Mark Souster
It began with a gentlemanly chat over a cup of tea at Wimbledon eight months ago and this week turned into the most valuable start-up event in sporting history and a tournament worth possibly $3.5billion (about £1.8 billion) over the next decade. When Andrew Wildblood, a senior vice-president and corporate director for India at IMG, sat down at the All England Club last July with Lalit Modi, the vice-president of the BCCI, both men shared a vision. They wanted to re-energise Indian domestic cricket and to tap into the apparently insatiable demand for the sport in the country.
The constraints of the domestic calendar mean that there will not be any Englishmen actively involved in the inaugural DFL Indian Premier League that starts in April, but Wildblood will be there to see the fruition of his IMG team's work.
It is a concept that has gripped the imagination of the cricketing world, one that before a ball has been bowled appears to have brought together sport, showbiz and big business, with Bollywood stars and mega-rich tycoons and conglomerates vying for the prestige of owning a team.
The financial figures are mind- boggling, akin to a modern-day gold rush, not least for the players. Mukesh Ambani, one of India's richest men, paid more for the Bombay franchise than Randy Lerner did to buy Aston Villa, who came complete with £30million of Birmingham real estate. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is, temporarily at least, earning more per week than Cristiano Ronaldo. Television rights went for more than $1billion.
So how did it come about? “Initially, we kicked around a few ideas,” Wildblood said yesterday from India, which over the past months has become a second home as he and his team work ceaselessly to overcome the hurdles inherent in establishing such a tournament from scratch. It has been a huge undertaking with an array of processes that all had to be rigorously tested.
“For some time, Lalit had had a vision of what he wanted and in order to do that we agreed it had to be based upon a city to city format rather than state to state,” Wildblood said. “It was a broad vision with no meat on the bone. We also concurred that the model should be based on US-style franchises whereby the owners of the teams would also benefit from the properties that were sold as a consequence of the creation of the product, ie, television and sponsorship.”
Within a month the concept had taken shape. Eight city teams will play home and away, with 59 matches over 44 days taking place almost exclusively during prime-time television hours, using the Twenty20 format. A commercial structure was developed to wrap around the sporting model to create an investment vehicle that would prove attractive to owners.
“I knew it would be huge,” Wildblood, 50, who is married with two children and lives in London, said. “There is nothing else that has been launched as a start-up that comes anywhere near to it in sport. We got a little lucky when India won the inaugural Twenty20 World Cup, which transformed the perception of that type of cricket into the format which 76 per cent of the population now say is their favourite.
“It has been the project of a lifetime, one of the biggest single things that IMG has ever done. From a business context, it has been life-fulfilling.”
It has comes as a result of an incredible convergence of a number of things: the advent of Twenty20, the development of the Indian economy, the desire to regenerate the stadium infrastructure before the 2011 cricket World Cup that India will co-host and the demand for more entertainment opportunities in a maturing economy.
“IMG has done a pretty amazing job,” he said. “There have been bear traps all the way down the line, but we have managed to avoid them because we have been incredibly rigorous and determined that what we constructed was totally robust.”
Modi agreed. At the culmination of the auction of the world's best players on Tuesday, he paid the ultimate compliment to the company without which Modi said the IPL would have been stillborn. When the first ball is bowled on April 18, in the match between Bangalore and Kolkata, Wildblood will be entitled to feel satisfied at a job well done.
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