LALIT MODI might have written the script himself. Tense to the end, the match was not settled until the stroke of midnight and the last ball. Lakshmipathy Balaji, of the Chennai Super Kings, bowled it: Sohail Tanvir, of the Rajasthan Royals, hit it through midwicket for one run. And with that Rajasthan won the final of the inaugural
Indian Premier League (IPL).
No follower of cricket needs to be told who Mr Modi is. As vice-president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the national governing body, he conceived and now runs the IPL. The sudden arrival and apparent success of the new league has shaken cricket from top to bottom. It is the most vivid illustration in sport of the shift in the global economy from rich countries to the emerging world.
The IPL is bright and brash, mixing India’s great sporting passion and Bollywood’s glamour, topped with lashings of money. The fun starts with the format: “Twenty20”, a short version of cricket in which each team bowls 20 overs (sets of six balls). Matches last three hours or so, about as long as a baseball game—just right for an evening’s entertainment. By contrast, international Test matches, the purist’s favourite form, can take five days.
Twenty20 is not Mr Modi’s invention. It was devised in England in 2003, as a way of reviving interest in county cricket—as, in the 1960s, was “one-day” cricket, now usually 50 overs a side. Twenty20 was not the settled choice when planning for the IPL began in earnest, as Mr Modi and IMG’s Mr Wildblood talked over a cup of tea at Wimbledon last July. The shortest form had not yet caught on in India.
That changed with the first World Twenty20 Cup, held in South Africa last September. Millions upon millions watched India beat Pakistan in the final. A photograph in “Wisden”, the bible of cricket, shows India’s
players parading the trophy back in Mumbai. You can scarcely see their open-top bus for the throng.
The next departure from tradition came with the
teams: not the usual 26 state-based units of Indian cricket but a mere eight city-based “franchises” created specially for the IPL. Scarcity created value. In January the franchises were auctioned for fees ranging from $67m (for the Jaipur franchise, which became Rajasthan Royals) to $111.9m (for the Mumbai Indians). The sale raised $723m.
“We couldn’t have asked for a better dream list of owners,” says Mr Modi. And indeed both Bollywood and business did him proud. One film star, Shahrukh Khan, co-owns Kolkata Knight Riders. Another, Preity Zinta, together with her boyfriend, Ness Wadia, an industrialist, is an owner of Kings XI Punjab, in Mohali. Mumbai Indians belong to Mukesh Ambani, head of Reliance Industries; his brother Anil, of Reliance Communications, is said to want a team too. Vijay Mallya, boss of United Breweries Group and Kingfisher Airlines, owns Bangalore Royal Challengers.
Mr Modi had already signed up dozens of the world’s leading cricketers—“the critical aspect for us,” he says. They were auctioned too, in February, with an auctioneer from Britain wielding the gavel. Undignified? The IPL’s human lots had few complaints. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Indian cricket’s latest pin-up, went to Chennai for the top price, $1.5m. The franchises’ total spending was capped at $5m each.
The money for the IPL is coming mainly from television. Mr Modi reckoned he could raise $1 billion for ten years’ worth of rights, and did. The franchises get 80% of the league’s television revenues in the first two years, declining to 50% from year 11. They also receive 60% of central sponsorship for the first ten years and 50% thereafter. That largely explains the scale of their bids. Over time, they will have to generate their own money from sponsorship, licensing and so forth, some of which will go back into the central pot...
