There's a spate of sports leagues in India. Yes IPL worked, and so did kabaddi, but what about the other me-too copycats?
WHAT SAY, guys, should we get a league going?”
“Sounds good. What sport?”
“Anything — can someone check what’s left? Something the Indians are good at.”
“Well, you’ve got football and tennis — two of them for tennis actually. I think there’s something for golf… Kabaddi, of course... Maybe badminton?”
“Done! Just get Saina and that new girl, Sindhu, the Kashyap guy, and some of the Chinese and Malaysian players and we’re on.”
No doubt these conversations are a tad weightier than that, but with the way sports leagues are mushrooming around the country, one must wonder how many are in it for the long haul.
As a journalist interacting with sportspersons across disciplines, you are guaranteed to hear things such as “The media is only interested in cricket” and “All the money goes to cricket”. Some of it is snide. Not all of it is unjustified.
But those are the players. When the officials mouth similar sentiments, it’s often misplaced. After all, it’s a cycle. Cricket, for the past two-three decades, has occupied the sweet spot. It is a sport India has done well at. A sport that attracts money and fans. Do well and there will be attention, which brings in the money; and if money comes in, the overall standard of the sport goes up.
Which should come first though? The money or the performances? That’s the question, isn’t it? The purse-holders wait for athletes to do well, and the athletes have no option but to wait for the money to come in. We have right old status quo. [This doesn’t include sports such as shooting or golf or lawn tennis, which are the reserve of the upper classes and attract sportspersons who can fund their own way up the ladder without doles.] The officials, who are in it to raise the standards and attract money, do little.
At least that’s how things used to be.
Then we had the Indian Premier League (IPL). Or, well, to be fair, it started with the Indian Cricket League (ICL), which was scuttled by the bosses of the game in India — the Board of Control for Cricket in India — and then was born the IPL. It is run along similar lines as the ICL, but more glamorous, with the best cricketers in the world, played over an easy-to-follow format.
It was the Big Idea, a replicable one, though: Get sponsors on board, get the best players in the world with the promise of good money, get the necessary permissions, don’t mess with the international schedules, and voila! Other sports got into the game, too.
The catch? It is an idea tailormade for cricket. It worked because India is the centre — financial and otherwise — of the game. Spectators are guaranteed. There are top-drawer players at home. It wasn’t a bother to get the best players in the world to swing by and so powerful is the Indian cricket board that an occasional disruption of the game’s existing calendar wasn’t a trouble.
How does that translate for other sports, though?
Kabaddi — quite well, actually. The sport has spread to many parts of the world, but isn’t big anywhere outside India. Getting the best Indian and foreign talent was easy. The monetary expectation of the players wasn’t much, so a low-finance competition was worked out. TV slots were arranged. And it was a success.
What about football then? It’s a game that’s growing in India with each passing day. But it is skewed growth: one that only takes in the top clubs across Europe, specifically England and Spain. There is increased TV viewership, and there are some youngsters — urban youngsters — flocking to the nearest coaching clinic set up by visiting European clubs to cash in on the Indian market.
Nice. Just that none of it actually helps Indian football grow. More importantly, none of it helps tick the boxes that a football league trying to cash in on the post-IPL popularity of franchise-based leagues needs.
Would you, who gets to watch Premier League and La Liga every weekend, pay to watch former European players and Indian footballers you don’t care about anyway, in the Indian Super League? Yes, there might be the thrill of the new for a season, but how viable is the promise? Is the game going to be top-class, like the IPL is? Or like the Pro- Kabaddi League is? The IPL works because everyone from Chris Gayle and Mitchell Johnson and AB de Villiers to the top Indian players are a part of it. In football, that would mean bringing Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and Luis Suarez over, no? Who then? Robert Pires, whose senior career ended in 2011? Or Alessandro Del Piero, who has been on retirement postings since 2012?
And now we have the two tennis leagues: The International Premier Tennis League (IPTL), helmed by Mahesh Bhupathi; and the Champions Tennis League (CTL), put together by Vijay Amritraj. The two are not in competition with each other and an ICL vs IPL-like situation is unlikely to arise. But which one will you watch?
The IPTL will have Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Maria Sharapova, Andy Murray, Serena Williams and others — the cream of the crop. The CTL headlines players such as Sergi Bruguera, Pat Cash, Mark Philippoussis, Greg Rusedski and others; players from the 1990s. It’s like a veterans’ event. Interesting for some of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and remember Cash’s Wimbledon final win over Ivan Lendl back in 1987, and Bruguera’s Roland Garros baseline-slugging in 1993 and 1994. But are we the target audience if the event wants to sell anything but nostalgia? Wouldn’t the average fan prefer Federer and Sharapova?
The league format is a fine bandwagon to get on to, but at the moment there appears to be a sort of reckless rush in the overall sporting scene here. And, really, a big idea is hardly big enough if it is just a me-too.