How India’s league is transforming the business of cricket
Few people have experienced the boom in cricket quite like Rashid Khan. Since making his debut for his national side nine years ago, the 26-year-old Afghan spin bowler has played in professional leagues in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, England, South Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, the UAE, the US and in his home country.
Khan is just one beneficiary of a wave of start-up cricket tournaments around the world, from Australia’s Big Bash League to Major League Cricket in the US, all spurred by the soaring success of the Indian Premier League (IPL), now one of the richest contests in sport.
The IPL’s ascent, fuelled by India’s rapid economic growth and support from the Modi government, has cemented the country as the most dominant force in a sport that traces back to the villages of 16th-century England.
Its outsized revenue has helped fund the game in smaller countries through distributions from the International Cricket Council, the game’s global governing body, which, later this year, will be chaired by Jay Shah, the son of India’s powerful home minister Amit Shah. The IPL has also turned some non-Indian players into international superstars.
“It’s definitely lifting all boats,” says Nick Hockley, chief executive of governing body Cricket Australia, which runs the Big Bash League. “I think it’s in everyone’s interests that the game is growing globally.”
Organisers of copycat contests are now seeking to emulate the IPL’s approach of using a faster, condensed version of cricket to attract the broadest possible audience.
Corporate sponsors and broadcasters have been quick to sign on, while team owners in the various leagues range from the billionaire Ambani and Glazer families to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and private equity firm CVC Capital Partners.
One of the youngest tournaments, The Hundred, is seeking to test global investor appetite for cricket, by some metrics the second-most popular sport in the world after football.
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), which owns the competition, this month kicked off an auction process for stakes in eight-team franchises that the governing body hopes will raise as much as £500mn. The ECB and its rivals want to tap into growing interest in cricket, especially ahead of Los Angeles 2028 when the sport will feature at the Olympics for the first time since 1900.
But while the proliferation of events has brought in new fans and been a boon for top players like Khan, the emergence of India as the rising superpower of the game has intensified a debate about its future.
Traditionalists believe the IPL and other short-form franchises siphon players, money and media attention from the original, longer “red ball” version of the game. More crucially, some argue that the growth in supply of cricket has now outpaced demand, and that not all of the current competitions will make it through a looming shakeout — and out of the shadow of the IPL.
“In cricket, there were 17 short-form franchise competitions last year,” says Richard Gould, chief executive of the ECB. “Whether all those things will survive, well, the answer is no. We need to make sure that we’re not engaged in an unsustainable arms race.”
The launch of the IPL in 2008 revolutionised cricket both on and off the field. The made-for-TV Twenty20 version of the sport, in which a typical game lasts about three to four hours instead of a full day, or up to five days in other formats, attracted new audiences with its combination of short, action-packed matches with the dazzle of cheerleaders, music and fireworks.
This momentum triggered a financial boom, with the value of the IPL’s media rights soaring to a record $6.2bn for the 2023 to 2027 seasons following a bidding war between Disney and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries. This made the IPL the world’s second-most valuable sports league on a per-game basis behind the US’s National Football League (NFL), while global investors such as private equity firm CVC have invested in franchises.
“The unique selling point of IPL is the quality of cricket we get to see,” says Arun Singh Dhumal, the league’s chair. “The IPL features some of the best cricketers from around the world. This mix of international stars and emerging Indian talent makes the league highly competitive and appealing to fans globally.”
The riches from the IPL have spread through the game. The ICC reported event revenue of $839mn last year thanks to the World Cup in India, up from $603mn four years earlier when the tournament was staged in England and Wales. In 2007, the year before the IPL was launched, the World Cup in the West Indies helped generate ICC event revenue of $286mn.
The Dubai-based ICC distributes its financial surplus to members across the world. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) takes nearly 40 per cent of those earnings, a reflection of its heft in the global game, compared to about 6 per cent each for Australia and England.
“The IPL is like no other sport in no other country. You go to India, you look at the billboards, it’s either a politician or it’s a cricketer there,” says the ECB’s Gould. “Cricket is India and India is cricket.”
