Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio)

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   I am listening to the Kolkata Knight Riders anthem as my pump-up song.

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:05

   Oh, nice!

3. BGBen Gilbert0:06

   It is so awesome. Have you seen the music video with Shah Rukh Khan, the owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders?

4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:13

   No.

5. BGBen Gilbert0:14

   He is the main character with the Bollywood dance around him.

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:17

   Okay, I'm gonna go watch it right now.

7. BGBen Gilbert0:19

   And it's a little cheesy 'cause I think it's from 2008 era, but it is perfect pump-up music.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal0:25

   Oh, yes. We've got the player silhouettes in fire. [chuckles]

9. BGBen Gilbert0:29

   Yes, that's exactly the one.

10. DRDavid Rosenthal0:31

    This is incredible. [laughing] How have I not seen this before?

11. BGBen Gilbert0:36

    This is something that American sports definitely need to adopt.

12. DRDavid Rosenthal0:39

    Oh, man, we've got, like, a construction crew.

13. BGBen Gilbert0:42

    Yes. [laughing]

14. DRDavid Rosenthal0:42

    Too hot, too cool.

15. BGBen Gilbert0:44

    That is exactly the right reaction.

16. DRDavid Rosenthal0:46

    Okay, I'm gonna pause it. We're not even gonna record an episode until I watch this film. [laughing]

17. BGBen Gilbert0:50

    [laughing] All right, let's do it.

18. DRDavid Rosenthal0:53

    Let's do it.

19. SPSpeaker0:54

    Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. Who got the truth?

20. BGBen Gilbert1:11

    Welcome to the Spring 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

21. DRDavid Rosenthal1:18

    I'm David Rosenthal.

22. BGBen Gilbert1:19

    And we are your hosts. Today, we cover the most interesting story in sports: cricket. Now, when David pitched me this idea a few months ago, I thought, "Eh, I'm not that interested in cricket." And to all of our US listeners out there, I am guessing you feel the same way, but I was very wrong.

23. DRDavid Rosenthal1:38

    Hey, there are twenty million hardcore cricket fans in the US today-

24. BGBen Gilbert1:43

    Great point

25. DRDavid Rosenthal1:43

    ... as we will get into later in the episode.

26. BGBen Gilbert1:45

    Great point. And listeners, this story really isn't about the game of cricket anyways. It's about how to create a massively successful sports league from scratch, something that I thought was impossible after doing our NFL and NBA episodes, which each took a hundred years to get to where they are today. Indian Premier League cricket started a mere seventeen years ago in 2008. And even more than a sports league, the IPL is a case study in how to create the perfect entertainment product. They took this sleepy, polite British sport with matches that lasted five days, and they completely transformed it. It is compressed down to three hours. It's a high-octane slugfest that is all about power hitting and hitting sixes, the sort of cricket equivalent of a home run. It's got Bollywood glamour and on-field dance performances, cheerleaders, fireworks, and the way they started the league itself was a high-stakes auction to a group of billionaires and movie stars. And of course, they carefully studied all the mechanics that made the NBA and the NFL as successful as they are today and then applied them on steroids.

27. DRDavid Rosenthal2:52

    It's an amazing story.

28. BGBen Gilbert2:53

    On top of all of this, the story itself has just about the most palace intrigue of any company we've ever studied. You've got Disney, Philip Morris, Rupert Murdoch, Reliance, Tata, and even Google. There's a very, very complicated founder figure. There's corruption, there's potential self-dealing, betting, rigging, and miraculously, the league has been successful despite all that. So successful, in fact, that it is the fastest-growing major sports league in the world, growing twenty x in value since 2008 to be worth more than sixteen billion dollars today. Insanely, the media rights to each match are so valuable that they're second only to the NFL. The TV broadcast rights, let me just say this again, for each match are worth more than an English Premier League soccer match.

29. DRDavid Rosenthal3:46

    Or an NBA game or a Major League Baseball game.

30. BGBen Gilbert3:49

    Yes. There's one angle where IPL cricket looks like pure, unadulterated capitalism applied to the world of sports, but there's another angle where it looks a lot more like a religion-

Episode duration: 4:28:06