The Billionaire Raj

by James Crabtree

  In India, cricket mattered for reasons that stretched beyond the passion of its supporters. India itself was often described as a superpower in the making. But there were few areas where the country’s global supremacy was already unquestioned. In fact, there was only one: cricket. Even before the IPL’s launch, India loomed over the dozen or so other countries that played the game seriously, gradually eclipsing England and Australia, traditionally cricket’s preeminent nations. India had more fans than the rest combined. Cricket also enjoyed total domestic dominance: the streets emptied for big matches, while analysts lumped other, lesser pastimes like football and basketball together as mere “non-cricket sports.”

  The weight of that public support had been true for generations but it was only after economic reopening in 1991 that it translated into a more lucrative form of power: television rights. Barely one million Indian homes had a television at the time of liberalization, with sets that showed only Doordarshan, a deadening government-controlled channel.2 But by the mid-2000s, as India’s economy raced ahead, the media landscape was transformed into a jumble of hundreds of cable and satellite channels, in which the rights to broadcast cricket were prized above all. With the launch of the IPL, and the multibillion-dollar deals that went with it, the financial power of the sport became clear.

  There were few clearer emblems of the country India was becoming. A game once administered by amateurs was suddenly professionalized by a mixture of international management companies and experts, drafted in from other sports. Multinationals rushed in to sponsor IPL teams, and paid players like Sreesanth eye-catching fees as brand ambassadors. Consumer companies found in cricket the only reliable way to reach hundreds of millions of increasingly affluent shoppers. Capital was pumped in by global media giants, including both Rupert Murdoch’s Star Sports and Sony, with the latter stumping up an unheard-of $1 billion for ten years’ worth of IPL television rights. As the event grew, estimates of its worth grew too. A figure of around $4 billion was often mentioned, an estimate of its “brand value” calculated by a marketing company.3 “It is no longer correct to speak of the ‘globalisation’ of cricket,” the Australian writer Gideon Haigh once said. “We face the ‘Indianisation’ of cricket, where nothing India resists will occur, and everything it approves of will prevail.”4

  For all its glitz, the IPL was troubled. Orthodox supporters bemoaned its television-friendly format, known as “Twenty20,” and the relentless commercialism that came along with it. India did not invent Twenty20, which had been launched in England a few years before. But it took the idea and supercharged it, to the dismay of those who worried that the “spirit of the game” was being ruined by grubby commercialism. The IPL’s star players turned up routinely in India’s tabloids for drinking, brawling, or worse. There were management bust-ups and questionable finances. As the financial stakes increased, so the rows over control became fiercer too, in a country where cricket administration was already uniquely politicized. In its second year of operation, the entire IPL jamboree moved to South Africa, amid worries over terrorism in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. In its third, the league returned home, only to see its charismatic architect, Lalit Modi, begin an epic battle for control of the event against Narayanaswami Srinivasan, the powerful tycoon who led the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the game’s governing body.

  Yet for all the furors that dogged the event, the events revealed by Operation U-Turn were of an entirely different order. Sreesanth was an international cricketer, and this was the first time one of the nation’s beloved, elite cadre had been accused of cheating in this way. Images of the bleary-eyed player being hauled out of police vans were played on repeat across every news channel, leaving one of India’s most charismatic and cocksure cricketers looking shocked and defeated. The allegations prompted Srinivasan, as head of the BCCI, to promise an immediate investigation. But barely a week later, and just days before that year’s IPL finale, Srinivasan’s son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, was also taken into custody.

  The police said that Meiyappan had been gossiping with bookmakers, handing over information about another IPL team, the Chennai Super Kings, which the son-in-law ran, but which Srinivasan himself ultimately controlled. The revelations sent India’s already indignant news channels into a round-the-clock frenzy of allegations and resignation demands. A cement mogul turned cricket baron, Srinivasan’s role at the BCCI, which owns the IPL, often saw him described as the sport’s most powerful man: a brooding figure whose influence, while hard to pin down, stretched into every corner of the game. Now these latest allegations appeared to drag him into the scandal directly. He denied personal wrongdoing, but the arrest of Meiyappan made it look increasingly as if the IPL’s growing crisis would no longer be restricted to just a few bad-apple players. Rather, the rot appeared to go close to the top. And while beleaguered fans debated why a star like Sreesanth would risk his international career for a small bag of money, the scandal raised more urgent questions—about the scourge of corruption, and whether Srinivasan, and the IPL itself, could survive.

  Rather than the simple passions of sport, the IPL scandal brought to mind a different side of India, one of shabby governance and financial chicanery that seemed unerringly similar to the problems in industries like telecoms and mining. The small-time institutions that had run cricket before liberalization were overwhelmed by the sudden rush of money that followed it. The IPL’s finances were opaque, but conflicts of interest between administrators, sponsors, and team owners were obvious, and especially so in Srinivasan’s case. And behind all this stood the specter of the world’s $750-billion illegal betting industry, and the shady syndicates that were said to control it, all of whom thrived in a country with a fierce love of gambling, but where sports wagers were officially prohibited. It was only on that muggy night in May 2013, as the police tailed Sreesanth north, that these various forces came together, creating a furor that rocked not just cricket but the country as well. And behind it all were the stories of the rise and fall of two men of contrasting styles, who in their own ways embodied the newfound power of the game: Lalit Modi, the brash architect who brought the IPL to life, and Srinivasan himself, the brooding power broker who shepherded India to global cricketing dominance and then gradually began to see his empire fall apart.

