More than the star players, more than the quick-fire format, more even than the money, what defined the first three editions of the Indian Premier League was the razzmatazz: the hype, the music, the cheerleaders—all the sound and fury. This year, the lucrative domestic Twenty20 league that revolutionized cricket still has the blasting rock music and incongruous-looking young women dancing on platforms, but behind the scenes, there's a new atmosphere of sobriety.
For a start, flamboyant former chairman and commissioner Lalit Modi is gone, sacked by the league's board after it accused him of owning silent stakes in three IPL teams, fixing the bidding for the two franchises joining the league this season and taking bribes to award media rights—accusations that he continues to dispute. With his departure, the league has been downgraded to just another committee of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, surrendering much of the free-wheeling autonomy that made it such a game-changer. Even the January player auction, the largest since the tournament's first year, was curiously restrained, largely because so many players didn't attract a single bid. The auction is starting to become a somewhat tawdry spectacle—a cold-eyed meat market where most of the meat goes unsold.
The worry is that without its former footloose financial attitude, the league will lose some of the glitz and glamour that has made it so distinctive in an otherwise conservative cricketing world. But this season's sobriety is born of an emphasis on good governance, after conflicts of interest threatened to destroy the league's credibility. In this edition, which kicked off Friday, you might expect full disclosure and complete accountability.
You might expect that—and yet the BCCI has appeared on a number of issues to be as arbitrary and high-handed as ever. Late last year, it tried to throw out three of the league's 10 teams (up from eight in previous seasons). Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab were accused of lying about their ownership structures, while the new Pune Warriors almost flew apart before playing a game, thanks to a complex tussle for control among shareholders. The decision to ban the teams was overturned by the Bombay High Court, with Rajasthan and Punjab required to provide bank guarantees to cover salaries and their contracts with the BCCI.
It's not only the lineup of teams that has been in flux. The IPL's bizarre decision to auction off nearly all available players again, most of them to new teams, has largely destroyed any continuity in playing personnel. The auction process itself was subject to a last-minute change, prompting a complaint from the Mumbai Indians when the order in which sets of players were auctioned was changed from random to preordained—but with no explanation of how that order was decided.
For this year's auction, teams had the largest-ever salary cap—$9 million. They could choose to spend as much as half to retain up to four players from last season at a set rate: $1.8 million for the first player and progressively smaller amounts for each subsequent one. (The league kicked off with a full player auction in 2008, when teams had a $5 million cap, followed by off-season horse-trading before the 2009 edition and last year a limited auction giving teams the opportunity to top up their playing rosters; so this year's was a novel hybrid of new and optionally retained players). However, the IPL has never specified that the amount deducted from the salary cap has to match the amount paid to the retained player—so it's quite possible the teams are paying their stars rather more than that, and busting the $9 million limit. The salary cap, then, may only exist as an index, a notional way of measuring the value of players, rather than a genuine limit on spending. Many would argue that a salary cap goes against the entrepreneurial nature of the IPL anyway—but if it's claiming to have one and doesn't enforce it, the protestations of increased transparency start to ring a little hollow.
Then there's the vexed issue of the IPL media rights. They were sold in 2008 to Singapore-based World Sport Group in a deal the IPL canceled last June, claiming it was owed money paid to WSG by the league's Indian broadcast partner. It did so unilaterally, however, without producing evidence in open court, and the Bombay High Court subsequently ruled that the BCCI couldn't resell the rights to a third party until the dispute was resolved. India's Supreme Court then overruled the Bombay court.
The Indian board has done many wonderful things with the IPL, and the franchise model has turned the game on its head by injecting mounds of cash. But that very franchise model still allows the BCCI to manage the league autocratically. That's fine as long as the cash flows freely. Add capricious changes in team and player lineups to a questionable remuneration system, a bun fight over broadcasting and an apparently imperious attitude to legal process, and the new squeaky-cleanliness of the IPL is starting to look like an empty attempt to save face after the league's alleged misdeeds in the past—the same old BCCI putting on a show of doing the right thing.
With recent match-fixing allegations still fresh in the mind, cricket is vulnerable to charges that things are being arranged behind the scenes. At the moment, the IPL is the only game in town for cricketers looking to make a fortune, but other domestic Twenty20 leagues are waiting in the wings. The IPL is still strong, but its credibility is delicate. It's successfully used Modi as a way to isolate and excise much of previous editions' toxicity, but it might take only one more big scandal for fans, sponsors—and players—to vote with their feet.
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