Intro
Mumbai Indians lead a new Sportico valuation at $2.1 billion, ahead of baseball’s Detroit Tigers at $2.08bn and hockey’s Vancouver Canucks at $2.05bn. All 10 IPL franchises now sit above $1.5 billion, putting the league at roughly $17 billion with only $600 million separating first from last. cricexec’s own valuation work has produced similar results. The striking figure is not the headline value but the multiple: on average team revenue of about $74 million, the IPL trades at nearly 23 times revenue — against roughly 15 times for the NBA, 13 for the NFL, nine for the NHL and seven for Major League Baseball.
The explanation is structural rather than commercial. Roughly $50–55 million per team arrives from the BCCI’s central media pool before a ticket is sold, 90% of it split equally. Wages are capped by the auction purse at around $16 million for a full squad — about a third of what the New York Mets pay Juan Soto alone — and franchises carry no stadium costs. Some reportedly run margins above 30%. With 10 seats, no relegation and India’s advertising spend still at about half a percent of GDP against 1.4% in the United States, buyers are paying for the gap rather than the current earnings. The RCB sale at $1.78bn in March and Rajasthan at $1.65bn in May anchor those numbers to real money.
In the vlog below, cricexec founder and publisher Zee Zaidi works through the four reasons behind the premium — and the three dependencies underneath it, starting with a 2027 rights cycle that has lost its bidding contest.
Transcript
Zee Zaidi:
The Mumbai Indians play seven home games in an IPL season. The Detroit Tigers of Major League Baseball play 81. And according to a new valuation released this week, the Mumbai Indians are worth more, 2.1 billion dollars. And every one of the 10 IPL teams is now worth at least 1.5 billion dollars. So how does a cricket team that plays for two months a year end up priced more than a 100-year-old American sports institution? T
I’m Zee Zaidi, founder and publisher of cricexec, the leading publication covering the business of cricket worldwide. We’re read daily by the people who run the sport, boards, franchises, sponsors, and players. And the people who run the sport have been asking each other that question for a while. The answer is a lot more interesting than cricket is big in India.
So let’s start with the numbers. This valuation comes from Sportico, the American sports business outlet. Cricexec has done multiple valuation exercises as well, yielding similar results. Mumbai Indians lead at 2.1 billion dollars. That puts them just ahead of baseball’s Detroit Tigers, which are at 2.08 billion dollars, and hockey’s Vancouver Canucks, which are at 2.05 billion. The Royal Challengers Bengaluru are second in the IPL at 1.85 billion dollars. Chennai Super Kings third at 1.75 billion, then Kolkata Knight Riders at 1.73 billion, Delhi Capitals at 1.7 billion, Rajasthan Royals at 1.65 billion, Hyderabad 1.62 billion, Gujarat Titans at 1.58 billion, Punjab Kings at 1.53 billion, and at the bottom, LSG at 1.5 billion dollars.
Now, put those numbers next to the NHL because the matches are almost eerie. Bengaluru, 1.85 billion dollars, the Nashville Predators exactly the same. Chennai Super Kings with five IPL titles, 1.75 billion dollars. The Pittsburgh Penguins, Sidney Crosby’s team, five Stanley Cups, also 1.75 billion dollars. Delhi Capitals and the St. Louis Blues both 1.7 billion dollars. Punjab Kings and the Buffalo Sabres both 1.53 billion. And Lucknow at 1.5 billion dollars is level with the Columbus Blue Jackets, the lowest valued team in the NHL. It’s also worth more than the cheapest team in Major League Baseball. So drop IPL into the NHL, and Mumbai would rank 20th out of 32. The other nine teams would all land in the bottom third, right alongside clubs with decades of history.
Add it all up, and the IPL is worth around 17 billion dollars. The average team, about 1.7 billion dollars. And notice how tight that list is. Only 600 million dollars separates first from last. In the NHL, the Toronto Maple Leafs at 4.8 billion dollars are worth more than three times the Blue Jackets. In the IPL, the whole league sits in a much narrower band. Now hold on to that because it’s a clue.
