talking about cricket, I'm talking about the NFL, I'm talking about the MLB, I'm talking about the EPL. This has the fewest number of games. It has the maximum audience. The success of the 2022 IPL media rights e-auction highlighted how successful this franchise has become in such a short time.

Television and digital rights for the 2022-2027 games were sold collectively for $6.2 billion. This not only reaffirmed the IPL as the leading cricket league but also made it the second most valuable league globally. At over $13 million per match, the IPL has surpassed global leagues like the EPL and MLB and is second only to the NFL. Disney took over the television rights and a joint venture between Paramount and Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries won the digital streaming rights. Media companies are constantly working to ensure they get the right format of content so that consumer loyalty continues and grows. If you look at the case of Netflix, in the two quarters that have passed, they actually said that they would lose their consumer numbers massively just because, you know, they are not able to penetrate countries like India, which require a different strategy. form of content.

I'm not saying you should pursue cricket as a possible broadcast. Maybe they will, who knows, but if it's a sport that is universal, that has no language, something like a soccer ball or a cricket, that actually attracts more consumers because of its religious following in those specific countries, I don't see a reason why you'll see more media companies coming and, you know, trying to partner with the BCCI, given the huge fan base around the world. It is widely accepted that the media is what has driven team values ​​to such astronomical heights. In the United States, the Big 10, a college football conference, just signed an $8 billion media rights deal and Apple signed a 10-year global streaming deal to broadcast major league football on worth 250 million

dollar

s.

With so much untapped revenue to play for, a flurry of new T20 leagues are being created in an attempt to ride the wave of the IPL's success. South Africa has begun to develop the details of the new T20 league. The players are already on board. A broadcast deal was confirmed and the team's owners were revealed. SA's previous attempts to get an international T20 league off the ground have failed. South Africa and the United Arab Emirates will launch new T20 leagues in 2023, adding to a schedule ofcricket already full. These tournaments will put additional pressure on resources and talent, especially as the current BCCI ruling states that no Indian national player can participate in other leagues unless they permanently retire from the IPL and domestic cricket.

The idea here is that players competing in other T20 tournaments will drive fans to those franchises, which could lead to tougher competition in terms of attraction, attention and brand value for the IPL. This is what it looks like in the T20 leagues, in Australia, the Big Bash League, the Caribbean Premier League, one in England, and now two new leagues are being launched, just announced, one in South Africa and the other in Dubai, the Emirates Cricket Board . . Now the fact is that in all these leagues, Indian players who have fans all over the world are not allowed to play, that is the rule.

And if you can't get, you know, players like MS Dhoni or Virat Kohli or some of the other greats we have playing cricket around the world for their country and in the IPL, I think you will lose it. many audiences. In an interview with ANI Sports in August 2022, BCCI vice-president Rajiv Shukla commented: "Our Indian Premier League is itself a huge league and we cannot allow any of our players to join any foreign league. anyway". IPL team owners have found a smart way to compete with these burgeoning leagues: buying the competition. All teams within South Africa's new T20 tournament have been bought by the IPL team owners.

There are 10 team owners in India. All of them have tasted immense success in IPL. They've seen their valuation go from literally nothing to close to $2 billion per franchise given the valuation of media rights. In 10 or 15 years, you'll certainly want to experiment as an owner, as a team owner, and see what you can do if other leagues take off. Now, non-cricket countries, seeing the opportunity that T20 provides, are starting to protect themselves. Not only is betting the shorter format an easier game to sell to those countries with less knowledge of the sport, but the money floating around and the growing demand for talent offers the perfect incentive for young athletes.

It was a historic event for Cricket Finland because we had never organized an international cricket tournament before. But I think from our perspective, as a non-traditional country, we've been looking at the data coming out of our World Cup qualifying event. There are quite significant viewing figures that come exclusively from Finnish viewers. And I think if we look at that in terms of the way forward, this is simply because the game itself has become more attractive for people to come see. It has become something that is sold more as a product, that has more things for the viewer to do when they hit the ground.

We've tried to reflect that here with a very smaller version. Obviously we don't have a 100,000-seat stadium like traditional cricket grounds in India or England. But at the same time we've looked at it to really think about how we can get new people interested in the game and have someone in the game talking about what's really happening on the cricket field. for someone who has never seen a game of cricket before. For Finland, a country whose national sport, Pesäpallo, also relies on bats and balls, T20 offers a potentially easy transition for players and spectators. You only have to look at the average salaries of Pesäpallo and IPL athletes to understand the opportunity that exists here.

In 2019, the highest salary for a Pesäpallo player was around $55,000. That same year, the salary and earnings of the highest-paid cricketer in the IPL, Virat Kohli, was around $4 million. That's not to mention the $21 million he amassed through endorsements. The opportunities that exist for players in non-traditional countries to really have access to the global stage, whether it's the IPL, whether it's another franchise somewhere else in the world, or whether it's within the ICC's Global Pathway events, I think there's something which has only been developed in the last five to ten years. All other cricket committees at the international level are trying this format because they believe it will allow them to get a lot of bounty in terms of dollars coming in and in turn they can improve the local infrastructure of the game in their respective countries, which they probably won't do. .

I cannot do so given the current state of finances. So it's a chicken and egg situation. If they are able to successfully attract and host the first or second season of the tournament by attracting some world-class players and getting suitable consumers, the media companies will come and follow them too. Now cricket hopes to enter the world's largest sports market: the United States. The US Major League Cricket competition will launch in 2023, backed by investors including Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and Microsoft chairman Satya Nadella. The following year, in 2024, Los Angeles will co-host the T20 World Cup with the West Indies.

And there is also a bid from the ICC to include cricket for the first time in the Olympic Games, which will also be held in Los Angeles in 2028. With so much interest in the sport and its expansion, investors are analyzing the business model and exploring shapes. to capitalize even more. It has now become a serious business where owners of large companies around the world see this as an opportunity to own a franchise, probably improve governance, get more independent athletes on the boards of these companies and , therefore attracting top talent and gaining sponsorships. and increase the scale and size of what they can do in their respective franchises.

Sport has become a business and sport is still managed and that is true beyond cricket in other sports, but particularly in cricket, as if it were a cottage industry. We don't have the kind of leaders and managers we need to run a big industry like this. An industry that attracts millions of people and that can affect the lives of millions of people because for them it is a form of entertainment that they value.