BCCI will incur several losses after the sudden suspension of the 14th edition of the Indian Premier League – IPL 2021 – following bio-bubble breaches and multiple COVID-19 positive cases in different franchises.
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The first half of the tournament proceeded with little to no anxiety around the security of the IPL bio-bubble, but things spiralled downwards dramatically earlier in the week resulting in the BCCI suspending it altogether, with hopes of resuming the tournament at some stage later in the year, and asking players to return to their families.
What losses do BCCI incur for suspending IPL 2021?
The largest chunk of money BCCI gets is from the official broadcasters, Star. The agreement with Star is for a five-year duration where they pay BCCI a total of INR 16,347, which equates to roughly INR 3200 crore per year. Nearly half of that will be lost to BCCI with just 29 matches of the 60 played this season.
“We would be losing anything between INR 2,000 to INR 2,500 crore for the midway postponement of this season. I would say something in the range of INR 2200 crore will be closer to accurate estimation,” a Times of India report, quoting a BCCI official, revealed.
The board also has an array of sponsors who wouldn’t be too happy with the postponement. Aside from VIVO, there are sponsors like Unacademy, Dream11, CRed, Upstox and Tata Motors among the primary sponsors. With half the season suspended, the losses are also likely more than half of the total expected amounts from these sponsors.
How does this affect the franchises? The current model has BCCI splitting a share of this revenue equally among the eight franchises. As such, BCCI’s loss is the franchises’ too and they will likely get much lesser from the BCCI revenue split this year.
Losses beyond the IPL
The bigger worry for BCCI is the T20 World Cup set to be held in India later this year. Part of the reason for BCCI staging the IPL this year in India was to show the ICC that they could stage a tournament with as many players in the country despite the raging pandemic.
The IPL was played across six venues and travelling from one to another is believed to have played a role in the bubble breach. The T20 World Cup is scheduled to take place across nine venues – Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Dharamsala, Hyderabad and Lucknow in five months’ time.
Staging the T20 World Cup in India after the suspension of the IPL will be a difficult proposition, especially as the board will need to convince member nations aside from the ICC itself.
