The Indian Premier League is now routinely discussed in the same breath as the NFL, the Premier League, and Formula 1 — a global sports property whose franchise valuations have surged by 70 to 80 percent in the span of just a few years. But behind the broadcast deals, the record-breaking player auctions, and the private equity billions flowing into Indian cricket lies a less visible story: the construction of a legal and regulatory framework that made all of it possible.
Nandan Kamath has been deeply involved in that construction project since before the first ball was bowled. A graduate of the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and a Harvard Law School LL.M., Kamath started his career as a technology and intellectual property lawyer at Davis Polk & Wardwell in Silicon Valley. He returned to India in 2006 to start his own practice. At the time, the idea of a sports law career in India was almost quixotic.
“I came back in 2006 to start a law practice, wanted to work in sport, but there wasn’t actually that much going on,” Kamath recalls. “It was a very low-key sector. Much of Indian sport had not been professionalized, cricket or otherwise. Very little documentation.”
Two years later, everything changed. The launch of the IPL in 2008 was, as Kamath puts it, “the first kickstarter for what you could call formal sports law.” IMG and its lawyers arrived with professional documentation such as franchise agreements, player contracts, sponsorship documentation that would go on to establish the foundational models – standardized templates of sorts – for the Indian sports legal community to adopt and work with. Kamath found himself, as he later told LawInSport, “with a little experience and lots of interest, in the right place at the right time.”
Three pillars of a legal ecosystem
Over the course of the IPL’s first two decades, Kamath identifies three distinct pillars on which the legal profession has supported the league’s growth — and, by extension, the growth of Indian sport as a commercial enterprise.
The first is the transactional infrastructure. The early work of documenting franchise relationships, player agreements, and commercial contracts created what Kamath calls “a structured environment where the goalposts are not changing all the time — keeping it dynamic enough for change to occur, but clarity on which investment can be made, decisions can be made, and planning is possible.” That clarity, unglamorous as it sounds, is the bedrock on which billions of dollars of franchise value now sits.
The second pillar is intellectual property and brand protection. From the IPL’s earliest days, Kamath and his colleagues worked with the BCCI to protect the IPL’s brand, its content, and its tiered sponsorship structure. The result, he argues, is a property that today stands comparison with any in world sport. “The IPL stands shoulder to shoulder with any property globally on the way it protects its IP,” he says. “Sponsors want to be associated with this brand because it’s either that or nothing.” That exclusivity, built through foresight and rigorous legal enforcement, has been central to the IPL’s commercial model — and it was a departure from how Indian sport had traditionally operated.
The third pillar is governance and government relations. Indian cricket has been the subject of extensive governance reform, including proceedings that reached the Supreme Court of India. Navigating that terrain — the relationship between the BCCI, the ICC, state governments, and the courts — has consumed enormous legal resources. “If you look at the last decade or two, significant time and money have been spent on judicial proceedings and the regulatory interface with the state,” Kamath notes.
A city still under construction
For all the progress, Kamath is candid that the ecosystem has not yet reached full maturity. Asked whether Indian cricket’s decision-making culture has arrived at the point where legal counsel is instinctive — as it is in American professional sport, where commissioners are often lawyers and few major moves are made without legal sign-off — he is direct.
“No, I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but certainly evolving towards that,” he says. “I would say a lot of ecosystems grow in phases. Here the league is still in the phase of establishing the stakeholders and their relative roles and positions. It may have been 19 years, but some things take time.”
He reaches for a metaphor that captures the state of play. “It’s like the city is still being constructed and inhabited before you’re putting in zoning, before you’re putting in the schools and hospitals,” he says. The implication is that the IPL and Indian cricket more broadly are still in a foundational construction phase — one where the relative positions of the BCCI, the ICC, the other boards, the players, the franchise owners, and other stakeholders are still being negotiated. But Kamath sees the trajectory clearly: “There will be a phase in the next 10 or 15 years which will be much more rule-based. The regulatory role of the BCCI will only grow in importance and relevance.”
Where valuation meets certainty
That trajectory matters because it is directly tied to value. As private equity firms and international investors have entered the IPL ownership market, the question of regulatory maturity has moved from a background concern to a front-of-mind valuation driver.
