🏏 The IPL is Creating Several English Millionaires. Here's how...

One of the strongest ways you can benchmark the success of anything in life is by seeing how much someone us willing to spend to bring it to the world.

When you apply that thinking to sports leagues, the value of the broadcast rights is the objective metric to measure to look at.

This therefore is a list of sports leagues by per match revenue on the planet:

1. NFL: $17 million

2. IPL: $13.4 million

3. EPL: $11 million

4. MLB: $11 million

5. NBA: $9 million

Yes, that is the IPL, which is a Twenty20 Cricket league right up there above the NBA, the Premier League and only second to the NFL!

This asset value is having a marked impact on the success of English cricketers. The IPL will pay three English cricketers more than £1m this year with Sam Curran being one of the highest paid players in the entire competition:

• Sam Curran  Kings XI Punjab, £1.94m

• Liam Livingstone Kings XI Punjab, £1.21m

• Jos Buttler Rajasthan Royals, £1.05m

In addition, plenty of other British players will make a healthy amount of money too:

• Moeen Ali Chennai Super Kings, £800k

• Mark Wood Lucknow Super Giants, £789k

• Chris Woakes Kings XI Punjab, £442k

It’s an unbelievable return for a cricket competition and in my opinion the best execution of a new sports league in history.

There has never been growth of this magnitude in such a short amount of time.

To put things into perspective, the Cricket World Cup Final and the IPL Final were played in the same stadium last year six months apart. The IPL Final had more attendees than the Cricket World Cup Final…

• IPL Final: 101,566

• Cricket World Cup Final: 92,453

Across the six week tournament last year there were 449million viewers in India alone with more than 32million people streaming the final concurrently on the JioCinema streaming service (think the Indian equivalent of the TNT Sports app).

That is an all-time record for a live-streamed event in human history.

Take that in for a second. It’s an incredible feat.

The expansion of the tournament tells a distinct tale too. Last year the IPL grew from 8 teams to 10 teams and there was a rabid bidding war to be owners of the new teams.

CVC Capital, an American private equity company paid $700m for their new team Gujurat Titans to be added to the tournament.

For perspective, Manoj Badale (a prominent Anglo-Indian investor) paid $70m for the Rajasthan Royals to enter the IPL when it was first created in 2008.

David Beckham paid $25m for Inter Miami when he moved to the MLS in the Mid-2000s.

The $700m paid is a record for an expansion team in any sports league globally and again goes to show how in-demand people are around the world to get a piece of the IPL.

I won’t mince my words when I say this, the Indian Premier League is an absolute monster and its truly remarkable how big the competition is considering it was only created 16 years ago.

In 2005, Andrew Flintoff became a national icon after his performances for England in the famous 2005 Ashes series. That year he was reported to make £500,000 for his efforts including a bevy of off-field sponsors that came his way.

Now, several cricketers are 3x making that for 6-weeks work playing franchise cricket in India BEFORE their endorsements, BEFORE salaries from their own clubs back in England and BEFORE cheques they get from other cricketing tournaments too.

There has never been a better time to be an English cricketer.

I’ll leave you this week with an excellent conversation with Manoj Badale himself. He was on the Sky Sports Cricket podcast this week and spoke on:

• How much he has to pay to upkeep an IPL team every year

• The sheer risk of investing in the IPL in its infancy

• How the IPL will continue to grow for years to come

• How The Hundred can learn from the IPL

+ more

An excellent conversation.

See you next week.