Era of franchise leagues: Four months in 2023, the IPL is the eighth franchise event of the year

The tournament whose growth was slowed down by the global pandemic returned to matches being played on a home-and-away basis. The lack of a large enough window has meant the teams will be divided into two groups, but this will still ensure seven home and seven away matches in the span of less than two months, taking the tournament tally to 74 games.

And, in the near future this will go up to 94 matches with a window of almost three months.

The sale of the broadcast rights for Rs 48,390 crore means that it is no longer empty rhetoric to say that the IPL is in the same league as the English Premier League in football or any of the top American sports codes.

The IPL has become something of a summer phenomenon in India now. Fifteen years since the tournament started, for two months, evenings are filled by the IPL, whether you are a casual watcher who just likes to keep an eye on the score or a more serious one. The spread of illegal betting has also been dramatic, something that can be seen in a casual visit to any club, restaurant or bar, with patrons and staff hanging onto every ball. Legally, fantasy games have added to the making watching the IPL sticky. When you have skin in the game, you’re going to follow it that much more closely.

The demand for tickets and passes is as high as ever, even with increased passes and in locations such as Chennai and Bangalore there have been scenes of fans queuing up outside the ground from the previous night in order to secure box office tickets. Online sales are strong even with franchises only releasing tickets for the first two matches and unrolling the rest in phases.

The 2023 season of the IPL is also the first to have different broadcasters for television and streaming. The joke doing the rounds on WhatsApp was that all cricket coaching in India would cease for two months, as about 150 former cricketers are in different commentary boxes.Virat Kohli is the face of the Star campaign, which insists that the only way to watch cricket is as a group crowded around a television, recreating the stadium atmosphere. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is the face of the Jio campaign which suggests that the time of the idiot box is done and digital is the way forward. Jio Cinema has rolled out commentary in 10 languages, and, incredibly, is still a free offering.

That there is so much demand for the IPL in today’s saturated cricket calendar beggars belief in itself. We are just into the fourth month of the year and this is the eighth major franchise cricket event to happen: the Big Bash League, Super Smash, Bangladesh Premier League, SA20, International League T20, Pakistan Super League, and Women’s Premier League have been played.

At the moment, the focus of the Indian fan is largely limited to its home league. But, already, with franchises, this has changed. In the Emirates Cricket Board’s ILT20, half of the six teams are owned by IPL team owners. In the SA20, all six teams are owned by those who have teams in the IPL and in the set-to-belaunched Major League Cricket in America IPL owners account for four of six teams.

It has not happened yet, but the time is not far when a player contracted to an IPL team will not sign on for just the Indian league, but rather for the franchise over tournaments played in different regions at different times of the year.

In cricket, it is theoretically possible to increase all kinds of numbers: build more grounds, produce more players coming through the system, get new demographics into the game. But the one thing that is finite is time. This brings us to the tipping point that cricket is at. As the number of leagues grows, and some leagues grow even longer (as the IPL will very soon) this eats into the window of time available for other cricket to be played. Already, finance dictates that other than India, Australia and England playing each other, no Test series is longer than two matches.

Already we see international teams release key players to go and participate in or prepare for major leagues, with no club versus country loyalty debates. This is just the reality that cricket lives in today and most stakeholders have come to terms with it.

While it is perfectly accurate to say that bigger is not always better, it is also inevitable that some things can’t be reversed. When the IPL was set in motion, powered by Lalit Modi, his claims about how big it would become and its place in global sport appeared to be pipe dreams. Or at least a vast exaggeration of a man trying to sell the world something that did not exist.

Today, most of those markers have been crossed. The key question is how much control cricket’s administrators have over the beast they have unleashed. The game has certainly changed a lot over the years, but there are still bits that feel familiar and old. How long they will survive in the world of allyear-round franchise cricket is anybody’s guess.