India's share in cricket market shrinking?

NEW DELHI: The Indian market has largely fuelled international cricket for long. But the recent International Cricket Council's (ICC) media rights deal shows that India's contribution to world cricket has fallen by a significant margin.

After Star won the ICC rights for $1.81 billion for an eight-year period between 2015 to 2023, India's projected contribution, according to sources, will be around $1.175 billion, which works out to 65 per cent of the deal. This is lower than the previous two deals where India had contributed around 82 per cent and 85 per cent of the total revenue respectively.

In the current contract, the rest of the world will pitch in with over $635 million. In the previous media rights agreement for the period late 2007 to 2015, India contributed as much as $900 million out of $1.1 billion, which came to around 82 per cent. In the cycle before this one, World Sports Group consortium paid $550 million to the ICC, where India's contribution to global cricket was above 85%.

India, though, comfortably remains the biggest market for cricket in the world, followed by UK, US, Australia, South Africa, Pakistan and the Middle-East.

The rights holder will hope to extract some more moolah from India through sponsorships and sale of rights to various media, for them to make a profit. It has been learnt that Neo Sports ($1.725 billion) and Sony ($1.45 billion) were the other two networks, which lost to Star this time. Based on the revenue model prepared by Test-playing nations, the deal was expected to fetch more than $2 billion, sources claimed.

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