Cricket reinvented: the rise of the IPL

How a competition designed to fill empty seats came to finance an entire sport

A The shortest form of professional cricket was invented to solve an accounting problem. English county clubs at the beginning of this century were playing to sparse crowds in long matches on weekday afternoons, and their administrators concluded that the product, rather than the marketing, was the difficulty. The competition they introduced in 2003 limited each side to twenty overs, compressed the whole contest into an evening, and was designed explicitly around the convenience of a spectator with a job. It was regarded within the game as a gimmick, tolerated because it made money, and few of those who authorised it expected it to alter anything of consequence. The early evidence for that view was the behaviour of the counties themselves, several of which fielded weakened sides in the new competition and reserved their best players for the older one. Crowds nevertheless arrived, in numbers the same grounds had not seen on a weekday for a generation, and a substantial proportion of them were women and children who had never previously attended a professional match.

B Its reception in India transformed the calculation. A national side that had treated the format with visible disdain won the inaugural world tournament in 2007 with an inexperienced team, and the victory arrived in a market of unmatched size and appetite. Within months the national board had announced a domestic league built on the new format, and it did so partly in response to a competitor: an unsanctioned rival league had already signed players, and the official response was less an act of enterprise than of defence. The rival had been assembled by a media company excluded from the broadcasting rights, had recruited players by offering money the official structure would not match, and had been countered by threats of suspension from national selection. Establishing a sanctioned competition on the same model was the only response likely to work, and it worked completely: the rival collapsed within two seasons, and most of its players were quietly readmitted.

C What distinguished the new competition was not the cricket but the ownership. Teams were sold as franchises to industrialists and film stars, and players were distributed not by geography or loyalty but by auction, with each franchise bidding against the others within a spending limit. The consequences ran deeper than the novelty suggested. A cricketer's earnings ceased to depend on the strength of his own national board, so a player from a poorer cricketing nation could earn in six weeks what a career of international appearances would not provide, and the balance of power between players and boards moved decisively. The auction also produced an unfamiliar spectacle for a sport organised around national representation: teams composed of players from countries that were, in the other half of the calendar, opponents. A bowler might spend April sharing a dressing room with the batsmen he would be trying to dismiss in July, an arrangement that senior figures predicted would corrode the intensity of international cricket and which appears, on the evidence so far, to have done nothing of the kind.

D The format also rewarded skills that the longer game had regarded as eccentric. Batting techniques designed to hit behind the wicketkeeper, deliveries bowled deliberately slower than the batsman expects, fielding treated as an athletic speciality rather than an interval between overs: all became central, and all subsequently migrated into the longer forms, where scoring rates have risen markedly. The traffic has been in both directions, which is the strongest answer to the accusation that the short game degrades technique. A generation of batsmen raised on twenty overs has proved willing to score at rates in the five-day game that were once considered reckless, and has thereby made results possible in matches that would previously have been drawn. Whether this constitutes improvement or merely change is a matter on which reasonable observers differ, but it is not stagnation.

E The accusation persists nonetheless, and the more serious version of it concerns the calendar rather than technique. A season has a fixed number of days, a body has a finite number of matches in it, and the leagues that have proliferated in imitation now occupy windows that once belonged to international cricket. Players have begun to decline national contracts in favour of a portfolio of league engagements, a decision that would have been unthinkable a generation ago and is now merely commercial. Administrators who welcomed the revenue are discovering that they cannot also control the schedule. The countries most affected are those whose boards depend on hosting the wealthier nations for their income, and which therefore cannot afford either to lose their best players to the leagues or to refuse the leagues access to their calendar. The consequence is a sport in which the fixtures that generate the money and the fixtures that carry the prestige are increasingly played by different people.

F Whether the longest form of the game survives this is the question the sport asks itself most often, and the honest answer is that it depends on markets rather than on merit. Five-day cricket is expensive to stage, draws well in a few countries and poorly in most, and is subsidised in nearly all of them by the revenue the short game generates. That arrangement is stable only while the subsidy is willingly paid. The defenders of the long game tend to argue from history and its critics from arithmetic, and the arithmetic has the better of it in every market but two or three. What began as an English attempt to fill empty seats on a weeknight has ended by financing the entire structure of the sport, and by acquiring, in the process, the power that paying for something confers.