MUMBAI: Times Group-owned American Cricket Enterprises (ACE), USA Cricket’s commercial rights partner, has confirmed that the Shah Rukh Khan co-owned Knight Rider Sports Pvt Ltd (KRSPL) has been inducted as a “key investor” in Major League Cricket (MLC), the Indian Premier League-templated T20 tournament that is targeting launch in 2022.
For the record, KRSPL is the holding company that owns and operates two T20 franchises – the Kolkata Knight Riders IPL team and the Trinbago Knight Riders in the Caribbean Premier League.
Vijay Srinivasan, co-founder of Willow TV (bought over by Times Internet in 2016) and listed as a co-founder of ACE (alongside Willow TV co-founder Sameer Mehta, Times Internet vice-chairman Satyan Gajwani AND Times Group managing director Vineet Jain) asserted that the investment marked a watershed moment in ACE’s endeavour to make cricket mainstream in the US.
“We are hugely excited by the Knight Riders buying into the vision of Major League Cricket and look forward to working with them to bring the potential of American cricket to fruition. It is great to have them in early in the process and have their expertise involved all the way through the league’s launch. Moreover, their investment is a statement of validation of our plans. This is a strategic long-term investment into the future of cricket in the United States,” Srinivasan told Times Group-owned cricket website Cricbuzz.
“The US being the largest media market in the world and the proliferation of the commonwealth diaspora provides a unique opportunity. We believe there is a large enough market for cricket. There are brands in the US who would look at cricket as a platform to advertise and build activation plans and marketing plans around our product. There is also a considerable appetite for merchandising and licensing that goes with it. If we can systematically and smartly go about building an elite product and then packaging and marketing it optimally ,we may well be on our way to build something truly special,” KRSPL CEO Venky Mysore told the website.
Mysore understands that the presence of top athletes will be at the forefront of his ‘elite product’ building strategy.
“Even just anecdotally talking to your A-List players about coming and playing in the US, the response I get is ‘wow! absolutely would love to play!’ — which is not quite what you hear about other leagues besides the IPL. So as long as the compensation and the attractiveness of the league can be positioned, you’ll have the best of the best wanting to come and play and elevate the quality of the product and the standard of cricket on display. We will play a crucial role in attracting high quality top level international players to come and play through leveraging our relationships and that is what ACE expects from us,” adds Mysore.
Cricbuzz further reports that apart from pledging around $15-20 million in equity and getting marquee players to the US, the KRSPL think tank will also leverage their expertise at MLC in designing the governance structure and the economic model. Mysore is very receptive about the idea of adopting the NFL model where franchises collectively own the league unlike the IPL or the CPL, where there is a central entity (BCCI, Cricket West Indies respectively) that owns the league.
Mysore believes that MLC can hit the ground running and break even within 3 years’ time with the kind of product he envisions complemented by NFL-like economic model and a credible governance structure.
For the record, the proposed tournament will initially have six franchises representing the cities of New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.
“We don’t have all the details as yet but looks like the six franchises collectively could be owning around 75% of the league and the remaining 25% going to smaller shareholders and promoters. I think this is actually a very good model, because there’s complete alignment, then, and you have an interest in making sure that the league runs very well. And obviously, the way the league runs has an impact on the franchise,” Mysore further said.
As per Cricbuzz, KRSPL will own the Los Angeles franchise (named LA Knight Riders) of the MLC, keeping with the happy coincidences of the purple and gold also worn by the Los Angeles Lakers and the added celebrity quotient around the Hollywood area to go with their very own Hindi film superstar Shah Rukh Khan.
Meanwhile, “King Khan”, in a statement issued to Mumbai Mirror (another Times Group publication), said: “For several years now, we have been expanding the Knight Riders brand globally, and closely watching the potential for T20 cricket in the USA. We are convinced that Major League Cricket has all the pieces in place to execute on its plans and we look forward to making our partnership an enormous success in the coming years.”
Mirror further reports that KRSPL has also obtained ‘Indian exclusivity’ in the league. This means no IPL team can be a part of the American league for at least the first five years of the league’s launch.
Major League Cricket is scheduled to kick off from 2022 after the conclusion of IPL in the same year.
