The Indian Premier League (IPL) is huge and continues to grow by leaps and bounds, square-cuts, and sixes.
To demonstrate this growth not merely by dollar amounts, although this will also have some bearing, a Google search for Indian Premier League gave some 9, 120, 000 search results.
This can be compared with a search at Google for the National Basketball Association (NBA), which returned a 9, 480, 000 search return. This demonstrates that on the internet alone IPL cricket is on par with that of the mighty NBA, which is a much older sporting concept.
The Indian Premier League, is a Twenty20 cricket competition initiated by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and supervised by BCCI Vice President Lalit Modi, Chairman & Commissioner for IPL.
It presently operates as 10 teams which are referred to as franchises as they represent arms of the IPL's trade mark. The franchise, similar to the American model of the NBA represents different cities throughout India. Each franchise tend to consist of the best of the best within the cricketing world.
Each team can buy a maximum of eight overseas players but only four would be able to take the field in a match. Each franchise will play the other franchises at their respective home and away, the top four teams at the end of the group stages will proceed through to the semi-finals.
A franchise can acquire a player in the annual auction, buying domestic players, signing uncapped players, through trading, and buying replacements.
The IPL concept began after an altercation between the BCCI and the newly-created Indian Cricket League. The tournament started on 18 April 2008 and has been vast expectation seem like a walk in the park.
It was the first sporting event ever to be broadcast live on the popular video sharing website Youtube, and now the IPL's brand value was estimated to be around $4.13 billion in 2010.
Global sports salaries review has claimed that the IPL is the second highest-paid league, based on first-team salaries on a pro-rata basis, only second to NBA league. It is calculated that average salary of IPL over a year is £2.5 million.
The IPL is predicted to bring the BCCI income of approximately US$1.6 billion, over a period of five to ten years. On January 2008 India's Sony Entertainment Television network and Singapore-based World Sport Group, secured the global broadcasting rights of the Indian Premier League. The record deal has a duration of ten years at a cost of US 87 billion for 10 years. Sony-WSG then re-sold parts of the broadcasting rights geographically to other companies.
India's biggest property developer DLF (Delhi Land and Finance ) Group also jump on the bandwagon and paid US$50 million to be the title sponsor of the tournament for 5 years from 2008 to 2013, and hence its depiction in the logo of the IPL logo.
The BCCI had found itself in the middle of many conflicts with various cricket boards around the world as a result of the IPL. The main point of contention was that signed players should always be available to their country for international tours, even if it overlaps with the IPL season.