And here’s where it gets strange or interesting. The average IPL team brought in about 74 million dollars in revenue this past season. To see why that matters, you need to understand one concept, the revenue multiple. It’s simply a team’s value divided by either its revenue or its profit. In this case, in sports, the revenue multiple is much more common. If a team brings in 100 million dollars a year in revenue and sells for 1 billion dollars, that’s a revenue multiple of 10. The buyer is effectively paying 10 years of revenue upfront. And the higher the multiple, the more that buyer is paying for future growth rather than what the team earns today.
Now go back to Chennai and the Penguins. Same value, but at hockey’s average multiple, a 1.75 billion dollar team would be bringing in something like 185 million dollars a year. Chennai, on the IPL’s numbers, brings around 75 million dollars, a lot less than half. So an IPL team earns a fraction of what a comparable American team earns, but it’s priced as if it’s worth the same.
Now compare whole leagues using the average multiple in each. For the average Major League Baseball team, that’s around seven times revenue. The NHL, around nine times revenue. The NFL, about 13 times revenue. The WNBA, after its recent boom, about 13 and a half times revenue. And the NBA, the hottest major league in American sport, roughly 15 times revenue. The IPL, nearly 23 times revenue. That’s higher than any major American league. Investors are paying more for every dollar an IPL team earns than they pay for a dollar earned by an NBA team, which means the real story isn’t how much IPL teams make, it’s why people are willing to pay so much more for what they make.
And I think there are four reasons, and the first is about where the money actually comes from. Most IPL revenue doesn’t come from the team at all. It comes from the BCCI. The board sells the league’s media rights centrally, keeps half after production cost, and distributes the rest to the franchises. 90% of that pool is split equally between the 10 teams. Only 10%, reportedly, depends on where you finish. So that works out to roughly 50 to 55 million dollars per team per year. That’s around three-quarters of an average team’s revenue, arriving before it has sold a single ticket or signed a single sponsor. That’s why the valuations are bunched so tightly. Each owner is drawing from the same well. And for an investor, that’s the attraction. Predictable, contracted income underwritten by the richest board in cricket is worth paying a premium for.
The second reason is costs, and this is where the IPL really separates itself from American sports. In most professional leagues, player wages are the biggest expense by far. In the IPL, they are capped by the auction purse. This season, that cap was roughly 16 million dollars per team, 16 million for an entire squad. For context, Juan Soto’s contract with the New York Mets pays him around 50 million dollars per year. One baseball player costs about three times an entire IPL team’s wage bill. IPL teams also generally don’t carry the cost of owning and maintaining a stadium. They play at grounds run by state associations. So you’ve got capped wages, limited capital spending, and guaranteed central income, and that produces margins most sports owners would envy. Some IPL franchises reportedly run profit margins above 30%.
That’s not normal in professional sport. Plenty of teams worth billions barely break even, and their owners are betting almost entirely on the value going up when they eventually sell. Lalit Modi, who built the IPL, put it even more bluntly on X this week, saying, quote, “Zero working capital, zero debt, zero infrastructure cost, no future capital requirement ever.” That’s Modi in full flow, and ever is doing a lot of work in that sentence. But on the basic point, he’s right. This is an unusually light business to own.
Now, the third reason is scarcity, and this year, the market proved it. There are only 10 IPL teams. There’s no relegation, like in football, and the league sits at the center of the biggest cricket audience on Earth. If you want a piece of it, you have to buy from someone who already owns one. In March, the Royal Challengers Bengaluru sold for 1.78 billion dollars to a consortium that includes the Aditya Birla Group, Blackstone, The Times Group, and David Blitzer’s Bolt Ventures. In May, a consortium led by Lakshmi Mittal bought the Rajasthan Royals for 1.65 billion dollars. Both deals were done at more than 20 times revenue. And look at who’s buying. Blackstone is one of the largest investment firms in the world. Blitzer is a co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils. These are people who know exactly what American teams cost. They looked at the IPL, compared it, and paid up. So these numbers aren’t just a model. They’re anchored to real money that changed hands this year.
