Selling media rights for women’s IPL first to give revenue visibility: Arun Dhumal

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) recently floated the tender to award WIPL media rights for the 2023-2027 period. The tender is available for purchase till December 31. The bid submission will take place on January 12. The BCCI will follow a closed bidding process to award media rights for Women’s IPL.

BCCI has not set any base price for WIPL media rights. “We believe that the market is the best place for price discovery, so that’s why we have not set any base price for the Women’s IPL,” Dhumal said.

A few stakeholders, however, feel that the board should have auctioned WIPL franchises before embarking on the media rights sale.

“The BCCI may have been better served in auctioning the franchises first as ownership of the teams and where the teams are based will influence potential commercial rights value,” a media executive said on condition of anonymity. The executive said the choice of cities will play a pivotal role in are more important for advertisers.

“If teams are based in cities with low advertising expenditure and are non-priority markets then monetisation of the events could be affected,” the person added. The executive also pointed out that most franchise-based leagues including the IPL have franchises determining the value of media rights as certain cities/regions in major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai, among others, which helps monetisation and also drives the aspirational value of the league. Dhumal said IPL has always defied conventional wisdom and to bring home the point, he cited the examples of the recent IPL media rights auction and the sale of Lucknow and Ahmedabad franchises.

“The recent IPL media rights auction and the sale of Lucknow and Ahmedabad teams have set new benchmarks,” he said. “A lot of people said that the base price for IPL media rights is too high, however, the final bid amounts were way beyond the base price. Similarly, nobody had imagined that Lucknow will surpass Ahmedabad franchise in value, but it happened.”

He further said, “Irrespective of what people say, the stakeholders and franchisees know their numbers and business strategy very well.” The league will have five franchise-based teams that will play a total of 22 matches. Each team will have a maximum of 18 players in the squad including six foreign players. The base price for each franchise is reportedly Rs 400 crore. The BCCI is considering two plans.

One is to sell WIPL teams based on zones and conduct the matches at non-IPL venues. The board has shortlisted six zones — North (Dharamshala/Jammu), West (Pune/Rajkot), Central (Indore/Raipur/Nagpur), East (Ranchi/Cuttack), South (Kochi/Vizag), and Northeast (Guwahati) — for this.