Follow the Money: How the IPL Earns, Shares and Spends Its Revenue
An IPL season lasts roughly two months. The business behind it runs all year.
Most fans only meet the league’s finances in two forms: the eye-watering auction bids every winter and the occasional headline about franchise valuations. Neither tells you much about how the money actually moves. The auction, for all its drama, is a cost line. The valuations are a guess about the future. The real economics sit in a handful of contracts that most viewers never think about, and in the rules that decide who keeps what.
The Engine: Media Rights
Everything starts with broadcasting.
In 2022, the BCCI auctioned the IPL’s media rights for the 2023 to 2027 cycle. The combined value came to ₹48,390 crore. Television rights for the Indian subcontinent went to Disney Star, digital rights went to Viacom18, and smaller packages covered a set of non-exclusive matches and overseas territories. On a per-match basis, the rights were worth more than ₹100 crore, which placed the IPL among the most valuable sports properties in the world on that measure.
Broadcasters pay those sums because the IPL concentrates an enormous live audience into a short window. Live sport is one of the few things people still watch at the moment it happens, which makes the advertising inventory around it unusually valuable, and the league also drives new subscriptions to streaming services.
The competitive picture has since changed. Reliance’s Viacom18 and Disney’s Star India business merged in late 2024 to form JioStar, and from 2025 IPL streaming moved to the combined JioHotstar platform. Both the television and the digital rights for the current cycle now sit inside one company. That will matter a great deal when the next rights cycle goes to auction.
Central Revenue: The Pool Every Franchise Shares
The BCCI does not keep all of that money. Media rights income and central sponsorships, including the title sponsor and the league’s official partners, go into a central pool, and a substantial share of that pool is distributed to the franchises.
The title sponsorship alone is significant. Tata has held the IPL title rights since 2022 and renewed in 2024 for the 2024 to 2028 seasons at ₹2,500 crore, or about ₹500 crore a season.
This central distribution is the most important design choice in the league’s economics. It gives every franchise a large, predictable revenue floor regardless of the size of its home city or its results. A team that finishes last still receives its share. That financial stability is a big reason the IPL has avoided the problem, common in other sports, where a few rich clubs pull permanently away from the rest.
What Franchises Earn on Their Own
On top of the central share, each franchise runs its own commercial operation.
Team sponsorships. The space on the front of the shirt, the sleeves, the helmet and the training kit is sold individually by each team. Popular franchises with strong social followings command much higher rates.
Ticketing. Gate revenue from home matches is an important franchise income stream, though the number of home games is small and stadium capacity puts a ceiling on it.
Merchandise and licensing. Replica jerseys, fan products and licensed partnerships add revenue, although in India this remains smaller than in many Western leagues, partly because of the market for unofficial copies.
Prize money. It exists, but it is small next to everything else.
The wider portfolio. Several IPL owners now own teams in other T20 leagues, including the SA20 in South Africa, the ILT20 in the UAE, Major League Cricket in the United States and the Caribbean Premier League. A cricket franchise is increasingly a global brand with year-round content rather than a two-month operation.
The Cost Side of the Ledger
Revenue is only half the picture.
Franchise fees. Owners pay the BCCI for the right to run a team. When two new franchises were added for the 2022 season, the Lucknow team sold for ₹7,090 crore and the Ahmedabad team for ₹5,625 crore, payable over a period of years. Those numbers show what investors believed the central revenue stream was worth.
Player salaries. Spending in the auction is limited by a salary purse set by the BCCI. For the 2025 mega auction, that purse stood at ₹120 crore per team, with retained players counting against it.
Operating costs. Travel, hotels, coaching and support staff, scouting, academies, marketing, digital content and fees to host venues all add up across a season.
Because central income covers a large part of these costs, many franchises have been reported as profitable in recent seasons, which is unusual in global sport, where team ownership is often a loss-making status purchase.
How Franchise Values Are Estimated
Headlines about franchises being worth thousands of crores can sound arbitrary. Behind them sits a fairly standard way of thinking about value.
The starting point is the central income stream. A franchise’s share of media rights and central sponsorship is large, contracted and predictable for years at a time, which is exactly the kind of revenue investors like to pay a premium for. On top of that, analysts look at each team’s own commercial strength: sponsorship rates, social media following, stadium demand and the size of its home market.
Then there is the question of scarcity. There are only ten IPL franchises, and new ones are created rarely. When a stake does change hands, as happened when the Torrent Group bought a majority stake in Gujarat Titans, the price becomes a reference point for the whole league.