IPL team owners, including Indian conglomerates Reliance and steelmaker JSW, now own franchises in similar leagues around the world, and are expected to compete for stakes in The Hundred teams over the coming months.
This overseas expansion has allowed owners of IPL teams to start building global brands and effectively retain players year round, a model that analysts say is transforming cricket — traditionally built around international series — into a predominantly club sport like football. West Indian all-rounder Andre Russell, for example, has played for the Kolkata Knight Riders and their franchises in Abu Dhabi and Los Angeles.
“Having multiple franchises allows us to increase the year-round engagement of our fans, scout and develop local cricketing talent, and also provide international development opportunities for our support staff and management teams”, says Manoj Badale, owner of the Rajasthan Royals IPL team, the Paarl Royals in South Africa and the Barbados Royals in the Caribbean Premier League.
English cricket’s answer to the IPL, The Hundred, made its debut in 2021. The ECB, which owns the competition, opted not to use the Twenty20 format, instead creating an even shorter set-up in which each team tries to score as many runs as possible off 100 balls, a change that squeezed matches into under three hours.
The competition’s architects saw this as a more attractive proposition for broadcasters. Men’s and women’s games are played back to back, part of its plan to attract a new, younger and more diverse audience. About a third of attendees at The Hundred matches are women, compared to less than 10 per cent for a typical men’s international, the ECB says.
505mnNumber of viewers who watched IPL in 2023
12mnNumber of viewers who watched The Hundred in 2023
However, The Hundred has faced some pushback from long-standing cricket fans, many of whom see the tournament as a gimmick aimed at children rather than a serious rival to the IPL or test cricket, the longest version of the game. During The Hundred, which lasts for a month during the height of the summer cricket season, England’s county championship is put on hold, although one-day cup matches continue.
Soon investors will give their verdict on The Hundred, which at 12mn viewers in 2023 is dwarfed by the IPL at 505mn. A pitch deck put together with US investment bank Raine Group and Deloitte has been sent out to more than 100 interested parties, detailing bullish projections for future revenues from TV rights and sponsorship.
Those running the process believe that some of the features that The Hundred shares with big US sports — such as the closed league with a small number of teams and salary caps — will help justify high valuations in a league that this year generated just £47mn in revenue. Even the rosiest projections of future growth put total income at £156mn a year by 2032, compared to the $1.1bn the IPL currently brings in from TV alone.
Yet executives across the game in England hope the auction will bring a wave of money from investors in India, the US and elsewhere, including private equity and sovereign wealth funds. They are betting that luring IPL owners to The Hundred could also push up media values overseas by attracting Indian viewers keen to follow their domestic team’s English equivalent.
Some of the money raised by the ECB has been earmarked to help tackle the simmering financial troubles facing English domestic cricket, where some county club teams — the traditional backbone of the game — are grappling with falling revenues and mounting debts.
“Everybody has seen the success of the IPL. It has been extraordinary, the broadcast deals in particular,” says Daniel Gidney, chief executive of Lancashire Cricket Club, which runs the league’s Manchester Originals. “This is a unique opportunity for US and Indian investors to invest into a heritage cricket asset. Demand already has been off the scale.”
Yet many in the sport are highly sceptical of what they see as a growing financial bubble as new competitions battle to replicate the IPL’s success.
The popularity of the IPL is built on a series of unique factors, including the enormity of India’s 1.4bn cricket-loving population, a buoyant economy and a lack of popular interest in other sports.
“The IPL is an 800lb gorilla,” says Joy Bhattacharjya, a former Knight Riders team director. “It’s a freak.
“If you look around and ask where are franchises making money elsewhere in the world, you’ll have to ask yourself some serious questions,” he adds. “None of these leagues at this point in time make any financial sense.”
The proliferation of short-form contests has driven up player salaries, as rival contests seek to outbid each other for talent. The ECB believes The Hundred needs private team owners to bankroll an increase in the competition’s combined salary cap for a men’s and women’s team to £2.6mn in 2025, up from £1.3mn last year — a long way off the IPL’s own spending limit of £10.6mn.
