The Indian Premier League has been one of the biggest sporting success stories of recent years. International stars from all over the world have come to play for Indian club sides. The matches have frequently been nail-biters, and league championships hard fought. The league even survived having to play in South Africa one year due to security concerns in India. Now, however, the whole edifice threatens to fall apart thanks to a degree of high-handed autocracy of a type we are used to seeing from the Pakistan Cricket Board.
The IPL does have some fairly high profile concerns about the legitimacy of business operations. Lalit Modi, the marketing genius who spearheaded the league for its first three years, is now under investigation by Interpol for alleged money laundering. It is not entirely clear, however, whether Modi has really done anything particularly wrong, or whether he is being singled out for special attention because he has offended important people in the Indian government.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has taken firm control of the IPL with a view to cleaning it up. But in doing so they seem to have lost sight of what a sporting league is all about: teams and players. A successful sporting business has many elements. Quality players, exciting games, TV revenue, quality marketing: these are all important components. But the key components that sporting leagues need to have are teams: groups of players who acquire reputations and supporters. If teams are not allowed to establish themselves, they don’t grow their support bases, and they have difficulty making money.
You see this sort of thing occasionally in the USA, for example when franchises move from one city to another. Loyal San José Earthquakes fans, for example, were furious when Major League Soccer took away our hugely successful team and forced them to play in Houston instead. Finding enthusiasm for the replacement Earthquakes team, with a very different squad of players, that we were given a few years later was difficult.
The BCCI has lost sight of the importance of teams in a number of ways. For example, this year they have required the teams to relinquish most of their players and rebuild their squads almost from scratch in a new auction. A certain amount of control over team composition is useful, otherwise you get a few rich teams dominating the league, as happens in European soccer. The draft systems used in US sports, and transfer regulations, are methods that sporting authorities use to counteract this.
Destroying every team in the league, however, is a very different matter. It was very obvious at the end of this year’s Champions’ League that the players of the victorious Chennai Super Kings were upset that they would never get to play together again. Supporters of all IPL clubs have little idea who will be playing for their teams next year. The BCCI, it seems, does not care as long as it can make lots of money out of a big player auction.
Today the BCCI dropped a bombshell. Citing financial and contract irregularities, they have wound up two of the IPL franchises, including the Rajasthan Royals, who won the inaugural league back in 2008. The owners of the affected teams have expressed shock and surprise, and owners of other teams are clearly worried.
It may well be that some of the charges laid against the Rajasthan and Punjab franchises are indeed justified. Given the allegations being thrown around, it would not surprise me if other teams had also done things for which punishments might be handed out. But you can deal with such things using fines and handicapping of teams. The severity of the BCCI’s action suggests that they have no concern for the many cricket fans who follow the league, and raises suspicions that they have ulterior motives.
You see, the BCCI has recently allowed two new teams into the IPL. The suspicion has to be that the BCCI, having pocketed fat buy-in fees from the new teams, and faced with the need to organize a new season with the expanded league, decided to find an excuse to kick out two of the existing teams. It has not escaped my notice that the two teams that have been chosen as scapegoats are both owned by high-profile Bollywood actresses: Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty.
If experience with the PCB is anything to go by, what will happen now is that legal threats will be liberally bandied around, “negotiations” will take place, and suddenly the two miscreant teams will be forgiven and allowed back into the competition. This will do nothing to allay fears of corruption in the IPL. It will do quite the opposite.