No 18-year-old has captured the imagination of a country since Sachin Tendulkar than IPL. It is as though yesterday that IPL was born, with a swirl of sixes into the Bangalore night skies, the iconic ground heaving to the newborn raptures. Seventeen seasons have passed, and the league would embrace adulthood when the fireworks whizz into the Kolkata skies on Saturday. Like exhausted but relieved parents, the league’s swarming audience would sigh, “how time flies” and marvel at the fully-formed specimen imposing on cricket’s landscape. And probably poke their touch-screen phones to make changes in their fantasy teams.
The loathers have turned lovers with converts’ zeal. It has cord-cut the traditional cricket-watching audience. As much as 43 percent of the audience is women. The cricket world has gravitated to the IPL universe, the global calendar kept largely abreast of the league.
In the country of its birth, it is the rite-of-passage age when you could drive, enter a polling booth, open a bank account, or be sentenced to prison. But IPL has lived the life of an adult for most of its existence, leaping over the traditionally accepted stages of life at maddening speed like an ethereal wunderkind. At 18, it radiates the glow of a prince assured of his inheritance.
Eighteen years is not a lifetime, but perhaps a third or fourth of all the years an average human would live. The IPL has already lived quite a life, its great success is that it has blended the different worlds of sports, entertainment and business, without each other intruding too much into the other’s space. Entertainment has not diluted the sport, just as sport has not impeded business. Everything coexists in inorganic but synchronised harmony.
Kolkata Knight Riders will take on Royal Challengers Bengaluru in their first match on March 22.
The league is more constant than the passage of seasons, change of governments, equations of politics, immune to recession, inflation, and pandemic. From the subconscious it has waltzed into the waking consciousness, from summer pastime it has swung into an unshakeable obsession. It thrives in popular culture, seeps into everyday conversations, sweeps into prime time television, displaces soap eras on viewership scale, and forces film producers to keep off high-budget films from the IPL window. Even festivals could have been kept aside, had any coincided with the league. In essence, IPL defines the Indian summers.
It reflects the country too, its virtues and vices, its stupefying consumerism as well as its unhindered ambition, its expansionist fervour, it’s the pop event that most Indians, whatever their beliefs, circumstances, or motivations, can gather around, it caters to their sporting ideals of heroism and popularity. No cultural product unites India as IPL does.
Some would say it symbolises greed—but then it has not pretended otherwise or claimed it’s the reincarnation of the Mahatma. After all, it was a concept designed specifically to attract advertisers, cricket reimagined as a billboard, where everything sellable was sold, from sixes and fours, catches and breaks.
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The popularity is easy to configure in economic terms. The league’s brand value is pegged at $3.4 billion by Houlihan Lokey’s 2024 IPL Valuation Study. Its cumulative value shot to $16.4 billion. In the last team auction in 2022, Gujarat Titans was bought for a staggering US$ 940 millions, which was roughly $200 million more than the combined cost of all franchises in the inaugural edition. The costliest franchise is Mumbai Indians, worth $ 1.3 billion, which is more than Inter Miami FC, the football club Lionel Messi turns up for and the most expensive of all MLS teams. So a league Jasprit Bumrah turns up for 10 weeks is more expensive than the one Lionel Messi appears for ten months a year.
The IPL Trophy on display (Photo by Saikat Das / Sportzpics for IPL)
It’s the second richest television sport, after the NFL, in the world too. The media rights for the 2023-2027 blocks were dispensed for US$ 6.1 billion a year. The annual broadcast revenues is on par with top leagues like the N.F.L. ($10 billion a year), England’s Premier League (about $6.9 billion) and the N.B.A. ($2.7 billion). It’s the six-fold Sony had paid ($1bn) to broadcast the first ten editions.
The astonishing part is that the league has little traction outside the country or in other cricketing nations, unlike the NBA or EPL. None of the teams have any connection globally, apart from expats, but still the sums remain astronomical. The range of advertisers jostling for IPL is a vast and varied spread— a 10-second ad on television costs ₹18-19 lakhs. It has veered from the soft-drink and sport-shoe staple to endorsing dairy, women’s beauty products, cooking oil and multivitamin tablets. Investments have begun to pour from overseas. American money has discovered IPL—private investment firm RedBird Capital Partners, which has stakes in Liverpool and AC Milan has acquired a 15 percent stake in Rajasthan Royals. If Americans stop by, can Saudi Arabia be far behind? On cue, Aramco, the largest oil company on earth, has hopped into the show.
If the league stands as a metaphor of free-market capitalism—by a mammoth distance the most commercially successful cricketing venture ever— it functions as the democratic, even socialistic, talent spotter. It has mobilised the scouts across the cricketing map, who have unearthed uncut diamonds from unsuspecting places and fast-tracked them to sporting mainstream. Jasprit Bumrah’s fragrance would have blossomed and wasted unseen; Varun Chakaravarthy could have been designing skyscrapers; Suryakumar Yadav would have retired as a domestic stalwart.
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Actor Shah Rukh Khan greets the crowd after KKR’s victory in the IPL 2024 final in Chennai, May 26, 2024. (PTI photo)
The ecosystem it has spawned is extensive and pervasive, bolstering a host of associated industries like tourism, hospitality, textile and clothing, ticketing and sporting technology. Stadiums began to hire more hands. Former cricketers were spoilt for post-retirement career choices, they could join the backroom staff, and pick the microphone or start an academy. Or perform all of these. Fantasy gambling leagues have established themselves as a parallel industry; parents are less disruptive of their children choosing sport as a career. The sport alone has seen the mushrooming of similar leagues, at the international, domestic, local and panchayat levels. Other sports copied the models with varying levels of success as well.
As significantly, its staunchest critics have stopped owing every ill in the game to the league. It is far from perfect, suffocatingly showy, but it does get along with the older siblings of the game, even exchanging tricks and tactics. It’s not quite the darling of the cricket world, but it does not matter because it is arguably the most powerful (and moneyed) entity in the game.
And it is just 18, just an adult, the whole youth stretched in front of it, the best days yet to be. The irony is we would be repeating these same lines on its 100th birthday too. Happy 18, but were you not an adult already? Even though it seems as though you were born yesterday.