Newly released financial papers show that India’s cricket board made almost $300 million from its Indian Premier League last year.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is one of the wealthiest sports organizations in the world. This is mostly because of how popular the Twenty20 event is.
Since it started in 2008, the IPL has made its best players rich and made billions of dollars from media rights. It has also inspired many other cricket-loving countries to start their own games.
Annual reports for the five years up to 2021-22 were posted on the BCCI website on Thursday. The reports showed that as of April 2022, the board had saved up 320 billion rupees ($2.7 billion).
Audited account numbers show that the IPL that year made a net profit of $292 million, with $771 million in income and $479 million in costs.
In the past, the BCCI has avoided giving out financial details.
Before Thursday, the board hadn’t released a full report since 2017.
Neeraj Kumar, a former anti-corruption advisor for the BCCI who wrote a tell-all book about the board this year, spoke out against the board’s silence about its funds in an interview with Australian media in June.
He told the Sydney Morning Herald, “It’s a great shame that we’re so rich and that so much money goes to our states without being tracked.”
Last year, the BCCI sold the broadcasting and internet streaming rights for the IPL games from 2023 to 2027 for a staggering $6.2 billion. US media giants Disney and Viacom were among the winning bids.
This amount is more than two-and-a-half times the value of the last five-year deal for television rights.
This year was the first time that the T20 event was open to women, and the BCCI made almost $700 million from contract and television rights.