Finally, valuations carry assumptions about the next media rights cycle. If investors expect rights values to keep rising, they value franchises accordingly. If the broadcasting market looks less competitive, those numbers can soften quickly, which is why the next rights auction matters to every owner.
Why the Auction Is Not the Business
The auction produces the headlines. Rishabh Pant’s ₹27 crore price at the 2025 mega auction became the highest in the league’s history, and each new record gets treated as a sign of the league’s financial power.
In reality, the purse cap turns the auction into a redistribution exercise. Every franchise has roughly the same amount to spend. A record bid for one player means less money for the rest of that squad, not more money entering the league. The auction decides how a fixed pool is divided among players. It is a test of squad-building strategy, not a measure of how much the IPL earns.
Sponsorship and the 2025 Gaming Law
For much of the last decade, real-money fantasy and online gaming brands were among the biggest spenders in Indian cricket. Fantasy platforms sponsored the India jersey, held official IPL partnerships and bought large volumes of broadcast advertising.
That changed with the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, which banned online money games along with their advertising and promotion. Dream11’s India jersey sponsorship ended in 2025, and the BCCI signed Apollo Tyres as the new shirt sponsor. Broadcasters, meanwhile, had to replace a category that had filled a large share of match-day advertising.
The headline media rights values were already locked in until 2027, so central revenue was largely insulated in the short term. The bigger question is what the advertising market looks like when broadcasters bid for the next cycle without one of their most aggressive advertiser categories.
The Economy Around the League
The IPL’s audience supports a wider ring of businesses that never show up in the league’s own accounts.
Host cities see bursts of activity on match days, from hotels and restaurants to local transport. Scores and statistics platforms draw their biggest traffic of the year. Creators build entire content calendars around the season, and fan communities organise watch parties in cities where the league never plays.
At the far edge of that ring sit businesses entirely separate from the league itself, such as the exchange-access providers that fans use to follow live markets. Services like CricketOnlineID.com operate outside the official ecosystem, and their position is shaped by India’s gaming rules rather than by anything the BCCI decides. They are a reminder that the IPL’s commercial footprint reaches well beyond the contracts the league signs, and that regulation can reshape parts of that footprint almost overnight.
Why Other Leagues Struggle to Copy the Model
Almost every major cricket nation now runs a franchise T20 league, and several borrow heavily from the IPL’s structure. Very few come close to its financial scale, and the reasons are largely structural.
Audience size. The IPL sells to the world’s largest cricket audience in a single domestic market. Leagues in Australia, England, South Africa or the Caribbean are selling to far smaller home audiences, however passionate those fans are.
The advertising market. Indian brands spend heavily around cricket because it reaches so many consumers at once. Smaller economies simply don’t generate the same volume of advertising demand for a two-month window.
Scheduling power. The IPL has increasingly secured a window in the international calendar where leading players are available. Other leagues often compete with international fixtures and each other for the same players.
Ownership. A growing number of overseas leagues depend on investment from IPL owners. That brings money and expertise, but it also means much of global franchise cricket orbits around the same group of Indian businesses.
The result is a league that others can imitate in format but rarely in finances.
What to Watch Next
A few developments will shape the league’s economics over the next several years:
- The next media rights auction. With television and digital rights consolidated under JioStar, the level of competition in the next bidding round will largely decide whether rights values keep climbing.
- More matches. The current rights cycle already allows for a larger number of matches in its later seasons. More inventory means more revenue, but also more strain on player workloads and viewer attention.
- The Women’s Premier League. The WPL launched in 2023 with its media rights sold for ₹951 crore over five years and its franchises sold for a combined ₹4,670 crore. It is becoming a second major property with its own growth curve.
- The global franchise network. As IPL owners build teams across other leagues, the value of a franchise increasingly depends on a year-round, multi-country operation.
- The advertising mix. How quickly other categories fill the space left by real-money gaming brands will show up directly in broadcast revenue.
The Short Version
The IPL is, at heart, a media business with a cricket league attached. Broadcasters pay enormous sums for a concentrated live audience. The BCCI pools that money with central sponsorship and shares it widely, giving every franchise a stable base. Franchises add their own sponsorship, ticketing and brand-building on top, and spend within a capped player budget.
The auction gets the attention. The rights contract pays the bills. And the next rights cycle, not the next record bid, will be the moment that shows whether the league’s financial model is still growing.