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There are two reasons to own an IPL team.
The first is soft power. The second is cold hard cash.
“It’s the number one sporting property in a country of 1.4 billion people,” explains Mike Fordham, who has worked across the launch of almost every major T20 league, including the IPL back in 2008.
“The shape of the business is such that every team is completely guaranteed profitability every year because you’ve got a guaranteed chunk of central revenues coming in. Currently the league makes $1.2bn (about £890million) a year in media rights, 50 per cent of which goes to the teams, so each team is guaranteed $60m in media rights a year.
“You’ve got pretty tight controls on costs compared to a league like the Premier League, where teams will spend, say, 100 per cent of their revenues on player wages. But in the IPL, you’ve got very tightly capped costs on players and every team has a minimum and maximum spend. The league doesn’t have relegation. You can’t muck it up.”
Fans of Sunrisers Hyderabad whip up the pre-match atmosphere (Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images)
The joke used to be that the fastest way to become a millionaire was to become a billionaire and then buy a sports team. To own a sports team was a romantic’s pursuit where the cost of chasing a dream was cash. But such has been the success of the IPL, where all the numbers are pointing up, that even the least romantic of people on the planet have become interested: private equity.
Since the start of 2025, three of the 10 IPL franchises have been purchased by new owners. Just over a year ago, two-thirds of Gujarat Titans was purchased for approximately $575m by Indian conglomerate Torrent Group, with the remaining third owned by private equity company CVC Capital Partners. More recently, Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, along with another prominent Indian businessman Adar Poonawalla, acquired Rajasthan Royals for $1.65bn.
The most expensive purchase, however, was that of Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) — who were bought by a consortium comprising of the Aditya Birla Group and the Times of India Group, both Indian companies, plus Bolt Ventures and Blackstone’s private equity wing, BXPE, both American — for $1.78bn.
“These teams don’t change hands very often,” Fordham explains. “So when they do, like RCB and Rajasthan did recently, you have a situation where everyone wants to buy. Because if you’re a billionaire in India you want an IPL team. And now you’ve got U.S. private equity that’s particularly interested, too. It’s the perfect storm.”
Last year’s final between RCB and Punjab Kings was the most watched match on Indian television in history, with 169 million people tuning in. Ahead of this year’s 2026 final on Sunday between RCB and Gujarat Titans, the tournament has already surpassed 1.1 billion viewers across television and digital platforms, according to Indian broadcaster JioStar.
Soccer’s World Cup final in July will surely be the most viewed sporting occasion of 2026, but Sunday’s final at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad will challenge the Super Bowl for viewers of a one-off event.
On a per-match basis, the media value of the IPL is the second most lucrative in the world behind the NFL. And when the deal is up for renewal next year, that number is expected to grow once again.
“For the first 10 years they were $100m a year,” Fordham says. “Then for the next five years they were $500m, and now they’re $1.2bn. It won’t continue to grow at that rate, but does it go from $1.2bn to $1.5bn?”
The great India batter Virat Kohli reacts to winning last season’s IPL (Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images)
An important thing to understand about the growth and subsequent foreign investment into the IPL is that it is as much an investment into India as an economic market as it is into a sporting league. For the domestic billionaires, there is glamour involved in their investment, but foreign money wants hard returns.
“This is the thing,” explains Arun Harinath, former Surrey batter who now works for A&W Capital, an advisory firm who were in the room for the recent Rajasthan Royals and Royal Challengers Bengaluru purchases. “The IPL needs to be viewed not just about cricket, but a reflection of the Indian economy as well.
“The World Economic Forum is projecting household consumption to go from $1.5trillion (in 2019) to $6trillion by 2030. It could become the third largest consumer market in the world. And it’s already a digital economy that has 7-800 million smartphones. So smartphone penetration is high.”
A decade ago, India went through a process called demonetisation as overnight — literally — Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that notes worth 500 rupees and 1,000 rupees could no longer be used. The two denominations accounted for 86 per cent of the nation’s currency in circulation in a country where 90 per cent of transactions were made in cash. It caused havoc.
In the same year, however, the government also introduced a contactless payment technology to move India from cash to online. Ten years later, the impact of an increasingly digital economy is taking effect.
“Year-on-year, people are starting to pay for digital subscriptions,” Harinath explains. “So all of that digital technology that is behind a paywall, people have started to embrace that.
“You’ve got so many eyeballs. And you’re just starting to see the eyeballs translate into monetisation.”
The question is how much further the IPL can go. Currently, all the lines are green. And as of 2026, it shows no sign of slowing. “I think there’s room for it to grow even further,” says Ravi Shastri, former head coach and cricketer for India, and current broadcaster.
“Having been involved with the IPL from the outset and having sat on the governing council for the first eight years, I was never in doubt that it was going to be a success.
“And to see where it has gone today, after 18 years, is unbelievable. The eyeballs for two months are fixed on the television screen in our part of the world, which has the largest population. Everything comes to a standstill. Nothing else moves after 6pm for close to 60 plus days a year which is phenomenal.
“(It can get bigger), not just in the number of days we play, but teams being added. And catching the imagination of one and all.”
A billboard featuring the Kolkata Knight Riders team outside Eden Gardens in Kolkata (Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP via Getty Images)
According to Shastri, this is now the big five: the Premier League, the Olympics, the (soccer) World Cup, Formula One and the IPL. “I know NFL is big and I know NBA is big,” he adds, “but cricket is right up there.”
But Fordham is unsure of the league’s desire to expand unless one thing can be assured: value.
The IPL is now at 10 teams but only after a second attempt. Its initial expansion from eight to 10 sides in 2011 failed after two years, and it was only once they were convinced it would succeed that they expanded to 10 again in 2022.
“They were quite conservative about going back to 10,” Fordham says. “Now if they were to go to 12 or 14, they would have to be certain that it was worth it financially. Will the media rights be worth more, comparatively, if you go to 12? And you’d also need a longer window to play. Do they want to start in February and go through to May?
“Even if they went to six or nine months, they could do that, and it probably wouldn’t suffer financially because the Indian fan is mainly interested in watching Indian players. But I don’t believe that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) want to completely destroy world cricket, which some people think they do.
“Every cricket leader I’ve ever talked to says, ‘We’ll be the ones to get Indian players in our leagues’. But the BCCI are not releasing guys to (rival white-ball leagues) The Hundred, the Big Bash or the SA20 anytime soon. They’re happy to protect their primacy by having the best players and having this window, but I don’t see it getting much longer.”
Crowds gather outside Vidhana Soudha in Bangalore to celebrate the Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s success last season (Stringer/AFP via Getty Images)
When the IPL started in 2008, it was an eight-team tournament that was 59 matches long. Almost two decades and billions of dollars later, it has increased only to 10 teams competing across 74 matches.
Nevertheless, India remains the market into which the rest of the world wants to tap. In recent weeks it has been reported that Australia’s Big Bash is exploring the possibility of playing the tournament’s opening match in India.
“Every league around the world has tried to have a twin strategy of monetising your own domestic market, but also what money can you get out of the Indian market?” Fordham says.
Who such a move benefits remains unclear. Australian fans will struggle to watch due to time differences, and why would Indian fans care? They already have their league. Nevertheless the allure of Indian money remains, as the numbers keep on going up.
“You say hard cash,” concludes Harinath. “But for a private equity investor, it’s rational.”