“The players win from franchise leagues,” says Andrew Umbers, managing partner at Oakwell Sports Advisory. “They are what drive commercial revenues, broadcast value.”
Top male players earned up to £125,000 in this year’s edition of The Hundred, compared to £2.3mn in the IPL, and £400,000 in rival leagues in South Africa and the UAE. Top female players this year earned up to £50,000, up from £15,000 in 2021.
The ECB also wants to increase the pay of the top men players in the month-long tournament to £300,000.
To attract and retain the world’s best men and women players, they need to paid properly, says Gould. “Outside of the IPL, we need to make sure we’re the top payers in the global player market,” he adds.
There are other challenges. The rapid expansion of leagues has also led to a packed calendar of international and club cricket, with some executives worried viewer interest is becoming saturated.
Places like England, Pakistan and Australia are large enough markets to build up some local momentum, and it is hoped that the benefits of bringing more people into cricket will be felt over the long term, some insiders say.
However, they warn that leagues elsewhere are likely to struggle unless they can find an audience in India.
Indian players are currently barred from joining overseas leagues by BCCI rules, a policy that analysts say helps protect the value of the IPL by ensuring it is the only league where audiences can see top stars such as Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma. Industry executives dismiss the idea of a relaxation in the BCCI’s rules.
Matthew Wheeler, a former professional cricketer and now chief executive of boutique investment firm A&W Capital, foresees a future for cricket where two or three of the current crop of short-form tournaments build a big enough audience to continue attracting international talent, while the rest will have to rely on domestic players and a local audience if they are to keep going.
“If you look at most people who’ve bought a franchise, they love cricket. They get an emotional return. Outside the IPL, how many franchises are wanted by pure investors? I suspect not many,” he says.
The IPL meanwhile is also trying to grow its own international audiences — something that could leave even less space for rival domestic leagues.
Dhumal, the IPL chair, says the league is working on strategies including creating video games and TV shows aimed at drawing in new viewers from around the world, with a view to drumming up interest ahead of the next Olympics.
“Now that cricket is going to be part of [the] 2028 Olympics, we have a responsibility to take the IPL to other shores and get its reach [to] even wider audiences,” he says.
Some fear that India’s growing stronghold on cricket, including its influence over the ICC, risks becoming detrimental to the game. The country has, for example, refused to play a bilateral series with Pakistan for over a decade due to geopolitical tensions, costing its smaller neighbour a crucial source of revenue. Pakistani players are also in effect blacklisted from the IPL.
“India is so powerful in terms of its clout that it can basically get away with whatever decision it wants to take,” says Najam Sethi, a former chair of the Pakistan Cricket Board.
He adds that the Pakistani players are now increasingly inclined to try and play for T20 leagues where they hope to make more money than playing for their country. “Their commitment to Pakistan cricket is being diluted because they get a lot more money from these leagues,” Sethi says.
There are also signs that even the IPL bonanza is peaking. D&P Advisory, a valuation firm, recently estimated that the value of the league has fallen for the first time outside the pandemic, from $11.2bn to $9.9bn this year, due to an expected drop in future media rights.
A recent merger between Disney’s Indian business and Reliance, whose competition helped push up the value of the last tranche of rights, “has essentially created monopolistic control over television and digital broadcasting”, D&P says.
Analysts said this leaves little prospect of similarly frenzied demand to push up media values in the near future, a cooling down that could add to the sense of uncertainty hanging over the game globally.
As for the question of whether the explosion of short-form cricket will ultimately spell the end of the five-day game, most executives insist that test cricket will remain the pinnacle of the sport for the foreseeable future.
“There is a lot of change happening now in cricket. What the sport is trying to do is find the right balance,” says A&W Capital’s Wheeler. “But aren’t we fortunate to have that choice?”
Additional reporting by Samuel Agini in London
Data visualisation by Alan Smith