Muddied waters of IPL

GROUND ZERO

A VIRTUOUS CYCLE CALLED IPL

Empty stands greeted CSK and DC players on Thursday at the D Y Patilstadium. It was a rude shock for the organisers of the marquee semifinal contest between premier sides. Was it also symptomatic of themuddied waters around brand IPL, built so painstakingly andassiduously over the last couple of years? Has the sheen and lustrearound brand IPL worn off due to issues relating to crony sportism?Yes, chairman and commissioner Lalit Modi was a unilateralist and didpretty much as he pleased, without so much as a by your leave from theIPL GoverningCouncil. The moot point here is that the IPL Governing Council and theBCCI allowed him to do so. There were no checks and balances at all.And though a cabal consisting of BCCI president Shashank Manohar andsecretary N Srinivasan tried their best to destabilise him and evencut him to size, Modi's powerful backers amongst whom were formerpresidents Sharad Pawar and I S Bindra and franchise owners MukeshAmbani, Vijay Mallya and Shahrukh Khan who have access to the top ofthe political pyramid in the capital, ensured that he got away scotfree each time he was pinned down on something. Be it the move to SAor the IMG dispute or the broadcast deal renegotiation, Modi was thecat with nine lives.
For a long time, many have suspected and even spelt out the fall ofthis card house called IPL. The sheer size and scale of power vestedin the IPL Commissioner pointed to this fact. He was known to bearrogant and had reportedly appropriated complete and absolute poweras far as IPL decision making was concerned. The question is - shouldhe have been allowed so much power? Why was there no system of checksand balances to curtail this power seeking rush that seemed to haveenveloped Modi? Or was it that they turned a blind eye to Modi'smisdemeanours given that he was making money hand over fist for theBCCI? The culpability of BCCI and the IPL Governing Council in themain is astonishing. Yet, they all chose to keep quiet. Even when Modidecided to declare the ownership patterns of the teams on April 14,the majority kept silent and only a handful refused outright to agreewith his proposal.
These are a series of acts of omission and commission and nobody has aclue about it. The source of funding, the tender process for highvalue contracts, the sheer ad hocism associated with the enterprise.Modi's writ ran large in the IPL. he was akin to a one man executivearm of the BCCI.It has taken a simple tweet to bring down this house. And in theprocess it has shaken the foundation of the IPL economy and itscollaborative eco system. A large extended family enterprisedovetailed with relationships and business associates. There arebroadcasters, sponsors, advertisers, corporates who are involved inthis billion dollar enterprise. Which has now proved to be an empty shellmaking a lot of noise. MSM or Sony Entertainment Television forked outan astronomical $1.63 billion for 9 years as part of a renegotiatedcontract with BCCI. To secure this, it has paid a facilitation fee of$80 million. Advertisers like Vodafone and Videocon have paid Rs 55crore each for this season as presenting sponsors on SET Max. Thisvirtuous circle has big names like Reliance Industries, UB Group,India Cements, Shahrukh Khan involved personally. Their brands arepart of the mothership called IPL. A brand that had till the other dayall the attributes of a mega brand with salience and luminescence.Companies like DLF, Hero Honda, Airtel, Nokia, Idea, Ultratech, Citibank andmany more have pledged big bucks to be associated with this failingenterprise. These are all brands, subsets to a larger brand.
Marketing analysts will tell you that there will be a huge impact onbrand IPL and all the sub brands associated with it. Researchindicates that while people memory is extremely short, probablylasting say a fortnight or so, it is the adverse impact on the motherbrand which is considerable. So, even as people memory will forget,impact on the mother brand will be affected by a contagion. Acontagion that acts as a corroder. This has been proved over time, forinstance in the Tiger Woods case where an individual was involvedunlike a collective like the IPL, Accenture walked away from the brandbecause it saw an erosion on its own brand recall on the dimension oftrust. Accenture spells trust, it works on faith and trust with itsclients. Once that is bunged, then the mother brand's image is ruinedby its association with someone like Tiger who broke his wife's trustby sleeping around. However, Nike which works on the recall of awinning mindset continues with Tiger because the dimension isdifferent. In Nike's case, it is about winning. When it comes to Modiand IPL, a conglomeration of dimensions is at work. And at the momentall of them are negative. Dirty deals, sleaze, misuse of office, cronycapitalism is all very well, but if the needle of betting and matchfixing gets to work, then it attacks the brand in an overtly negativemanner. Fortunately there is no evidence of match fixing yet inIPLgate. Thankfully, this is a relief. The format does not allow amatch to be fixed easily. One man can take the game away in one over.Collusion between a handful of players on both sides would be requiredand hence IPL remains untouched till date from the quagmire of fixingand tanking games.
