Cricket would be hard to surpass if the measure were revenue generated relative to audience size. At a time when football’s future is increasingly tied to questions of ownership, broadcasting and financial power – from the FIFA-UEFA dispute over the sale of the World Cup to the wider reshaping of the game’s economy – another sport has quietly become one of the most attractive targets for global investment. Cricket has long occupied a singular position in the sporting landscape. It does not have football’s reach as a participation sport, yet few games have built an economic ecosystem on a comparable scale. Nowhere is that contrast clearer than in India, where the Indian Premier League has grown in less than twenty years from a new competition into one of the most valuable sporting enterprises in the world.
According to an analysis by The Economist, the IPL is no longer merely the leading cricket league on the planet. It has become a rare sporting asset: one capable of attracting the attention of the largest investment groups. When the tournament was launched in 2008, its city-based franchises were largely acquired by Bollywood stars, Indian entrepreneurs and industrialists drawn to the prestige of owning a team. The faces have changed, and so has the money behind them. The celebrity era has given way to something more institutional.
From the beginning, the IPL was built around the meeting point between sport, entertainment and spectacle. Actors, businessmen and some of India’s most recognisable figures helped turn it into an event that extended well beyond the boundary rope. The exact size of its audience is difficult to measure, but estimates regularly place viewership between 400 and 900 million people, putting the league among the most watched sporting events anywhere. That scale has produced extraordinary valuations. In March, a consortium involving Blackstone, the American private equity giant, and Bolt Ventures, the investment firm led by David Blitzer, acquired Royal Challengers Bengaluru at a valuation of $1.8 billion. Blitzer already holds stakes in several sports franchises across the United States and elsewhere. Reuters has reported that Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek is also exploring the possibility of buying an IPL team, while KKR, another major American private equity group, has shown interest. In 2021, CVC Capital Partners backed the creation of Gujarat Titans before selling two-thirds of its stake last year to an Indian conglomerate, securing a significant return.
The first franchise auction raised $724 million for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the organisation that runs the league. Today, estimates from investment bank Houlihan Lokey value the IPL at more than $20 billion, supported by India’s expanding consumer market and the growing spending power of its domestic audience. Broadcasting remains the engine of the business. Television and streaming companies continue to pay heavily for matches that last around three and a half hours, a relatively short format by cricket standards. In a media world increasingly divided into smaller fragments, the IPL offers something becoming harder to find: a huge audience watching the same live event at the same moment. Advertisers know the value of that. The audience itself is part of the attraction. Almost half of IPL viewers are women, an unusual figure for a major sporting competition. The league has moved beyond traditional cricket circles, becoming a family occasion as much as a sporting one.
Its structure has helped preserve that appeal. There are only ten teams, broadcasting rights are sold collectively and expansion remains limited. There is no relegation, while player salaries operate within a cap, avoiding the kind of spending spiral that has reshaped competitions such as the Premier League. The stadiums are provided by state governments and the BCCI. In India, where opportunities to acquire major sporting institutions remain scarce, owning an IPL franchise has become a marker of status and influence. The arrival of international capital has only increased the value of those positions. Cricket’s most prized assets are no longer simply bought. They are contested.