- Champions League Twenty20, slated to be held in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai, Dec 3 to 10, is off
- Indian Masters golf tournament, to be held in February, called off
- Last two India-England ODIs cancelled
- ICL's World Series tournament called off after 26/11, with a week's play to go
- Sponsorship and prize money in many football, tennis events fall, organisers say there are other factors too
- McLaren F1 team's event with Mika Hakkinen, to be held in Mumbai, cancelled
- World Doubles Squash Championship, to be held in Chennai from December 15-20, is cancelled
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Nor does Year 2009 hold out hopes for the IPL. Its title sponsor is DLF, the big dad of the realty business which is in the throes of an economic tailspin. "What will DLF do?" asks the representative. "Another big sponsor is Citibank, who're in trouble in the US. If such massive companies are facing a meltdown, will they have money to pump into sport?"
The meltdown came even as IPL team owners were taking stock, glumly accepting that their projections were wide of the mark. The CEO of one of the IPL teams would privately admit, months before the meltdown, that the picture painted to his franchise was rosier than it actually was, that the talk of break-even timelines and monetising opportunities didn't have a strong basis. The downturn has now forced several rethinks and mid-course corrections.
"The slowdown will impact everyone—the IPL, the franchises and all services related to them—in a very significant way," says a senior source in an IPL team. "We fear that local sponsorships streams, which include partners and gate money etc, will be disrupted. With money difficult to get by, we fear it'll be a sort of an unequal battle, for most costs are either fixed or rising." Agrees Jeet Banerjee, MD of sports management firm Gameplan, "Corporates are under pressure, they will review their future participation in sports."
The fear is that measures to cut costs may not be adequate; the franchise fees are fixed, as are the players' costs. The depreciation of the rupee against the dollar—all IPL deals have been signed in dollars—have already increased cost by 25 per cent.
The tournament itself is in no danger, IPL team representatives insist, but the frills are likely to be shorn off. Says a Delhi team source, "Anything that's non-essential will not be done. The entertainment, the cheerleaders, the music videos will have to go." But wasn't "cricketainment" or tamasha around the game the tournament's USP? "Yes, it was, but we have to think of surviving this slowdown," he answers.
Ironically, the smaller players in the field believe they won't be affected, that events with massive TV and in-stadia deals are likely to suffer most. Arindam Bhattacharya of Cradle Sports, a Delhi-based sports management company, is one of them. He believes that smaller events, outreach programmes of corporate houses which he's been doing, will not be affected because at a low cost, the client can reach their target audience directly. "That's what my experience was when the last slowdown occurred, in 2000."
The big players, though, aren't dismayed. "We remain confident about the Champions League," insists R.C. Venkateish, MD, ESPN Software India, which holds TV rights to the Champions League. "With an array of properties across sports categories, we will continue to grow." Dushyant Singh, a director at corporate consultancy KPMG, is also not overly worried. "The IPL is still in its nascent stages and it's yet to exploit innumerable revenue streams," he said. "I still expect the revenues of the IPL teams to rise and break even within the next two years."
KPMG has been in discussions with potential investors to find a buyer for the Hyderabad Deccan Chargers, owned by the Deccan Chronicle group. No deal has yet been reached, and observers say they may wait out the slowdown, hoping for more clement economic weather soon. That might be too sanguine a hope for the dark skies Indian sport finds itself under.
