How Jagmohan Dalmiya Commercialized Cricket (Part 6)

SM: From where you sit, where do you think cricket needs to go next?

JD: Nobody can say for sure, as it is still very early. I see a lot of countries like India and Pakistan where cricket is moving fast towards club cricket, like league football. I think that is the direction it will continue to go. If this continues, clubs will have their own rights just like FIFA, and others will have their own rights. Right now it is all a bit mixed up.

SM: Is ICC controlling everything?

JD: ICC is also a paper tiger. The majority of the money is in India, so unless they earmark very clearly what belongs to whom, it will all become cloudy. We have the IPL [Indian Premier League] now, to which the eight big houses have come. In three or four years they may or may not be involved, and there could be newcomers as well. It is a big transformation that is up in the air.

SM: One of the reasons cricket is big is that it is a function of India being one of the largest consumer economies. The advertisers go after the consumer market that is India. Why has no other sport in India been able to get to any significant level? Why don’t we have serious Olympic representation? We do not have high quality players in other sports, we do not have this kind of money flowing into any other sport. Why is that?

JD: Part of it is marketing. The proof is when there were match-fixing rumors being passed around, all of the sponsors left cricket. There was not a single sponsor left. At that time other games could have been marketed. Alternatively, people used to see Kaun Banega Crorepati. This is the marketing problem. In the beginning cricket gained its popularity from the radio. Telecasts were not available. That was kind of a bad situation for cricket, because without the scoreboard it is hard to follow the game. With the scoreboard the speculation comes in. If one looks at how we transformed the game, it was by making it more available to the average person. People used to say cricket was a gentleman’s game, and that it was a player’s game. Now it is a spectator sport.

SM: From what I am assessing based on what you have described, cricket had the popularity first, before sponsorship came into it. I don’t think any other sport in India has the popularity, even historically, that cricket has. So sponsorship is not chasing those sports. It is the other way around, those sports are chasing sponsorship.

JD: Yes, but this is not the only reason. They haven’t been able to popularize the games themselves. With something like table tennis you may not have the audience, but hockey is the one game India should focus on. Soccer won’t work, because if you bring the international teams to India, and have them play with Mohanbagan, East Bengal, they will have to swallow 14 goals per match. The level is not there in the Indian teams. But if they want to do soccer, they should bring foreign teams and have them play each other on Indian soil.

SM: But you think hockey has the potential. Thank you very much. I would like to see a real marketing exercise done on another ten different sports so that in each, India becomes a powerhouse. The Olympics are always an embarrassing time…with a billion people, India hardly has a presence at the Games. Many thanks for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : How Jagmohan Dalmiya Commercialized Cricket
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