To put it brazenly in numbers, ESS needed its coffers to have $90 million per year for the next 10 years just to just break even, but according to reports it was raking in around $20 million a year with ad revenue. This was of course without counting overhead costs in marketing & advertising campaigns that would require the broadcaster to pay cheques as fat as those souvenir man of the match replica cheques to various Bollywood brand ambassadors. Numbers are for balance sheets and quantitative research analysts. I am interested in investigating how a tournament on paper, which was meant to be in the higher echelons of T20 tournaments compared to its glamorous younger cousin — the IPL fizzled like a balloon whose air had been let out. I think the first deduction would lead me to believe that ESS thought it understood the anatomy of the league before understanding the anatomy of the cricket fan — the Indian cricket fan. The easiest alibi for the tournament organisers, the rights broadcasters, advertisers and anyone with a vested interest in the tournament would be to attribute that season’s three week mishmash of confused cricket to player burnout as a result cricketing overdose due to poor scheduling. Perhaps there is a modicum of truth to it. The real problem however is that the premise on which the Champions League itself that was created is, was and will always be flawed. Although in its purist form the Champions League possesses that kernel which makes it a valuable tournament on paper. After all who wouldn’t agree that the best domestic T20 sides should square off annually to claim the coveted trophy? But therein lay the problem. Unlike football, cricket’s meteoric rise to global fandom never had the club/domestic loyalties. Well even if it did, it wasn’t what made the sport popular.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 19:03:53 +0000
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