Indian Premier League Cricket

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I am listening to the Kolkata Knight Riders anthem as my pump-up song.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
Oh, nice!

**Ben Gilbert** (0:06)
It is so awesome. Have you seen the music video with Shah Rukh Khan, the owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders?

**David Rosenthal** (0:13)
No.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:13)
He is the main character with the Bollywood dance around him.

**David Rosenthal** (0:17)
Okay, I'm gonna go watch it right now.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:19)
And it's a little cheesy, because I think it's from 2008 era, but it is perfect pump-up music.

**David Rosenthal** (0:25)
Oh, yes. We've got the player silhouettes in fire.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:29)
Yes, that's exactly the one.

**David Rosenthal** (0:31)
This is incredible. How have I not seen this before?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:36)
This is something that American sports definitely need to adopt.

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
Oh man, we've got like a construction crew. Too hot, too cool.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:44)
That is exactly the right reaction.

**David Rosenthal** (0:46)
Okay, I'm gonna pause it. We're not even gonna record an episode if we didn't watch this over.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:52)
All right, let's do it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:53)
Let's do it.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:54)
Who got the truth? Welcome to the spring 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (1:18)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:19)
And we are your hosts. Today, we cover the most interesting story in sports, cricket. Now, when David pitched me this idea a few months ago, I thought, I'm not that interested in cricket. And to all of our US listeners out there, I am guessing you feel the same way. But I was very wrong.

**David Rosenthal** (1:38)
Hey, there are 20 million hardcore cricket fans in the US today.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:42)
Great point.

**David Rosenthal** (1:43)
As we will get into later in the episode.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:45)
Great point. And listeners, this story really isn't about the game of cricket anyways. It's about how to create a massively successful sports league from scratch, something that I thought was impossible after doing our NFL and NBA episodes, which each took 100 years to get to where they are today. Indian Premier League cricket started a mere 17 years ago in 2008 And even more than a sports league, the IPL is a case study in how to create the perfect entertainment product. They took this sleepy, polite British sport with matches that lasted five days, and they completely transformed it. It is compressed down to three hours. It's a high-octane slugfest that is all about power-hitting and hitting sixes, the sort of cricket equivalent of a home run. It's got Bollywood glamour and on-field dance performances, cheerleaders, fireworks. And the way they started the league itself was a high-stakes auction to a group of billionaires and movie stars. And of course, they carefully studied all the mechanics that made the NBA and the NFL as successful as they are today, and then applied them on steroids.

**David Rosenthal** (2:52)
It's an amazing story.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:53)
On top of all of this, the story itself has just about the most palace intrigue of any company we've ever studied. You've got Disney, Philip Morris, Rupert Murdoch, Reliance, Tata, and even Google. There's a very, very complicated founder figure. There's corruption, there's potential self-dealing, betting, rigging, and miraculously, the league has been successful despite all that. So successful, in fact, that it is the fastest growing major sports league in the world, growing 20x in value since 2008 to be worth more than $16 billion today. Insanely, the media rights to each match are so valuable that they're second only to the NFL. The TV broadcast rights, let me just say this again, for each match are worth more than an English Premier League soccer match.

**David Rosenthal** (3:46)
Or an NBA game or a Major League Baseball game.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:48)
Yes. There's one angle where IPL cricket looks like pure unadulterated capitalism applied to the world of sports. But there's another angle where it looks a lot more like a religion, or a unifying cultural force, or even a mechanism of diplomacy, as we shall see. And David, I don't want to spoil too much, but last night, before we were recording, you were pitching me that 20 years from now, the IPL will be the largest sports league on the planet, period, bigger than the NFL.

**David Rosenthal** (4:18)
That is the case I'm going to make on this episode. It's funny, on our NFL episode, we came to the conclusion that the NFL is this perfect blend of communism and capitalism. And I was thinking, oh, maybe the IPL will be an even more perfect blend. No, it's the perfect blend of capitalism and religion.