MUMBAI: The Indian Premier League, a runaway success as a T20 cricket promotion, may tom-tom its achievements from one media house to another, but it still comes out only second best to English Premier League of soccer.
More and more potential franchisees, from India and abroad, are said to be keen to rush in when the new window opens for IPL next year. That may be good news, but the bigger revelation is that the magnum corporate houses, already in cricket team ownership, are turning their eyes towards bidding for one of the leading football clubs in England, Liverpool.
Indian industrialists Mukesh Ambani and Subroto Roy of the Sahara Group are reportedly in the race for a 51 per cent stake in Liverpool football club, bidding to pay off its 237 million pounds debt.
One of the most successful clubs in the history of English football, Liverpool emerged as a takeover target for Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries and the seventh richest man in the world, as pressure mounted on Hicks and Gillett, the present American owners, to cut a deal to sell the club. Both Ambani and Roy, as well as Liverpool chief executive Christian Purslow, are at present in the denial mode, more out of a desire to conceal the future owners of the club supposed to be the fourth richest football club in the world after Manchester United. Real Madrid and Arsenal.
This denial may be also because there are other interested buyers, Dubai International Capital being one of them. The attempt surely would be to boost the bid further.
Why are world’s leading corporate houses bidding for sports clubs instead of firms in their own line of business ?
An in depth analysis would suggest that these clubs are constantly in the news both in print and on electronic media, quite apart from the massive fan following they have. They thus serve as ready-made carriage for any form of brand publicity that they can think of. It is one more step ahead of just the sponsoring of a club. The ownership gives them all rights and even huge tax-free profits. It may be asked: then why not other sports ? Cricket and football are the most covered sport, even as rugby, baseball and basketball have a limited area of popularity.
There is no need to say that two other richly endowed sports, tennis and golf, are individual events. No business house can own a tennis player or a grand slam tournament. At best, they can only sponsor them.
Does this business take-over not create an undesirable disparity. Take India. The introduction of IPL has highly commercialized cricket and the BCCI is reaping more profits than before. But at the other end of the spectrum we have a situation where India’s hockey players have to go on strike even to get their just dues.