The fortunes of Modi and IPL are in a way inextricably linked in theshort term. Media's glory boy has come crashing down to earth. Thosein his corner have turned against him, leaving him with very littlemanoeuvrability. Five years ago nobody had heard of him, his risebegan when he became the super chief minister of Rajasthan. Some of usin media had heard of him obliquely as the managing director of ModiEntertainment Network, but that was just about it. His entry into BCCIas the Rajasthan Cricket Association president changed the equations,courtesy his benefactor chief minister Vasundhra was the firsttentpole. The second and more important building block came when hehandled Sharad Pawar's high voltage campaign to become BCCI boss afterJagmohan Dalmiya had vanquished him a year earlier. Mon won hisbrownie points by getting Pawar the top job. He also earned hisunflinching trust at the same time.His proximity to chief ministerVasundhra Raje pitchforked him into the limelight. As BCCI veep hebegan to do some business deals which realised more value for theboard. But the breakthrough benefit came after Subhash Chandra cockinga snook at the BCCI architected Indian Cricket League. Despite itsunofficial status and rebel tag, Chandra managed to rig up teams andbrought fairly decent international players to India. He even broughtsome big former Indian cricketers on board, none bigger than KapilDev. And by poaching entire Ranji teams, the likes of Ambatti Rayadufirst made a name of themselves in ICL, he had thrown down thegauntlet at the BCCI. It acted as a wake up call for the somnolentboard. That is when Modi found his true calling. His metier. Armedwith a NBA, NFL, EPL, MLB template from the US, the Dukes Universityeducated scion to the Godfrey Philips empire began to widen hishorizons. Modi found an able partner in Andrew Wildblood of IMG andtogether they retrofitted ICL to rig up IPL with many fashionabletwists. In the end came Indian Premier League, a league ofextradordinary gentlemen and a few ladies.
By bringing innovations and wearing a marketer's hat with greataplomb, Modi created an enterprise of substance. Though hollow frominside. The smartest move of course was roping in Mukesh Ambani, VijayMalllya, Shahrukh Khan, Preity Zinta et al, a true blue confluence ofglam quotient and cricket. Auctions of teams and players, a hithertounprecedented concept made it larger than life. Nowhere in the worldin any sport for that matter is a player auctioned, it happened in theIPL. Cassandras like myself thought that the whole enterprise wasdoomed for failure from the start. Why should sub tribal loyaltieswork in a nation high on jingosim was my thinking? But I was provedwrong, Brendon McCullum played the innings of his life and kickstarteda craze which became the new opiate of the masses. An opiate whichshook the foundation of Indian cricket and how it functioned. Revenuesand ratings began to flow from the barrell of this gun. Modi was thedarling of the media and the masses. All the warts and allegationsreceded. All of us knew that his brother in law Suresh Chellaram wasthe majority shareholder in RR, his step son in law Gaurav Burman'sbrother Mohit was similarly co promoter of Kings XI Punjab, that BCCItreasurer then N Srinivasan was owner of a franchise - CSK. Yes, cronycapitalism was rampant, but everyone chose to ignore it as IPL becamebiggger by the day.
Now the same media has turned against its own creation. How has mediadone with IPLgate? The best stories have appeared without a doubt inToI which is strange and I suspect that someone is feeding them. ForModi made many enemies in his time. His arrogance threw a lot ofpeople off, his brash demeanour offending many. There arebroadcasters, sponsors and advertisers in that long list. All of themmaybe feeding media for it is a virtual free for all out there. Of thetelevision channels, Headlines Today is front running everyone withincisive news breaks and opportune analysis. ToI and ET are going forbroke, but the substantive stories are all apearing in ToI. Three ofmy favourites - Poorna Patel commandeering an Air India jet for IPL,Videocon and Adani bid files evaporating into thin air and of coursethe juiciest - facilitation fee paid by WSG - allegedly to Lalit Modion the renegotiated broadcast deal.