Heard on Twitter:
sardesairajdeep
breaking news: sahara gets pune, rendezvous group kochi in ipl auction. shashi tharoor must be smiling!
1 minutes ago via web
sardesairajdeep
breaking news: sahara gets pune, rendezvous group kochi in ipl auction. shashi tharoor must be smiling!
1 minutes ago via web
4 comments:
Some more tweets on the subject:
prempanicker
Afterthought: dear Kerala IPL franchise, I know the temptation to alliterate must be strong. But please - no Kings In your name. Thank you
1 minutes ago via UberTwitter
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ShashiTharoor
I am NOT part of the bid but was pleased 2give Rendezvous Sports World my encouragement&blessings.My interest is in transforming Kerala #IPL
3 minutes ago via UberTwitter
krpradeep Two new IPl teams bought in todays auction for IPL 4 in 2011 : Pune (by Sahara Group) and Cochin for over Rs. 1300 crores each !!
This is insane pricing. When and how will these teams become profitable? BUT it also shows WHAT a goldmine the current owners are sitting on.
MORE on the new IPL franchises
Ayaz Memon:IPL 2010: The record sale of the Pune and Kochi IPL cricket teams has left me speechless
Saturday night’s Battle of The Oldies which featured such celebrated names as Warne, Ganguly, Kumble, Dravid, Kallis, Jayasuria and Tendulkar was to be my theme for today’s piece on the IPL. How these players – along with Gilchrist, Hayden and a few others – have defied age and predictions that T20 would be only a young man’s game makes for a fascinating study. But such noble intent was quashed by the extraordinary developments on Sunday morning which will have sent tremors all over the sporting world.
In case you’ve spent Sabbath day lolling in bed, there is urgent need to sit up and take notice. A sport which till just the turn of the millenium looked like it was in serious need of a life-support system is going ballistic. Two new teams to be added to the IPL in Season 4 were today auctioned for 370 million and 330 million. And we are talking US dollars here, not rupees. Whoa! Wassup?
The mandarins of the ICC certainly don’t have a clue. The Board of Control for Cricket in India had redefined the power matrix of the sport in the 80s, rendering the ICC toothless; the IPL is now revising that further to leave the ICC not just without teeth but also, like the emperor in that famed fable, without clothes.
In Abu Dhabi, where I was recently for the annual Laureus sports awards ceremony, Ian Botham, no less, praised the IPL as a good initiative. He castigated the ICC for being so obsessed with its own internal politics as to retard its responsiveness to events and issues to a hurtful degree. The ICC, if I understood Botham correctly, was not only not proactive, but inactive.
I won’t squander more words on a body that is becoming moribund by the day. Rather, let’s try and understand what’s happening in India where the sale of IPL franchises would suggest that a developing country has become a first world economy on the strength of cricket alone.
In early 2008, for instance, when the eight original teams were sold, the highest price paid was 111 m USD or thereabouts. The 370 m USD paid for Pune city on Sunday, therefore, represents a whopping increase in excess of 300 per cent for the highest price paid less than three years ago.
For that kind of return on investment, every true-blue capitalist should be making a beeline to India and knocking on the doors of Lalit Modi and Co for entry into this rarified world of heavy-duty money-making opportunity.
I’m afraid I am limited by my (lack of) knowledge about complex finance structures, so I can’t dilate on the business model of the IPL with any authority and explain how the corporate valuation game translates into actual profit. Indeed, I have no idea when people ask me whether the IPL is not a bubble that could burst any time.
For the moment, what I do know is that everybody has been left speechless.
http://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/2010/mar/220310-IPL-auction-Pune-team-Salman-Katrina.htm
http://www.mid-day.com/news/2010/mar/220310-Amby-Valley-Sahara-Pune.htm
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