Cricket

Today's guest columnist is Josh Lalor, an Australian professional cricket player and consultant for KPMG. The June sale of media rights for the next five ...

Lalor, a consultant with KPMG, has spent the past 15 years playing cricket professionally in Australia and other leagues around the world. A sport which has been built on the foundation of creating strong cricket-playing nations is being disrupted by an even stronger league in India—and the prospect of an emerging U.S. If the IPL decides to do so, it now has the capacity to offer the best players in the world a higher salary for a 10-week tournament than they can earn with their national teams in a year. The IPL remains the catalyst that influences the rest of the game globally, perhaps more so than those of us inside the sport could imagine. Meanwhile, the sport is drawing the interest of some of American business’ best and brightest. As the sport’s chief innovator, the IPL undoubtedly has plans for MLC and the USA’s population of roughly 4.5 million Indian expats. Under Marathe, USA Cricket has won the right to co-host the T20 World Cup in 2024. Disney and Viacom18 did not rest, with Disney retaining the TV rights at $3 billion and Viacom18 winning the digital rights for around the same amount, staggering figures. The IPL is the pinnacle of T20 cricket, the game’s shortest form—a little like a Major League Baseball contest, but where it’s possible to see the equivalent of 20 home runs per game. [India](https://www.sportico.com/t/india/) alone, it’s a fair assumption that 1 in 5 people on the planet are IPL fans. Amazon, Disney and Viacom18 are household media conglomerates that were short-listed to participate in the media rights e-auction, with Amazon pulling out at the 11th hour, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall. In May it was announced that Chris Paul and Larry Fitzgerald invested in the Rajasthan Royals, the inaugural IPL winners in 2008, joining co-owner RedBird Capital, which bought a 15% stake in 2020.