The fourth reason is the one that really explains the 23 times multiple. It isn’t what the IPL earns today, it’s the market it sits in. India is now the most populous country on the planet, with more than 1.4 billion people, and it’s the fastest-growing economy in the G20, growing at more than 6% a year, the only G20 economy that’s growing at that rate. That’s roughly three times the pace of the United States economy.
Now, here is the number that matters most for a media business. India spends only about a half a percent of its GDP on advertising. In the United States, it’s more like 1.4%. In the UK, it’s about 1.5%. Even China is above 1%. So relative to the size of its economy, India spends less than half of what China does on advertising and around a third of what the US and UK do. As the economy grows and that gap closes, the advertising pool grows faster than the economy itself. And when that money is spent, the IPL is where the biggest share of it goes. It’s the single largest media asset in the country. Its current media rights are worth more than 6 billion dollars over five seasons, about 15 million dollars per match. Per match, that puts it second only to the NFL and ahead of the Premier League in football. That’s what investors are really buying, not just a cricket team’s revenue today, but a seat at the center of India’s advertising market just as it starts to catch up to the rest of the world.
And the speed of it all is remarkable. In 2008, the eight original franchises sold for a combined 723 million dollars, about 90 million dollars each, and the owners didn’t even pay upfront. It was 10% a year over 10 years. Rajasthan were the cheapest at 67 million. They’ve just sold for nearly 25 times that. Mumbai cost Reliance about 112 million. Today, they’re worth nearly 19 times that. The average IPL team’s value is up around 1800% since 2008. Over the same period, NFL teams are up around 800%, the NBA close to 1700. Modi saw a lot of this coming. Back in 2008, he said this, quote, “I’m no financial analyst, but given the huge success of the league and its future potential, I would venture to say that franchisees bought assets that were heavily underpriced.” Whatever else you can say about Lalit Modi’s assessments, on that point, he’s been proven right.
Modi says the number will just keep going up. Maybe, but a multiple of 23 times isn’t a reward for what’s already happened. It’s a bet on what’s coming next, and that bet has some real dependencies. The first is that so much of the value flows through one organization. The BCCI controls the media rights. It decides the size of the central pool, the number of teams, the length of the season. Owners have a fantastic asset, but limited control over its biggest revenue line.
The second is timing. The current IPL media rights deal runs through 2027, next year. The last auction back in 2022 was a genuine contest, with Disney Star and Viacom18 fighting it out. Since then, those two businesses have merged into JioStar, which is controlled by Reliance, the same group that owns the Mumbai Indians. So the next cycle may not have the same competitive tension as the last one. In fact, JioStar vice chairman Uday Shankar has been issuing warnings for the past several months, both to the IPL and to the ICC, about the fact that the price of rights are gonna have to come down. And if the next deal comes in flat, the central pool stops growing, and a multiple built on growth has to be justified some other way or come down.
And third, a valuation is just an estimate. It isn’t a price. The RCB and Rajasthan deals tell us what two sets of buyers were willing to pay for two very specific teams. They don’t mean every owner could sell tomorrow at exactly these prices. None of that makes the valuations wrong. It just tells you what you’re really buying.
So back to the Detroit Tigers. Mumbai aren’t worth more than a Major League Baseball team because they earn more. They earn far less. They’re worth more because of the structure they sit inside. A closed league, money that’s guaranteed centrally, costs that are capped, only 10 seats at the table, and the biggest cricket audience in the world in the fastest-growing major economy on Earth. In that same post, Modi asked, “Which other league or entertainment property has the same model?” His answer, “None.” That’s a bit of a stretch. American investors understand this model better than anyone because the NFL was built on a version of it. But what they found in the IPL is a version with even tighter cost control and arguably more room to grow.
Whether 23 times revenue turns out to be smart or expensive will be decided largely by one negotiation, the next IPL media rights deal. Get that right, and today’s numbers may look, in hindsight, like Lalit Modi’s heavily underpriced moment all over again. Get it wrong, and the market finds out what an IPL team is worth without the growth story attached. Either way, cricket’s most valuable assets are no longer being compared with other cricket teams. They’re being compared to the biggest names in global sport. And that on its own tells you how much has changed.
