Stuff That Works...

• Get the best returns from the least possible price.
  IPL leaders Rajasthan Royals, Punjab XI have the lowest costs.
  
• Build strong teams and hire motivational leaders.
  Applies to business as well as sports.
  
• First impressions are crucial; in fact, very essential to get the product launch right.
  A losing team will result in negative fallout on the mother brand.
  
• Decentralise and empower the business division.
  Owners shouldn't meddle in day-to-day performance.

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...And That Which Won't

• Listen to your customer, and react quickly to negative feedback.
  Catering to the popular voice may not work for team performance.
  
• Constant evaluation of success or failure in reaching targets.
  Evaluation in sports is governed by intangibles, is more intuitive.
  
• Ensure the business meshes with overall group branding initiatives.
  Treat sports as an independent business, not a brand promotion exercise.
  
• Reward successful performers with performance incentives.
  Players have to be motivated by more than just money.

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Sporting a T-shirt and waving from the owner's box is a heady experience, but owners of IPL teams are also discovering the downside: running a multi-billion-dollar business can never really prepare one to swallow defeat in front of millions of fans on prime-time TV.

Defeat can have a negative impact on the brand. So it's best to keep it as a standalone business, say experts.

It is, after all, your team and money—for some, brands and egos are at stake too. As the IPL starts separating the winners from the losers, that's the new reality team owners are coping with. Vijay Mallya's public attack on his team's manager and captain, if anything, shows the business of cricket is just not proving to be business as usual.

As things stand, say experts, the first lesson is that no one can yet predict to any reasonable degree whether any IPL match will be won or lost. There just isn't enough data to crunch. Lesson number two is more important: Not everyone will win in any case, with or without the excel-sheets filled with data. In short, nothing guarantees victory to any of the clubs in the league. But, as Santosh Desai, CEO, Future Brands, points out, although team owners appear to talk about the matches in the language of business, the real reason they get upset when their team loses is that it hurts their pride. "If their team loses, they all feel let down even if they haven't lost any money in real terms," he says.

The hurt can be more than just a dented ego. In the case of Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries (Mumbai) or the UB group (Bangalore) or India Cements (Chennai), the team gets intrinsically linked to the promoter's brands. That's why, points out Anirban Das Blah who runs sports management firm GloboSports, club owners have done their best to hire the most visible players and top marketing minds. They want to make a good impression right from the start. "For other owners, the team is still a business proposition, but costs have been optimised—as in Jaipur or Kolkata's case—to ensure success," Blah says.

The jury is still out on which of the two models will do well in India. But a look at the global scene—like football clubs in Europe and NBA in the US—shows sports is definitely a profitable business. What's not that clear is the strategy of using brands to piggyback on the fortunes of a sports team: defeat can have a negative impact on the brand. That's why experts say it's best to just treat it as a standalone business. "Corporate values do apply in the world of cricket; but unlike a regular business, these values do not make the outcome of a match predictable," warns Kolkata team director Joy Bhattacharya.

But then, teams have to win too—so, can a sports team be really run like a business? Predictably, opinion is divided. "Of course, it can be run like a business. I feel that the opposition to IPL is elitist. People need entertainment, and the IPL has provided that," says columnist and author Gurcharan Das. Adds Tarun Khanna of Harvard Business School: "Some actors might promote themselves during the matches, but that would be a small price to pay for more money for players and better sports facilities overall." The private players will improve the game, he adds.

The counter-view puts sports and business on different platforms. According to Harish Bijoor, CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults, the IPL form of instant cricket is more gamble than business, at least for the first year. "There is no method in the madness of IPL. Luck plays a huge role here," he says. Desai says the principles of a sporting event and business are "clearly not identical". Profit might be the motive for both, but a sport is more than the efficient marshalling of resources, he notes.

What's clear is that it's early days for the owners—a shake-up of the IPL format is likely, and soon. "IPL is good, old-fashioned, very straightforward commercial," says economist and cricket enthusiast Surjit Singh Bhalla. "But something's got to give. There is too much cricket going on." Maruti's former CEO Jagdish Khattar believes TV viewership may be IPL's first casualty. "I saw it with cars—months of near-obsessive interest in a model that tapers off suddenly, and sometimes never picks up. That's the way Indian audiences are," he says.

The best team will win eventually, even in sport. The nervous moments leading up to that will define the new business rules for cricket.