IPL FEVER ..

By Debjani Basu

IPL or Indian Premier League is the latest craze in cricket. It is a Twenty20 cricket competition created by the BCCI and is now the most watched domestic Twenty20 competition in the world. All the 59 matches of the second season of IPL is running this year in South Africa. The Twenty20 league is set to debut in April 2008, with eight teams comprising a minimum of 16 players each.

The IPL works on a franchise-system based on the American style of hiring players and transfers. These franchises were put for auction, where the highest bidder won the rights to own the team, representing each city.

The auction for the same took place on January 24, 2008 and the total base price for the auction was $400 million. The auction went on to fetch $723.59 million.
The Mumbai franchise owned by Mukesh Ambani’s reliance industries limited was the most expensive franchise - fetching $111.9 million closely followed by Vijay Mallya’s united breweries which paid $111.6 million for the Bangalore franchise.

Bollywood also made its presence felt with two of its leading stars bagging the ownership of their respective teams - Shah Rukh Khan and Juhi Chawla’s Red Chillies Entertainment buying out Kolkata for $75.09, while Preity Zinta and her beau Ness Wadia bought the Mohali team for $76 million.

I feel on the face of it, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has already been a huge hit, attracting millions of dollars in bids from the country’s biggest industrialists and Bollywood stars for franchisee ownership and for television rights.

But, the much hyped cricket league, which has already started, has surprisingly stumbled in its attempt to find new advertisers willing to sign up for all the available sponsorship slots. Less than few hours from the coin toss of the first match, the board of control for cricket in India (BCCI), promoters of IPL, are still hunting for ground sponsors. This could give wrong signals on how IPL 2009 will fare, so still we have to wait n watch whether it will able to catch similar kind of eyeballs or not like it did in IPL 2008.