Cricket is one of the most popular sports in countries like the United Kingdom, India, and Australia. However, most of the market share of this sport is taken by India considering how the country has such a large population. In fact, the largest event in the sport, Indian Premier League (IPL) is sometimes responsible for revenues averaging $3 billion within a year.
In fact, 2004 was the best performing year for the IPL where it managed to generate around $4.1 billion revenue just from advertising, player auctions and viewership fees. The only time that it managed to match the same numbers was in 2017, signaling that the sport is starting to become more and more popular over the last few years after decreasing significantly in the decade.
How the IPL generates income
The Indian Premier League, much like any other sports industry in the world relies on advertising, viewership tickets and the auctions conducted on the players. Not to mention dozens of sponsors vying for a spot on the sportsmen’s uniforms and etc.
Whatever the sports industry gets their hands on, they manage to generate some income out of it, but there are some that are better at it.
When it comes to world coverage, there is no sport that beats football, but in terms of the volume of viewers, Cricket is starting to climb the ranking thanks to the millions of viewers from India alone.
You see, by pairing up the prices of the United Kingdom and Australia with the viewership of India, Cricket is able to generate billions of dollars by simply recording the games and airing them on specific channels where they get additionally profitable advertising deals.
A darker side of Cricket
Finally, we have one of the most popular and pretty much ancient ways of generating profit from sports. Betting.
Cricket, much like any other sport in the world has a large betting industry. Every viewer has the opportunity to place a bet on their favorite player as well as a team to predict the outcome of a match. If they were correct, they get a significantly large sum of money back.
However, considering how Cricket is a sport where almost everything can go wrong within seconds of starting the game, the chance to win is much lower. However, in order to compensate for these issues, especially during the Indian Premier League 2020, most betting companies increase the prize pool to make it more enticing.
It would be false to say that nobody wins when betting on Cricket, but it’s much harder and complicated when comparing it to betting on football or basketball.
2019 proceedings to predict 2020
The IPL conducted in 2019 received the valuation of around $6.8 billion, giving the sport the highest value it has ever seen in the past.
In terms of ad revenue, the 2019 IPL season managed to bring in slightly more than it’s 2018 predecessor, but that doesn’t mean that 2020 will see an increase on that number as well.
You see, when industries grow extremely fast over the years, every year becomes harder and harder to match. Imagine a company that had the goal of achieving $20 million in revenue in 2015. Let’s say they managed to do it and increased their goals for 2016 of around $22 million. They reached it as well but with much more hard work and dedication. Say this continues up until 2018 where the company barely managed to reach its goal of $30 million in revenue. So much so that they had to fire some employees along the way just to reach it.
The $35 million goals for 2019 would become even harder, and thus have the possibility of making the company fail. Constant growth is not maintainable and hyping it up will bring a lot more damage than it will fix.
Therefore, there are many experts saying that overcoming the expectations of IPL 2020 revenue is going to be nearly impossible.
Because of this, it is expected that in the year 2020 there will be a lot fewer sponsors vouching for teams and individual players, fewer people watching the events and even players participating in it due to slightly lowered salaries and payouts.
Overall, the expectations on IPL 2020 performance are very pessimistic, however, should they prove to overcome this pessimism, it’s almost guaranteed to kickstart a new level of confidence in the sport for coming seasons in 2021 and 2022. So IPL 2020 is more of an investment for the sport than the organizers can realize.