Kamath frames the relationship between legal infrastructure and franchise value with precision. “Unless institutional capital is seeing the league as a proper global play, shoulder to shoulder with properties such as MLB the multiple doesn’t make sense,” he says of the IPL’s current valuations. For investors to pay multiples that rival those of major American sports franchises, they need to believe the regulatory environment is going to be comparably robust.
The arrival of private equity, Kamath argues, both demands and accelerates that maturity. “The infusion of private equity brings a level of discipline,” he says. “You will see valuation jump when there’s clarity and it’s seen as not overly dynamic — dynamic, but without too many surprises.”
In Kamath’s telling, the real value unlock is not about any single broadcast deal or player acquisition. It is about something more fundamental: predictability. “A lot of it comes from certainty,” he says. “A lot of it comes with sticking to the rules that you put out and having a vision for those rules, even if you’re going to change them.” He extends his city metaphor: investors are buying into “a future belief that that city is going to be built out — but also that this city is safe to live in, is well protected and its boundaries and rules of conduct are known to everyone.”
Translating the domestic into the global
As the IPL increasingly intersects with global capital and international cricket structures, the kind of cross-jurisdictional legal fluency Kamath represents has become increasingly important. His legal education in India, combined with his subsequent education at Oxford and Harvard and his years practicing IP law in California, give him familiarity with the legal traditions that shaped professional sport in the United States, England, and Australia — traditions that have, in turn, influenced the IPL’s own development.
“The Indian professional cricket ecosystem has been built off the synthesis of lots of different histories,” Kamath explains. “Professional sport in the US, but with a twist. Australian cricket of the Kerry Packer era with a twist, English county cricket with a twist. All of these twists originate from certain different legal histories, and having legal knowledge of different systems is certainly helpful.”
This comparative background has positioned him as a useful bridge for international parties seeking to navigate the Indian market. “It comes up a lot —people want us to translate what’s happening domestically in the language of the global,” he says. As foreign investors, players, and governing bodies engage more deeply with Indian cricket, that translation function — someone who understands both the English law position on restraint of trade and the specific dynamics of a BCCI committee meeting — becomes increasingly valuable.
Looking ahead, Kamath sees the leadership of cricket becoming “highly rule oriented.” The major questions confronting the sport —how the Future Tours Programme allocates windows, the interactions between authorized leagues and international cricket, the terms on which domestic systems release players to franchise leagues, and how technology including AI, data and wearable devices will be governed on and off the field — are fundamentally questions of rule-making. “Lawyers, along with business and regulatory executives, could play a very significant role in helping map the future” he says.
From the crease to the courtroom
Kamath’s connection to cricket is not abstract. Before he was a lawyer, he was a serious cricketer. He captained Karnataka’s under-16 team and was selected for the India camp — the top 20 junior players in the country — two years running. Several of his contemporaries, including Rahul Dravid, went on to represent India at the highest level. Some of them eventually became his clients.
He chose law over cricket at 17, enrolling at the National Law School, but the game never left him. He played for the Oxford University team, umpired league matches in California during his time at Davis Polk, and played club cricket for Stanford CC. “Once cricket’s in your blood, it doesn’t go away,” he says.
Building for the next phase
Nearly two decades after Kamath returned to India and found a sports industry with “very little documentation,” the landscape has changed dramatically. The IPL’s franchise valuations now rival those of top-tier American sports teams. International capital is flowing into Indian cricket at unprecedented levels. And the legal architecture that underpins the entire structure — the contracts, the IP protections, the governance frameworks — has developed from almost nothing into a system that, as Kamath puts it, “stands shoulder to shoulder with any property globally.”
“There is a sense of security that capital gets, that that it’s a well-conceived landscape where the leakages are limited and there is a continuity and certainty of capital getting protection.”
But the city, in his metaphor, is not yet finished. The next decade will determine whether Indian cricket’s regulatory environment can mature at the pace its commercial ambitions demand — and whether the certainty that global investors require becomes the norm rather than the aspiration. For Kamath and the broader community of lawyers, executives, and policymakers who have helped shape the ecosystem, the work continues.
“The best players in the world are going to play here,” he says. “They’re going to be paid the most here, and the legal infrastructure is dynamic enough to capture new interest coming in and staying firm on value.” The legal scaffolding that supports that ambition — invisible to the hundreds of millions who watch the IPL every year — may be the most important infrastructure the league has ever built.
