Sundar Raman, former chief operating officer of the Indian Premier League explained why world cricket cannot afford the cancellation of the IPL 2020. Even if they have to choose between T20 World Cup and IPL, the latter one will be a sure winner, Raman believes.
Sundar Raman forecasts post-COVID future of cricket
Sundar Raman worked on the Indian Premier League since its inception and he was also one of the seniors working in the ICC. He has been working on the present crisis of global cricket and the possible cures world cricket needs to deal with the COVID-19. While speaking about the debate between T20 World Cup and IPL, Raman clearly voted for the latter one.
He explained that the IPL guarantees US$100m in players’ salaries annually (Rs 85 cr per franchise multiplied by 8). He added that the Indian Premier League alone generates close to 40% of cricket’s global revenue. In his view, the World Cup can be rescheduled next year but the loss of one IPL season would be huge for cricket world to recover. Raman worked on two possible scenarios; in the first case where sports would return to the digital platform by July 2020 and the audience would return to the stadium by January 2021, the revenue loss would be around 48%. Out of the 48%, 2/3rd would be due to the league. In the second scenario, sports would return to the digital platform by December 2020 and fans would start going to the stadium by April 2021. In this case revenue loss would be 88% out of which 36.1% would be due to the league and 22.3% would be because of the World Cup.
The curious case of Indian Premier League
Now the revenue of cricket world largely depends on the association of the Indian cricket team. Playing in India or India participating is a great potential of cricket revenue generation. Rama said to Cricbuzz, “This potential opportunity of India’s revenue contribution (unrealised by India) is alone worth US$ 1.2b over a 4-year cycle (2019-2022).” In fact, a third of cricket revenues in 2019 came from the IPL despite England hosting a 50-overs World Cup. So, no wonder why Raman is voting for the same.
Raman concluded, “IPL remains as the single biggest event for the global cricket economy. With a contribution of around 1/3rd of global cricket revenues annually, the importance of IPL cricket’s global economy cannot be over stressed. If IPL was to be considered a separate cricket body and revenues from IPL were to be removed from the Indian cricket boards revenues, IPL would emerge as the biggest revenue generator for global cricket – higher even than ICC & ACC revenues combined.”
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