  Land of the Modi Cam

  The change the IPL brought to cricket was clear from its very first match, fought out on a humid Thursday afternoon in April 2008 at Bangalore’s M. Chinnaswamy Stadium. On one side were Royal Challengers Bangalore, owned by Vijay Mallya, the city’s preeminent local tycoon, who had shamelessly named the team after his own brand of Royal Challenge whiskey. On the other were the Kolkata Knight Riders, fronted by Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan and named, for reasons no one could exactly explain, after the 1980s American television series.

  The opening ceremony was glitzy enough: stilt walkers and acrobats cavorted around the grounds; daredevils in team colors rappelled from the roof; and a team of cheerleaders, borrowed from the Washington Redskins, danced against a backdrop of fireworks and laser lights. But it was on the pitch that the fireworks really began, as New Zealand international Brendon McCullum battered 158 runs from 73 deliveries, the highest-ever score in a Twenty20 match. Cricket had never seen the like. And presiding over it all, from inception to opening night, was one man: Lalit Modi.

  Some sports administrators preferred to operate from the seclusion of the backroom, but Modi lapped up any and all public attention. He attended matches when the IPL was in season, flying from city to city by private jet and holing up in fine hotels close to the grounds. Before play he kept a sleepless schedule: meeting players, sponsors, and franchise owners; chain-smoking and firing off instructions into his BlackBerry. At the games he was conspicuously visible, wearing sharp Armani suits and rimless glasses, and sweating slightly in the heat. During play a special “Modi Cam” would zoom into his face, in
the process revealing the movie star, politician, or local tycoon with whom he happened to be seated. At the end, often close to midnight, he would lead a procession to the post-match party, at which players would carouse with off-duty cheerleaders, as elderly grandees looked on bemused and tried to grasp what exactly their once modest sport had become.

  Modi was known officially as the IPL’s chairman and commissioner. Today his website describes him as the tournament’s “founder and architect.” But in truth he was less administrator than impresario: a showman, organizer, and instigator; an ideas man; a creator of theater. Like the “owners” who sometimes appeared ringside during the circus of America’s televised wrestling contests, Modi soon became a lead character in a show of his own creation, one in which he also wrote the script and controlled the outcome down to the smallest detail.

  Among the many oddities of Modi’s character, one stood out in particular: it was never exactly clear that he liked cricket. Born into an old business dynasty, he grew up with money and went to fancy schools, where he showed no talent for batting.5 In his teens he left to study in the United States, attending Duke University. It was there, so legend has it, that he became entranced by the professionalism of basketball and baseball, and began pondering whether similar techniques could transform his own national sport.6 It was there also that the destructive tendencies that marked his later career first emerged, when he was arrested, along with three fellow students, having cobbled together $10,000 to buy half a kilo of cocaine from a drug dealer. “The seller, in fact, had no cocaine; he did have a shotgun, which he used to coax the students out of their $10,000,” writer Samanth Subramanian later recounted.7 “The next day, the quartet fell upon a fellow student whom they accused of setting them up for the robbery.” The episode left Modi facing accusations of drug trafficking, kidnapping, and assault. He pleaded guilty to the charges, but returned home not long afterwards to serve a period of community service, having persuaded an American judge that he was suffering from ill health.

  Back in India, Modi declined a position in his family’s conglomerate, which dealt mostly in tobacco. Instead he fashioned himself as a media magnate, setting up a company called Modi Entertainment Network. These were the years after liberalization, in which dozens of channels began sprouting up. Modi struck deals with foreign companies seeking a slice of the market, many of which flopped. An early foray into cricket in the mid-1990s failed too: he tried to convince the BCCI to let him set up a new tournament, but was rebuffed. Yet those setbacks only seemed to drive him onwards, fueling a desire for recognition, and honing a business style that was at once abrasive and dynamic.

  Convinced of his vision for cricket, he began ingratiating himself within its establishment, building alliances with politicians and winning a senior position at the head of one of the country’s influential state-level boards. Even then, Modi’s character was an oddity: he was an animated and persuasive man, but one with a patrician capacity for rudeness and a gossipy disdain for those he was ostensibly meant to be cultivating. Yet while he made enemies easily, those who had worked for him also spoke glowingly of his energy, his head for figures and his instinctive grasp of how to structure a business deal. “He was entertaining to work with,” I was told by one executive at IMG, the global sports management group that helped Modi craft the IPL. “He took decisions, he would talk to people, he was transparent. He was power hungry, I suppose, but he loved being the center of attention.” Above all, he seemed driven to fashion for himself a new category of business figure—the cricket tycoon—fit to preside over the money-spinning enterprise he planned to build.

