The Indian Century

Even in countries where the people love it, cricket has never been a sport you would play to get rich. While the cream of the game in the traditional strongholds of England and Australia do better than all right these days, we're still talking about a level of reward — maybe $1 million a year for the highest-paid players — that wouldn't get the kings of Major League Baseball or Premier League soccer out of bed.

In the corridors of the stately old game, however, a whiff of revolution is in the air. For decades a bit player on cricket's stage, India is using its burgeoning financial might to seize the lead role. The latest and most daring move of its cricket authority, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, is forming a new competition, the Indian Premier League (IPL), in which players can rake in more money for a few weeks of work than they'd normally make in years.

At an auction in a luxury Mumbai hotel on Feb. 20, the IPL's eight city-based franchises each spent up to $5 million to buy the services of 76 of the world's best players. To buy the franchises themselves, an assortment of businessmen and Bollywood actors had earlier forked out a total of $700 million. "The IPL has the backing of some of the heaviest hitters in India, if not the world," says Gus Seebeck, sport-marketing manager for Australia's Network Ten, which paid more than $10 million to secure the local TV rights for the IPL from Sony Television and the Singapore-based World Sports Group (WSG). Sony-WSG spent more than $1 billion for the exclusive global rights for 10 years.

Seebeck's not kidding about heavy hitters. Among the franchisees is Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, the world's 14th richest man, with an estimated net worth of $20.1 billion. Not quite as wealthy but rather more flamboyant is Vijay Mallya, known for throwing lavish parties in his home city of Bangalore and for his co-ownership of the Force India Formula One team. The enterprise's big guns aren't fooling: "We want the IPL to be one of the icon brands in the world," says IPL chairman Lalit Modi, "and we are going to push everything that is required to achieve that."

The IPL's vehicle is the new and helter-skelter Twenty20. For those not enamored of cricket, the game comes in three forms: stupefying (the traditional Test match, which can last five days and still not produce a result); slightly less stupefying (one-day cricket, in which scoring rates are quicker and matches continue into the night); and passably exciting (Twenty20, in which batsmen are pretty much obliged to try to belt every ball out of the park). An odd thing about the IPL is that, until recently, Indians didn't much like Twenty20 and were leading the way in trying to jazz up one-day cricket. Then India won last year's inaugural Twenty20 World Championship in South Africa, and suddenly a good many of the country's 1.1 billion people can't get enough of the fun.

Many of cricket's traditional fans are worried that the IPL and all these piles of cash could lead the game into strife. They're old enough to remember cricket's first revolution in 1977, when the Australian TV mogul Kerry Packer secretly enticed most of the world's best players to join his rebel outfit, known as World Series Cricket (WSC). Back then, cricketers were expected to play for little besides national pride and really did get a crummy deal from the establishment — match fees in the hundreds of dollars and no contract money. WSC changed that and, though it split cricket asunder for two years, it is generally now seen as a boon for the game. But as cricket and business writer Gideon Haigh observes: "Players are more susceptible now to financial inducements than they were when they were paid a pittance. Now that everything has a value, nothing is beyond price."

IPL organizers have so far trodden more delicately than Packer ever did. IPL contracts stipulate that national duties will take precedence over the annual tournament, which starts April 18 and goes for six weeks. But where those national duties clash with the chance to earn quick bucks in India, players are already getting restless. Australian captain Ricky Ponting wants a window created in the calendar for the IPL, lest aging players make a calculated decision to retire early from their Test careers. Teammate Andrew Symonds, snared at auction by Hyderabad for $1.35 million over three years, has made it clear he'd rather play in the upcoming IPL tournament than tour an unstable Pakistan as part of his national squad. "Right now you'd have to be nervous if you're a cricket administrator," Symonds warned in his Brisbane newspaper column. "The bottom line is the money on offer in India is not going away and may even get more and more tempting."

Some observers wonder how long it will be before the Indian billionaires demand more for their IPL investment than six weeks a year of the players' time. Another concern is that the game has learned nothing from its recent betting scandals. The chief lesson there was that players engaged in matches whose result scarcely matters to them are vulnerable to the charms of bookmakers. Despite the vast amounts of money being tossed around, the real price of the IPL won't be known for some time.