Tonight the Deccan Chargers and the Kolkata Knight Riders will join battle in one of the hottest sporting events in the world. In a country of 1.2 billion people, most of whom are bonkers about cricket, the Indian Premier League (IPL) — the fast-paced, 20-over version of the game — is a symbol of everything they want India to become: a true global power.
With its billionaire club owners, international stars and Bollywood swagger, the IPL has become an emblem of their aspirations and an illustration of how the global economy is shifting East. And the father of this new India is considered to be the most powerful man in world cricket; a successor to Gandhi, in Gucci loafers.
Maybe it is the police bodyguard shadowing him, pistol on hip. Maybe it is the two BlackBerrys that he checks constantly and the four sugars that he demands in his tea, with the urgency of an addict. Whatever it is, there is something about Lalit Modi, as he sits in his office above the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, that suggests a reservoir of pressurised energy.
He paints a grand vision: nothing less than the transformation of cricket into a genuinely global sport. It already has the potential to reach two billion people, he claims (half of them in India), but cricket has been stymied by myopic administrators, nepotism, corruption, vested interests, personal fiefdoms and incompetence. Mend these problems, however, and America and China, which for so long have been resistant to cricket’s charms, can be conquered. All that is needed is the right salesman (him), the right product (the IPL) and a belief in the power of the market.
In Mr Modi’s world, fans are consumers, matches are content. The IPL, a competition for eight city-based teams featuring many of the sport’s international stars, is only three years old but already a major part of the calendar. His mission is to make cricket enticing and accessible — and hence more lucrative. In 2008 he introduced cheerleaders to the game, causing a storm among conservatives; this year he forged a deal with Google and YouTube to show live IPL matches online. “I see the IPL becoming bigger than the NFL, the NBA, the English Premier League,” he tells The Times with typical grandiloquence.
In person he can radiate a heady cocktail of disarming charm, monumental self-belief and iron will. Or, by many other accounts, he can be horrid. “How can I put this . . .” are often the first words of acquaintances when asked to give their opinions of Mr Modi. “They either love him or hate him,” says Kadambari Murali, the sports editor of the Hindustan Times. “But everybody in India has an opinion about Lalit.”
The idea for the IPL had been gestating ever since Mr Modi was a student in the US, but the real impetus came when he had a cup of tea with a leading sports agent at Wimbledon in July 2007 — by which time he was the vice-president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the national governing body.
What followed testifies to his powers of organisation. By the time the first ball was bowled nine months later, the tournament had generated $2 billion (£1.3 billion) from the sale of television rights, team franchises and other licences. In 2004, before Mr Modi battled his way on to the Indian cricket board, which owns the IPL, its annual income was probably less than $15 million. In the Modi era cricketers can earn — pro rata, at least — sums to rival those of their footballing peers. Last year Andrew Flintoff made $250,000 a week while he was involved in the competition.
From the outset Mr Modi has scandalised the purists, from Mumbai to Antigua to London. The IPL’s 20-over format might allow a match to be wrapped up in the time that it takes to watch a Bollywood movie — but at the expense of the subtlety and guile that makes Test cricket special, they say.
One pundit compared Mr Modi to a “modern Charlemagne, with a little touch of Frederick the Great, the Prussian king A. J. P. Taylor called ‘a barbarian of genius’.” Others, with less imagination and more venom, have accused him of selling cricket’s soul to make a quick buck.
Mr Modi, however, is unrepentant. “Either we innovate and bring in new fans, or we don’t innovate and we let the sport die,” he says. The cash generated by the IPL will trickle down, he says. Already, training facilities are being built across India. He promises that the same will happen — somehow — as far afield as Britain.
He becomes still more animated when talking about the IPL business model. He describes how he devoted a decade to the research that culminated in the league; how bits were borrowed from every major sports competition in the world. The objective: to avoid the curse of football’s Premier League, a competition that 43 sides have played in but only four have won. “We didn’t want a Man United or a Chelsea,” he says, explaining how caps on spending in the IPL have been designed to avoid one team owner buying all the top players.
The rule sounds as if it may have been formulated out of a sense of fair play. In fact, Mr Modi freely admits, it exists to maximise television audiences, advertising revenues and merchandise sales.
So does he see himself as the owner of media content, obliged to secure the most lucrative deals, or as a long-term custodian of cricket? “A custodian,” he replies indignantly, apparently hurt at having been asked. The IPL, he says, is about accruing audiences, not money. Test cricket is not in danger, because the Indian cricket authorities still make more out of Tests and international one-day games than they do out of the new league.
He does, however, believe that Test cricket must evolve. His vision is for a switch to games starting in the afternoon and continuing into the evening under floodlights. You might think such a proposal would receive an icy reception from MCC, the guardians of the cricketing code — but the fact is that MCC officials appear to be getting behind the Modi way. Lord’s has floodlights and MCC has considered joining a consortium to buy an IPL side.
Indeed, reviewing Mr Modi’s successes so far, it is tempting to assume that the future of the IPL is assured. Certainly India’s standing as cricket’s financial superpower has been confirmed. Doubts still linger, however, over the league’s sustainability — just as they do over India’s progress to great power status as it struggles to deal with the same problems that Mr Modi has sought to overcome. At least half of the IPL team owners are probably not making profits yet and questions hang over whether the league will prove lucrative in the long term. On Sunday Mr Modi’s efforts to sell two new IPL teams in an auction with a base price of $225 million fell flat.
“The bids that were received were returned without being opened,” he said. He added little else in the way of explanation — an omission that will increase suspicions that the IPL has fallen short of the money-spinning bonanza that its creator had promised investors.
That may not matter if billionaire team owners are happy to treat IPL sides as trophy assets. But there is a disquieting parallel to be drawn with India as a nation. The country looks to be on a path towards double-digit economic growth. A cushion of domestic demand and low reliance on exports helped it to weather the global economic downturn — and yet 47 per cent of Indian children are still malnourished.
“Inclusive growth” — benefiting the underclass as well as the middle class — is cited as a goal by the ruling Congress Party, but it remains elusive. The second-highest rate of economic expansion by a major country, after China, still conceals all manner of deprivation.
Mr Modi is a famous workaholic, thinking nothing of telephoning a subordinate at 4am. India’s policymakers will have to emulate him if the coming century is truly to belong to all of their countrymen.
Lalit Kumar Modi, 46
1963 Born into wealthy trading family in Delhi. Modi Enterprises had grown into a multimillion-dollar business empire since its foundation in 1933
1983-86 Studies engineering and business administration at Duke University in the US; trains at Philip Morris and Estée Lauder. Marries Minal, a friend of his mother, who is nine years his senior. She gets a divorce in order to marry him
1987-91 Serves as president of International Tobacco Company, an Indian firm
1992 Becomes executive director of Godfrey Phillips, India’s second-largest tobacco company
1994 First suggests a new Indian limited-over cricket league, but Indian cricket board rejects the idea
1995 Introduces ESPN pay channel, which allows Indians to watch world class cricket
2002 Launches 10 Sports channel
2005 Becomes president of Rajasthan Cricket Association, using a controversial law to secure his election; soon appointed vice-president of Indian cricket board
2007 Launches Indian Premier League
2010 IPL valued at $4.1 billion
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