The video explores how cricket, a sport with deep ties to British tradition, struggled with declining viewership and commercial viability. However, the advent of the Indian Premier League (IPL) catalyzed a revitalization, transforming cricket into one of the world's largest sports franchises, second only to the NFL. The IPL's success is credited to India, whose substantial population has catapulted the event's global viewership and financial appeal, reversing cricket's declining trend dramatically.

The documentary delves into how cricket's intricate rules and lengthy playtimes initially hampered its global popularity. Cricket spread through British colonization but struggled to attract new audiences. Innovations like the Twenty20 format helped make the game more dynamic and accessible, setting the stage for the IPL's blockbuster debut in 2008. The IPL infused cricket with entertainment elements reminiscent of American sports leagues, creating new franchises and attracting top players, thus surpassing traditional cricket formats in economic significance.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. enigmatic [ˌenɪɡˈmætɪk] - (adjective) - Difficult to interpret or understand; mysterious - Synonyms: (mysterious, puzzling, cryptic)

It's one of those kind of quite enigmatic sports to describe.

2. proliferate [prəˈlɪfəˌreɪt] - (verb) - To increase rapidly in numbers; multiply - Synonyms: (escalate, multiply, burgeon)

This pressure only intensified as the unparalleled popularity of mega franchises like the NFL and the EPL continued to proliferate.

3. disruption [dɪsˈrʌpʃən] - (noun) - Disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process - Synonyms: (disturbance, interruption, interference)

But it would take a total disruption in 2008 to change the course of cricket.

4. spectacle [ˈspektəkəl] - (noun) - An event or scene regarded in terms of its visual impact - Synonyms: (display, show, extravaganza)

They made it into a spectacle, and the old fashioned traditionalists find this abhorrent to them.

5. abhorrent [æbˈhɔːrənt] - (adjective) - Inspiring disgust and loathing; repugnant - Synonyms: (detestable, loathsome, repulsive)

They made it into a spectacle, and the old fashioned traditionalists find this abhorrent to them.

6. aggregated [ˈæɡrɪˌɡeɪtɪd] - (verb) - Formed or grouped into a class or cluster - Synonyms: (collected, congregated, combined)

So the BCCI obviously continues to, you know, aggregate power in its hands purely because of the type of consumers it has at its disposal.

7. proliferation [prəˌlɪfəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - Rapid increase in the number or amount of something - Synonyms: (surge, explosion, escalation)

Player choice, scheduling, the kind of proliferation of short format leagues whilst also trying to schedule international cricket.

8. infused [ɪnˈfjuːzd] - (verb) - To fill something or someone with a particular feeling or quality - Synonyms: (instilled, permeated, saturated)

The IPL infused cricket with entertainment elements reminiscent of American sports leagues.

9. controversial [ˌkɒntrəˈvɜːʃəl] - (adjective) - Giving rise or likely to give rise to public disagreement - Synonyms: (contentious, debatable, divisive)

From Saudi Arabias controversial Liv golf tour that saw golfers sign up despite concerns over the countrys human rights record and then lose their place on renowned PGA tours to the proposed European Super League, a breakaway competition in football designed to guarantee millions of dollars for a select few at the expense of long established leagues

10. spectators [ˈspɛkteɪtərz] - (noun) - People who watch or observe an event, especially a sports game - Synonyms: (audience, viewers, onlookers)

spectators were not coming to cricket devised a new format of the game where only 20 overs were bowled by each side.

How India Made Cricket a Billion-Dollar Business

Cricket, a quiet sport pioneered by the British. Measured, considered timeless. Just a couple of decades ago, cricket was struggling to attract audiences and its commercial future was very much in doubt. Now it has the second biggest sporting franchise in the world, bettered only by the NFL. At the centre of its success is one country and its record breaking tournament, the Indian Premier League.

So there's been a revolution in cricket. Traditionally, what used to happen when english cricket started cricket in the rest of the world stopped. Now, such is the glamour of IPL, such are the riches IPL provides that english cricket has to bow down to India. There are 74 games now in the IPL and each one is valued at over 10 million pounds for one game. There's no way that other formats of the game before could have commanded that sort of financial power or value.

The figures that are talked about is that 80% of world cricket's income is provided by India in one form or the other. India currently has a population of 1.4 billion people. IPL has a viewership of almost 700 million people worldwide. Fan base for cricket is about two and a half billion people. We are 27% of that total fan base worldwide. So potential to grow this viewership immense, massive.

