MUMBAI: Uday Shankar, president of Walt Disney Company, APAC, and chairman, Star & Disney India, has said “the market is not ready to support and sustain the IPL 2020 with the same fervour and gusto in the current economic environment,” according to a report in ET Now.
The chief of Star India, which holds the global media rights of Indian Premier League, told the business news channel he does not expect the market would recover in the next 6-8 weeks to put thousands of crores of advertising on this season of the IPL.
“The market has gone through massive shock. Whether it would recover enough to put thousands of crores worth of advertising in next 6-8 weeks is the real issue and we doubt that,” he told ET Now.
“IPL is an expensive tournament. We have paid huge monies to acquire the rights. For it to break even for us, for the other stakeholders, the advertising activity needs to be really substantial. Given the kind of economic shock we have seen during these times, I am not sure if market is ready to support and sustain IPL 2020,” he said.
The timing of Shankar’s comments is important. It coincides pretty much with it becoming “all but certain” that the T20 World Cup 2020, scheduled to be held in October-November in Australia, will be officially postponed. Ergo this opens up a window for the BCCI to host this year’s IPL in the slot vacated by the ICC tournament.
So what is the not so subtle “message” that Shankar is sending out to the IPL’s owner – the Board of Control for Cricket in India? There HAS to be a reworking of the the IPL rights fees that Star will pay the BCCI this year. And if not? That’s a bridge that is yet to be crossed but it is only reasonable to presume that Star India’s new owners Walt Disney would DEMAND that Shankar extract some give and take from the Indian cricket board on this matter.
For the record, Star India had already shelled out some Rs 1.6 billion odd to the BCCI as 50% advance on its IPL rights licence fee before the cash awash tournament was indefinitely postponed due to COVID-19. Not exactly the best possible place to negotiate from, it must be said. More so when you consider that if there is one cricket board that exemplifies bad governance in terms of chain of command, it is the BCCI.
Just who does the team under K Madhavan, managing director, Star & Disney India team interact with for this. Or put differently, just who in the BCCI has the authority to sign off on a renegotiated contract?
BCCI chief executive Rahul Johri? NOT the man. Why? Because Johri is clearly living on borrowed time. He is seen as former Committee of Administrators chairman Vinod Rai’s man and had resigned soon after the sorry 33-month stint of BCCI’s Supreme Court-appointed CoA came to an end on October 23 (now that’s another tale in and of itself). Johri may have been re-instated as BCCI CEO but it is is clearly a stop gap appointment so one can hardly blame him for not being seriously invested in the running of the board.
How about BCCI secretary Jay Shah? While nobody in the BCCI wants to draw attention to the fact, the truth is that as per the existing constitution of the Indian cricket board, the BCCI does NOT have a secretary at the moment? Why? As per the new constitution prepared under the Supreme Court appointed Lodha Committee, the tenure of the son of Union Home Minister Amit Shah officially ended on 30th June. Reason being that Shah has completed his six years in cricket administration. Before becoming the BCCI secretary, Shah was the joint secretary of the Gujarat Cricket Association. The new constitution says administrators have to take a three-year cooling-off break after six successive years in any state unit or in the BCCI.
How about BCCI president Saurav Ganguly? For the same reasons as Shah, the former Team India captain will not be eligible to hold his present position effective 27 July.
That leaves BCCI treasurer Arun Dhumal (brother of former BCCI president Anurag Thakur, currently Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs). He may be very accessible to the media for quotes but SportzPower is not convinced that he would be ready to “roll up his sleeves” and commit to the complexities involved in reworking the terms and conditions of the existing IPL rights contract, even admitting that the force majeure situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic demands just that.
Dhumal’s recent comments to Cricbuzz are quite revealing: “This whole talk that IPL is a money-making machine, so be it. Who takes that money? That money goes to the players, that money doesn’t go to any office bearers. That money goes to the welfare of the nation, the travel and tourism industry, in terms of industries being revived, in terms of taxes being paid.
“So why opposition for the money? Money is paid to the players and all those people who are there to organise the tournament. Media has to change the stance and tell about the benefit of this tournament that is happening.
“If BCCI is paying thousands of crores in taxes, it is going in nation-building, it is not going to Mr Sourav Ganguly or Mr Jay Shah or myself. Right? So you should be happy if money is being made rather than money being spent on sports.”
So for Dhumal it’s all about the money. Nothing more, nothing less. Who can blame him anyway. That has been pretty much the default mode of the world’s richest cricket body since way before Dhumal’s time. For the BCCI, it is all transactional and zero about the future of the game.
Speaking of the future of the game, it is worth checking on when the BCCI last put out a “vision document” on where it wants to take the game. Fact: in 2000, no less. It was in 2000 that then BCCI president Dr AC Muthiah and then secretary Jaywant Lele handed over to then Sports Minister Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa the BCCI’s grandiosely titled ‘Vision Statement’. 20 years have passed but said vision statement has remained just that – a statement. And two decades on, it is really a sorry state of affairs that BCCI remains all about the money and little else.
Coming back to Disney Star, between a rock and a hard place about sums up where Madhavan and his strategy team are currently at, on the 2020 IPL rights fees situation. At least as far as SportzPower’s understanding of the current scenario is concerned.
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