How a cash-strapped BCCI in the early 90s became the world’s wealthiest board

Today, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is expected to be richer by approximately Rs 15,000 crore ($2.35 billion) and with that the Indian Premier League (IPL) will be escalated to the league of the world’s most valued sports properties, sitting side by side with the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the English Premier League (EPL). With multiple global corporate leaders in the fray to acquire the rights for the next five years, the bids for the digital rights may well turn out to be a real surprise and a marker for the future. It’ll also mean that the money spent by broadcasters on an IPL game will soon be one and a half times more than the money spent on telecasting an international contest involving the Indian national team. The BCCI, confident of the market demand for its signature property, has arranged for a live streaming of the whole process. In what is an outstanding public relation and marketing exercise, live streaming will drive home the enormity of the act and the transformation of Indian cricket into a multi-billion dollar industry.

What further adds to the incredulity of the situation is that just two decades earlier in 1993, Doordarshan, the government-run network, had a monopoly on the telecast of cricket matches in India and forced BCCI to pay for every telecast. For each live telecast, it used to demand `5 lacs from the BCCI to meet production cost. Things first changed in 1993 when the Board sold television rights for the India-England series to Trans World International (TWI) and Doordarshan, in turn, paid TWI $1 million for the right to telecast the matches in India. This agreement, the first of the kind in the Board’s history, made it richer by $600,000. It also allowed the BCCI to tide over the severe financial crisis plaguing Indian cricket between 1987 and 1992.

In most mature media markets, a competitive electronic media industry was the general norm by the 1990s. In the US and the UK, there were multiple commercial television networks fighting for television rights in an open economy. In 1990, the British parliament repealed all government control, thereby bringing in uninterrupted competition or an ‘open sky’. Consequently, BBC’s monopoly over the telecast of sports events like Wimbledon and the British Open golf was exposed to competition from ITA, Channel 4 and Sky TV.

In contrast to the UK, open competition over broadcast rights in the US has been the norm for decades now. In fact, the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the US was host broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union. Uplinking was permitted back to Europe and the rest of the world from a central feed point in the American city of Dallas. This feed hub was also controlled by the EBU.

India entered the field late but has clearly caught up. Two things, it can be argued, has helped the IPL in doing so. First, it’s risk free. In the IPL, India wins every single day. Whichever team plays, India is the winner. It eliminates any risk of India losing out like what had happened in the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean.

The second is the ever growing Indian diaspora across the world. With more and more Indians making the US, the UK and Europe home, takers for the IPL across these consumer markets have consistently risen. The IPL for many is a way to connect to things Indian. In a world dominated by information and capital flows and where technology has broken spatial and time barriers, the IPL helps nurture an Indian collective of consumers who continue to celebrate Indian-ness through the prism of this uniquely Indian export. This is what explains the BCCI’s decision to segregate the rights across regions in an attempt to maximize revenue from the media rights sale.

For a sport dominated and controlled by the global south, the IPL bids are expected to have a cascading effect. Within minutes it will elevate cricket to the league of the world’s most watched and most valued sports. It will establish the strength of the Indian consumer market and its massive potential in the years ahead. It will be a huge shot in the arm of a beleaguered BCCI. A brand that has lost sheen in the last few years and repeatedly pulled up for inaction by the Supreme Court, is still capable of inspiring corporate confidence and bids to the tune of Rs 15,000-plus crores for a domestic cricket property. For the Committee of Administrators (COA), this might well be the lasting legacy they leave behind as temporary arbiters of the game in India.