This is the story of how one country became the driving force behind the biggest sporting turnaround of the 21st century. Well, cricket is this unique english game. The English invented most of the sports, but cricket is probably unique in that the two sets of players are doing opposite things. One of them is playing with a bat and the other one is playing with a ball. It's one of those kind of quite enigmatic sports to describe. I think it's the battle between runs. The number of runs you can score versus the number of wickets a wicket is when a batter gets out. So it's a contest between runs and wickets. The overall aim of the game is to score more runs than the opposing team.

A run is essentially a point and it's given every time a batter runs between the wickets, which is possible after the ball has been bowled. Four runs are given if the batsman hits the ball beyond the boundary of the pitch with the ball having hit the ground. A six is given for batters who can clear the boundary without the ball hitting the ground. The fielding team bowls to the batting team. A fielder bowls in sets of six balls, which are called an over. After each over, the bowler changes. The best way to prevent the batting team from scoring is by getting the batsman out or taking wickets. This can be done in many ways. Bowling, catching or running out. Once ten of the eleven batsmen are out their innings finishes and they can't score any more runs. The same is true if they run out of time, which varies depending on the type of cricket game and is where the most revolution has taken place in recent years.

Its most traditional format is multi day cricket. So where it's played with a red ball and there are three results possible, win, lose or draw. So I know people are completely stumped by the fact that you can play a game for five days and still draw at the end of it. Cricket's complicated rules and long playtime meant it struggled to appeal to fans outside Commonwealth countries who had deeply historical ties to the game. Invented in England in the 16 hundreds, cricket arrived in other parts of the globe during the late 17th and 18th centuries via british colonizers. The British took the game to different parts of the world as they expanded, as they went in search of trade, and then they acquired territories. They didn't tell people, you have to play our sport, they played their sport. And the other people seeing the British play the sport, was attracted by it.

While a number of the Commonwealth countries adopted the game as their own, one managed to turn the sport into big business. I think the Indians, who've been given no chance at all, are likely to give a great deal more travel than many people expect. When I was a very young boy, that was a long time ago, in the fifties, as a five year old, I was taken in India, in Mumbai, to watch England play India. Mihir Bose, the BBC's first sports news editor, is one of cricket's best known commentators. His most recent book, Nine Waves, the extraordinary story of how India took over the cricket world, traces the country's rise from colonial dependency to global dominance within the sport.

The money in cricket came through, and this was worldwide came through people at the gates buying tickets. When a team came over in England, Australia, West Indies, New Zealand or whoever, there would be in the cities, what was called test fever, people would want to buy tickets, there would be long queues to get tickets and so on. And that was the situation till well into the 1990s. Television had shown its potential in India during the 1982 Asian Games, but it wasn't until the 1990s, when domestic viewership reached critical mass, that its full potential could be capitalized on.

The cricket authorities in India realized television stations were prepared to pay big money. By then, crowds had declined. All over the world, people were watching on television, and english cricket and australian cricket found that when they played India, they could sell their television rights to these indian television stations for a lot of money. And that is where India, if you like, took over the world game. While the sport's original days long format continued to have an appeal with long standing fans, crickets struggled to entice new, younger audiences. This pressure only intensified as the unparalleled popularity of mega franchises like the NFL and the EPL continued to proliferate.

In an attempt to reinvigorate the sport, a variety of shorter formats with fewer overs were created. England, finding audiences were not coming to cricket. spectators were not coming to cricket, devised a new format of the game where only 20 overs were bowled by each side. You know, shorten the game, because then you could play the game in an english summer, start it at one or 02:00, play till about 07:00, 08:00 and somebody could finish their work at five and just pop in for two or 3 hours. That was the idea.

England's 20 over format, also known as T 20 or 2020, launched its first professional tournament in 2003. The shorter format made it a much better fit for broadcasters. Sky Sports televised eight group matches and the entirety of finals day live. England's T 20 World cup was a success domestically and had proved the potential of a more explosive version of the game. But it would take a total disruption in 2008 to change the course of cricket. And that disruptor came in the form of the Indian Premier League. No matter which time zone you're in over the next 51 days, it's only one time, and that is to celebrate cricket's biggest festival. Welcome to the Vivo Indian Premier League.