  The tournament Modi created was a raucous, seat-of-the-pants affair, and one that became quickly notorious. “It was pretty wild, the parties, the girls,” a former IPL franchise manager told me. He recounted a story about one of the world’s best-known cricketers, who played in the early seasons. “I remember this player coming to me once, and saying: ‘Some people have alcohol addictions but I have a sex addiction, and I need women. I play better if I’ve had sex the night before a match,’ ” he said. “And so what do you say? I called up someone, and told them this and they said they’d take care of it.”

  The cheerleaders, mostly shipped in from Eastern Europe or North America, created particular temptations. A few years later a blond 22-year-old South African called Gabriella Pasqualotto began publishing a then-anonymous blog, “The Secret Diary of an IPL Cheerleader,” filled with hints of misbehaving married sportsmen. “We are practically like walking porn,” one post read, before its author was eventually discovered and sent home in disgrace. “Eventually they started putting them in different hotels,” the team manager recalled. “We learned pretty quickly that that was the safer option, to put the cheerleaders a couple of miles away from the players.” More generally, however, the administrators at first took a hands-off attitude to the stars and those who hung around them. “The management became more relaxed; the owners became very magnanimous,” he told me. “They said: ‘Oh, we’ve just won a match, let the boys drink, why do you need to be such a pain?’ And at some point people end up saying: ‘Why should I bother? Why do I want to be the bad guy and enforce discipline?’ ”

  For all of its carnival image, Modi’s IPL was also a serious operation, and one that aimed to make serious money. He launched the event at a press conference in September 2007, with start-up funding from the BCCI but no teams, stadiums, or sponsors, and just a handful of star players. Six months of frenzied dealmaking later, the competition opened in Bangalore, with eight franchises signed up, a clutch of big-name corporate backers on board, and a roster of the world’s biggest stars ready to bat and bowl. Modi’s deal with the cricket board gave him complete control for five years, a remit he used to micromanage every aspect of the contest. He showed a particular gift for marketing, convincing wary companies that his untried venture would succeed.

  Almost every element of the IPL was carefully branded, with logos on jerseys, bats, and corporate boxes. There were even sponsors for the after-match parties. In its early years, the event was known as the “DLF-IPL,” after the infrastructure company that paid Rs2 billion ($31 million) for overall “title” sponsor rights. Modi managed to squeeze seventy or more television advertising slots into a single game. Each team was also allowed a series of “strategic” time-outs, ostensibly a chance for a mid-match stocktake, although in reality simply a helpful gap to pack in one more commercial break. To draw in viewers, he struck upon the simple but brilliant idea of combining India’s two defining passions—cricket and Bollywood—by persuading prominent film stars to take stakes in IPL franchises, and then to cheer on the teams enthusiastically from the stands.

  Belying his caustic reputation, Modi built the tournament through charm and guile. Top players were tempted with salaries of $1 million or more, and sold in hyped-up televised auctions, in which Modi appeared as commentator. His dynastic background gave easy entry into the upper echelons of corporate India, where he convinced billionaires to buy franchises at $100 million or more. One IPL team official recounted how Modi played on his bidders’ anxieties, suggesting to one prominent tycoon that a major rival was interested in taking his favored team, or telling another that he risked losing a franchise to another city entirely. The historian Ramachandra Guha, a noted cricket lover, was not alone in noting a pattern: “Indian companies known for their professionalism, entrepreneurial innovation, and technical excellence have stayed away from the IPL,” he wrote in 2013. But the sight of A-list Bollygarchs getting involved still added to the tournament’s credibility, as Andhra Pradesh infrastructure group GMR took the Delhi franchise, and India Cements, the company owned by Narayanaswami Srinivasan’s family, did the same for Chennai. Alongside Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood actresses Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty were drafted in as owners for franchises in Punjab and Rajasthan. Global television deals soon followed. “Foreign capital was supporting the
cable companies who were booking this,” one senior cricket administrator told me later. “You had lots more money to throw around.”

  The IPL’s gathering momentum only confirmed the worst fears of the game’s anxious traditionalists. Yet viewed through Modi’s eyes the league actually had a noble purpose: not simply to revolutionize a tired game, which he felt had grown out of touch with India’s rising generation, but also to clean up its murky governance. “All cricketers playing in the inaugural IPL are role models for an entire generation,” he said in an emotional speech at the opening ceremony in 2008. “It is crucial for youngsters all over the world to learn straightaway the values of this great game, and the spirit in which it should be played.” This anti-corruption rhetoric partly involved the settling of old scores. He nursed a grudge from his earlier failed tournament, which he claimed collapsed after he had declined to pay a bribe to a BCCI official. “We were burnt very badly,” he said later. “It became an ambition of mine to go out and clean it up.”8 Surprising though it seemed to his critics, Modi’s talk of cleansing the sport appeared genuine. Inspired by the spirit of a newly liberalized India, he planned the IPL as a libertarian paradise, in which the backroom stitch-ups of old would be replaced by open rules and a system of transparent auctions for players, teams, and media rights. “My job is to break cartels,” he told one interviewer in 2006. “I believe in free markets deciding everything. If there is no value, there is no value. Let people decide.”9