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The Indian Premier League, currently the focus of a government tax probe, has in three short years morphed into a money-making behemoth with its showbiz-style mix of cricket, Bollywood and big business.
The corporate dollars that have driven the league’s exponential expansion may now be coming under scrutiny, but while individual heads could roll as a result, most experts agree that the IPL itself is here to stay.
Launched in 2008, the tournament — based on the shortened, made-for-TV Twenty20 format — has consistently punched above its weight, attracting the sport’s top stars to a country where cricket is followed with religious fervour.
Under the stewardship of flamboyant chairman Lalit Modi it has been marketed so effectively and so pervasively that even the lexicon of the game has been changed in an effort to maximise corporate sponsorship.
Thus a six in the IPL is known as a “DFL Maximum” after India’s largest real estate developer, while the sponsorship of Citibank means that a wicket is termed a “Citi Moment of Success.”
Another IPL innovation was to introduce foreign cheerleaders to add glamour to the proceedings, although their skimpy outfits and routines ruffled some feathers in what remains a deeply conservative country.
According to Indian cricket writer Rahul Bhattacharya, watching the IPL “is like encountering one of those post-modern narratives that seeks to satirise consumerism.
“Its relationship with sport is not of participant but consumer. It holds nothing sacred. The IPL knows that it competes not against sport but general entertainment,” Bhattacharya wrote.
While brazen branding has upset purists, their complaints have been largely drowned out by the plaudits of the league’s passionate supporters.
The opening game of the 2010 tournament between Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders attracted 42 million viewers — a 41 percent increase on the inaugural tournament opener — according to India’s television ratings agency, TAM.
These are numbers that advertisers drool over, and have ensured that the money keeps pouring in, with barely a passing nod to the global financial crisis.
As a result, the IPL’s brand value has more than doubled since last year to an estimated $US4.13 billion ($A4.46 billion), according to a study conducted by independent consultancy Brand Finance.
When two new franchises were offered this year to expand the current roster of eight IPL teams, one of them went for $US370 million ($A399.14 million) dollars.
As a point of comparison, Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich paid $US233 million in 2003 for the English Premier League (EPL) side Chelsea, one of the top clubs in Europe.
Before launching the first tournament in 2008, the IPL organisers studied the EPL and sought to emulate its mix of high profile overseas stars, homegrown talent and foreign coaches.
Where the IPL went a step further was to take the idea of entertainment at face value and bring in a host of A-list celebrities from the only thing that rivals cricket as a national obsession — the Indian film industry.
Three Bollywood superstars — Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty — own IPL teams and images of them and other Bollywood glitterati watching games are given a lot of air time in live match broadcasts.
So popular have the prime-time matches become that Bollywood producers try to avoid major film releases during the six-week IPL season for fear of damaging their box office take.
“You have to hand it to the IPL,” said Jiniti Shah, vice president of the rating firm aMap.
“They married these two Indian mainstays, cricket and Bollywood, and packaged them in a short, prime-time format that caters perfectly to modern entertainment demands,” Shah told AFP.
Much of the credit belongs to Modi, 46, who is something of a polarising figure in cricket and media circles.
Detractors portray him as a brash, arrogant Svengali, while admirers hail him as a genuine visionary who created the IPL from scratch and identified deep pockets of marketing revenue where none had previously existed.
When the 2009 IPL was threatened by security concerns — because it clashed with Indian’s lengthy general election — Modi was instrumental in the bold, and ultimately successful decision to shift the entire tournament to South Africa.
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