Cricket de-coupled?

The real risk has been taken by the TV company that has committed a little over a billion dollars for TV rights over the next decade. Over the same 10 years, the team owners will get their lion’s share of TV sponsorship fees (80 per cent for the first five years, 60 per cent for the next five) and the title sponsorship fee (60 per cent) which is to be paid by DLF. Each team owner therefore stands to get a guaranteed share of between $80 million and $100 million over 10 years — which makes the teams themselves virtually free for some of the less ambitious bidders (even the highest team bid, by Mukesh Ambani, was for $111.9 million). The team owners also get access to all on-ground and local revenues as well as the obvious branding opportunities, all of which taken together should be comfortably enough to pay the players’ fees (a total of between $3 million and $5 million per team). After 10 years, team ownership is there in perpetuity without any further charges. So what might have seemed like a flaky play by movie stars and cash-rich businessmen is in fact a pretty safe bet.

The main threat comes from the duration of the league and the density of the scheduling. Forty-four days may be a good starting point, but can hardly become a permanent timeframe. The franchise will have to be expanded to at least twice the current number of teams over the next couple of years and the frequency of games will have to be reduced to mitigate viewer fatigue. Realistically, this means at least a four to five-month season every year, which will both eat into the domestic schedules for many countries and reduce the time available for the international calendar, which is set up by the International Cricket Conference several years in advance. If the IPL is to work financially, it cannot but challenge the ICC’s international schedule.

“The untold story is how an opaque monopolist such as BCCI was forced to respond by the competitive threat created by Subash Chandra’s ICL (Indian Cricket League).” Wait until the tournaments actually start. Imagine the Kolkata cricket team and what it’s going to do to the political debate in that state in the coming years: The aam aadmi lining up to watch his city team promoted by a Bollywood badshah, funded by market capital, featuring marquee players from across the world, and undertaking a daily mark-to-market on Sourav Ganguly. A thousand Montek Ahluwalias couldn’t have managed to pull this off in a 100 years, bringing the common man into the complicated conversation on markets and society.