They made it into a spectacle, and the old fashioned traditionalists find this abhorrent to them. That's not cricket. Cricket is theatre, where, you know, you have intellectual discussions as to where the ball is played and so on and so forth. Here they said, no, no, you don't need all that. You want entertainment. You want to rival what the cinema offers you, what any other form of entertainment offers you. The IPL didn't just take inspiration from America's pre show entertainment and pyrotechnics. It also adopted a similar league structure where the same teams compete every year.

For the IPL, they devised completely new teams, so it became Mumbai. Indians, owned by one of the richest businessmen in India, composed, some of them from Mumbai, composed of players from around the world, or the Chennai Super Kings, or, you know, the Kolkata Night Raiders. So they came up with these exotic names. You know, the one difference is this is not about a country playing another country. The one difference is you're able to, as a franchise, attract the best in an auction, which is done prior to the season beginning where you bid for the best players in the world for a certain price tag.

How much has the IPL changed the face of cricket because of the money involved? Yeah, well, I mean the money involved is huge for the players these days. This is a time of upheaval in sport when new moneyed leagues promising big payout threaten to upend the status quo. From Saudi Arabias controversial Liv golf tour that saw golfers sign up despite concerns over the countrys human rights record and then lose their place on renowned PGA tours to the proposed European Super League, a breakaway competition in football designed to guarantee millions of dollars for a select few at the expense of long established leagues.

And the IPL is no different. With only ten teams competing, each under owners with deep pockets, it quickly attracted the world's best players, causing issues for any other tournaments that took place during the IPL season. Player choice, scheduling, the kind of proliferation of short format leagues whilst also trying to schedule international cricket. Whether it's Test match cricket, the domestic game, the other international formats, it is quite a challenging jigsaw puzzle.

The organization unofficially in charge of putting that puzzle together is the Board of Control for Cricket in India or the BCCI, while the International Cricket Council is named the global watchman. Money, as is often the case, wields power. The humble truth here is that BCCI is the richest body today in the world of cricket across the globe. And I think it's purely because of the success of IPL. Massively so. You've got sponsorship deals coming pouring through every single corner of the room into the BCCI. 80% of world cricket's income is provided by India in one form or the other.

There's television rights, there are commercial deals. When India play abroad. If you look around the stadiums, the marketing of the sponsors names are indian sponsors names because they have got the rights. They want their names on television because Indians are watching and therefore they'll sell the products. So the BCCI obviously continues to, you know, aggregate power in its hands purely because of the type of consumers it has at its disposal. The indian consumer, like I said, 700 million people watching IPL, which has probably the least number of games across any sporting format across the world.

I'm not just talking cricket, I'm talking NFL, I'm talking about MLB. I'm talking EPL. This has the least number of games. It has the maximum viewership. The success of the 2022 IPL Media rights e auction highlighted just how successful this franchise has become in such a short period of time. The tv and digital rights for 2022 to 2027 matches collectively sold for $6.2 billion. This not only reaffirmed the IPL as the leading cricket league, but also made it the second most valuable league globally at more than $13 million per match.

The IPL has surpassed global leagues such as the EPL and the MLB, and is second only to the NFL. Disney bagged the tv rights and a joint venture between Paramount and Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries won digital streaming rights. Media companies are constantly working hard to make sure they get the right form of content such that the consumer loyalty continues to stick and grow.

If you look at the case of Netflix in the two quarters that went by, they actually said they're going to come off massively on their consumer numbers only because, you know, they're not able to penetrate countries like India which require a different form of content. I'm not saying that they should go after cricket as a, as a possible broadcasting theme. They may, who knows? But if you get, you know, sport which is universal, has no language, something like a football or a cricket, which actually attracts more consumers.

Given its religious following in those specific countries, I don't see a reason why you will see more media companies coming and trying to get a partnership with the BCCI, given the massive fanfalling across the world. It's widely agreed upon that media is what's propelled the values of teams to such astronomical heights. In the US, the Big Ten, a college football conference, just signed an $8 billion media rights deal, and Apple signed on to a ten year global broadcast deal to stream Major League Soccer worth $250 million.

With so much untapped revenue to play for, a flurry of new t 20 leagues are being created. In an attempt to ride the wave of the IPL's success, South Africa have started fleshing out details of the new t 20 league. Players are already on board. A broadcast deal has been confirmed and team owners revealed. It says previous attempts at getting an international t 20 league off the ground have failed. South Africa and the UAE are both set to launch new t 20 leagues in 2023, adding to an already packed cricketing calendar.

