Cliff Notes – The IPL was supposed to have been much longer by now. Why isn’t it?
- The IPL’s match count has stagnated at 74 for four consecutive years, despite plans to increase to 84 by 2025, contrasting with global trends of expanding sports leagues.
- A significant reduction in afternoon matches has led to a longer season, with players favouring evening games due to better broadcast ratings and viewer engagement.
- While franchises express interest in a longer season, logistical challenges and player availability concerns hinder immediate expansion, with the current format remaining cautious.
The IPL was supposed to have been much longer by now. Why isn’t it?
Something almost unheard of happened in the world of sports broadcasting recently. The number of IPL games a season, stipulated to increase to 84 in 2025, according to the IPL’s lucrative media-rights contract of 2022, remained at 74 for the fourth successive year.
The decision defied a global trend of incessant growth in sports leagues and events: football’s World Cup and Champions League have both swelled in recent years, while the Club World Cup is growing from seven matches to 63. But in the IPL, even an incremental expansion has been treated with caution, to the point of being deferred.
This has been true across the league’s 18-year history. The IPL has become a commercial behemoth since its launch in 2008, but its season has only grown from 59 matches between eight teams to 74 between ten. In fact, the current format is two matches shorter than that used in 2012 and 2013, soon after the IPL’s first expansion to include additional franchises.
A significant change has been the dramatic decline in the number of double-headers. The past two seasons have seen only 12 games played in the afternoon slot, less than one in six; back in 2011, that proportion was more than one in three. The result is a longer IPL window, with the season now stretching past nine weeks.
Players much prefer evening games, as demonstrated by Ishant Sharma’s obvious discomfort after bowling in the 40-degree Ahmedabad heat on Saturday. But the decline in the number of afternoon games owes primarily to the decline in broadcast ratings for games that start at 3.30pm compared to 7.30pm – around 30-40% percent lower for the earlier-starting matches.
“The analogy used was a soap opera,” says Mike Fordham, who worked in the IPL from inception for the events company IMG and was later Rajasthan Royals’ chief executive. “There were big traditions in India of families watching soap operas, so the idea was that this would be your nightly entertainment – and you’d have to watch every game to know the full story.” In that sense, the IPL is different to the vast majority of sporting leagues around the world: it does not schedule fixtures that run simultaneously, barring occasional overlaps when an afternoon game overruns. It fuels the idea that the casual viewer is agnostic to whether their team is playing when they tune in, as long as they can watch some of their favourite players.
The US business podcast Acquired recently released a four-hour IPL special, analysing the league’s growth, and was surprised that it has remained so short. “Looking at it from the outside in, there’s no way that in five-ten years from now there are not more games [played] during the IPL,” says co-host David Rosenthal. “All the economic forces are pointing that way.”
Rosenthal believes that the IPL has been “really smart” in avoiding an expansion beyond ten teams. “Take the NBA: nobody cares about an average game on an average night. There’s 30 teams: who cares if the [Charlotte] Hornets are playing the [Atlanta] Hawks? Nobody. There’s a real sense right now in basketball of ‘these games don’t matter’. The IPL is the exact opposite.”
The IPL’s current broadcast deal, signed in 2022, is worth US$6 billion across a five-year cycle, giving it the second-highest price-per-match valuation of any sports league in the world, behind the NFL. But that statistic relies on the scarcity of games: in absolute terms, there are four different European football leagues with media rights deals worth more than the IPL’s.
Rohit Sharma feels the heat (and the humidity) AFP/Getty Images
“[The price-per-match valuation] is both incredibly, incredibly impressive and overstates the size of the IPL in terms of overall economic impact,” Rosenthal says. “To us, that’s why we think this league is clearly going to expand – and it shows the need to keep the right amount of restraint in not going to 30 teams, or playing six months of the year. But it is a good example of the potential of just how big this can get.”
Some believe that there is no more juice to squeeze from the lemon: the valuation of the “IPL ecosystem” fell by 11.7% in the Indian firm D&P Advisory’s most recent report, which anticipates “a more conservative approach” in media-rights bids for the next cycle. That prediction follows the completion of the Reliance-Disney merger in India last year, bringing the IPL’s broadcast and streaming platforms together in a single entity.
“Everyone knows that this is something that is here to stay, and IPL will only grow bigger,” says Santosh N, the firm’s managing partner. “But from a numbers perspective – some of the billion dollars that we talk about, with regards to media rights or title sponsorship – I actually think that maybe we ran too fast on some of these.”
The alternative view comes from the league’s founder, Lalit Modi: “IPL is the golden goose that all want… Don’t worry, IPL will continue to be fiercely bid upon,” he posted on Instagram. Streaming of the league’s games has returned to a paid model this year after two seasons where every match was available for free. JioHotstar vice-chair Uday Shankar said last week that the app already has 200 million paid subscribers: “IPL is a very, very powerful asset.”
Among the teams, there is an appetite for a longer season. The current 74-match format is lopsided: each team plays five of their nine opponents both home and away. Officials at multiple franchises told ESPNcricinfo that they would support a move to a full home-and-away season, increasing the total number of fixtures to 94, provided player availability can be guaranteed.
One concern commonly raised around extending the season is that squad sizes would have to increase: “We also have to factor the load on the players due to the increase in matches,” Jay Shah, the ex-secretary of the BCCI, told the Economic Times last year. It would also mean more time away for overseas players, an increase in team salary caps, and buy-in from national boards – an issue that would come across Shah’s desk in his new role as ICC chair.
The television (TV) broadcast production control room at the stadium BCCI
Eight of the ten IPL franchises now have interests in at least one short-form league outside of India, demonstrating their desire for growth. But a significantly longer IPL – say, a six-month-long season – remains far-fetched at this stage, not least given the constraints of the global calendar. “It’s a tournament, really, more than a league,” Fordham says. “And despite what some seem to think, there’s no indication that the BCCI wants to destroy the international game.” There are in-built constraints to the IPL’s dates. The monsoon hits most of the lower half of India by mid-June, providing a hard stop at the far end, while ICC events – like this year’s Champions Trophy, and next year’s T20 World Cup – often run into early March. The Women’s Premier League has also run into March, though it will shift forward into a January-February window next year.
“Either you need a bigger window or you will end up having more double-headers,” IPL chairman Arun Dhumal recently told the Hindustan Times. Expanding the season by another week or two, bringing the start date into early or mid-March, would require international support and assurances from other boards that they would make their players fully available. There has long been speculation of a second, shorter IPL tournament taking place in the second half of the year, around September, which some believe could be a significant new revenue stream for franchises. The trouble, again, would be finding space in a crammed global calendar.
The league’s most recent expansion, from eight franchises to ten, has been a qualified success. But while there is little doubt that more new teams would be hugely lucrative – “They’d sell for a billion dollars plus,” Fordham predicts – there is no prospect of another sale coming soon, as newcomers Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants continue to establish themselves.
The lack of appetite for expansion in the near term also reflects the dominance of the league’s three biggest brands: Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bengaluru have more Instagram followers between them than the other seven teams combined. “We have to look at the larger picture and keep in mind what works best for the league,” Dhumal said.
Do fans – and therefore broadcasters- really want a longer IPL season? “Maybe India is different, but a personal view is that non-stop T20 cricket for six months could get very samey,” Fordham says. The IPL turns 18 years old this year – but adulthood alone does not guarantee maturity.