These tournaments will put a further strain on resources and talent, especially as the current ruling by the BCCI states, no indian national player can take part in other leagues unless they permanently retire from the IPL and national cricket. The thinking here is that players competing in other t 20 tournaments will take fans to those franchises, which could lead to tougher competition in terms of attraction, attention and brand value for the IPL so you've seen t 20 League's mushroom in Australia, the Big Bash League, the Caribbean Premier League, one in England, and now two new leagues being launched just announced.

One in South Africa and the other one in Dubai, the Amherst Cricket Board. The fact is, in all of these leagues, indian players who have a global fan following are not allowed to play. That's the rule. And if you can't get the likes of Ms. Dhoni or Virat Kohli or some of the other big boys that we have playing cricket across the world for their country and in the IPL league, I think you lose that many audiences.

In an interview with ANI Sports in August 2022, the BCCI vice president Rajiv Shukla commented on the our Indian Premier League is itself a huge league and we cannot allow any of our players to attach themselves to any foreign league in any manner. The owners of the IPL teams have found a clever way to compete with these burgeoning buying the competition. All teams within South Africa's new t 20 tournament have been bought by the owners of IPL teams.

There are ten team owners in India. All of them have tasted immense success in IPLs. They've seen their valuation go from literally nothing to now close to $2 billion per franchise, given the media rights valuation. When you taste that kind of success in a limited timeframe of ten or 15 years, you certainly want to experiment as an owner, a team owner, and see what this can do if other leagues take off now, non cricketing countries, seeing the opportunity that t 20 brings, are beginning to hedge their bets.

Not only is the shorter format an easier game to sell to those countries with less understanding of the sport, but the money floating around and growing demand for talent offers the perfect incentive for young athletes. Right now we're in the middle of a hysterical event for cricket Finland because we've never hosted an international cricket tournament before. I think from our perspective as a non traditional country, we've been looking at the data that's come out from our World cup qualifier event. There are quite significant viewership figures which have come through purely from a finnish based viewership. And I think looking at that in terms of the way forward that's come about simply because the game itself has become more attractive for people to actually come and watch.

It's become something which is more sold as a product, has more things going on for the viewer when they come to the ground. We've tried to sort of mirror that here with a very smaller version. Obviously, we haven't got a hundred thousand seater stadium as they've got it, or a traditional cricket ground in India or in England. But at the same time, we have looked at it to actually think about how we can actually get new people interested in the game and have somebody at the game that is referring to what's actually happening on the cricket as somebody that's never seen a game of cricket before.

For Finland, a country whose own national sport is also bat and ball based, T 20 offers a potentially easy transition for players and viewers. You only have to look at the average salaries of Persapolo and IPL athletes to understand the opportunity here. In 2019, the highest salary for a Persepolo player was about $55,000. That same year, the IPL's top paid cricketer Virat Kohli's salary and winnings came in at around $4 million. That's not to mention the $21 million he banked through endorsements.

The opportunities that are there for players in non traditional countries to actually access to the global stage, whether that's IPL, whether that's another franchise somewhere else in the world, or whether that's within the ICC's global pathway events, I think that's something which has itself only developed in the last five to ten years. Every other cricket board internationally is trying this format because they think it will result in them getting a lot of large ease in terms of dollars that come in, and they can in turn improve the local infrastructure of the game in their respective countries, which they probably can't do given the current state of finances.

So it's a chicken and egg situation if they are able to successfully attract and stage the first or second season of the tournament by attracting some world class players and getting adequate consumers, media companies will come and funnel those as well. Now cricket is hoping to break into the largest sports market in the world, the US. The US's major league cricket competition is set to launch in 2023, backed by investors such as Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and Microsoft chairman Satya Nadella.

The following year, in 2024, Los Angeles will jointly host the T 20 World cup with the West Indies. And there's also a bid by the ICC to feature cricket for the first time ever, the Olympics, which will also be in LA in 2028. With so much interest in the sport and its expansion, investors are picking apart the business model and exploring ways to capitalize even further. It has now gone to serious business, where large business owners across the globe are seeing this as an opportunity to own a franchise, probably improve governance, get more independent sportsmen to come on the boards of these companies and therefore attract the best talent, get sponsorships and increase the scale and size of what they can do in their respective franchises.

Sport has become business, and sport is still run, and that is true beyond cricket in other sports, but particularly in cricket, as if it's a cottage industry. We haven't got off the field the sort of leaders and administrators we need to run a big industry like this, an industry that appeals to millions of people and which can affect the lives of millions of people, because for them, it's a form of entertainment that they value.

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