ICL may spend Rs 150 crore

With the announcement that as many as 52 players have joined Subhash Chandra’s parallel cricket league, Subhash Chandra’s ambitious Indian Cricket League seems to be finally taking shape. Most analyst still believe this is only the first success and the road ahead is still long and winding. Though Essel, along with infrastructure major IL&FS set aside a corpus of Rs 100 crore at the launch of the league, sports analysts peg the total spend by the Essel Group to kick-start the league to around Rs 150 crore.

According to most analysts, the first priority of the ICL was to get players to sign up followed by a marketing blitz and then broadcasting and setting up the infrastructure.

For signing up new players, ICL is paying around Rs 30 - 60 lakhs to all the ‘no-namers’ i.e. those players that do not have a name to themselves and are domestic players. For a requirement of around 60 to 80 players this comes to around Rs 30 crore. Add on to this the branded players that are expected to join the league.

“Lara would not be expected to join for less than Rs 2 - 3 crore,” one analyst said. Estimating a requirement of around 8 to 10 ‘branded’ players, the bill for player sign-up goes up by another Rs 30 crore.

The second most important issue for Essel is the marketing behind the league. This will be the main differentiator between the ICL and the domestic or international tournaments.

Media honchos like Manish Porwal of Starcom Mediavest believe the ICL is not looking at overthrowing the present system but bridge the gap between the international arena, which gets the highest viewership globally and the Ranji trophy, which gets hardly any eye-balls. The timing also makes a lot of sense with the tournament coming right after the 20:20 world cup thereby creating the appetite.

This makes the analyst estimate the marketing costs to around Rs 20 crore.

As for the third most important issue i.e. playing and broadcasting infrastructure, as Essel owns major broadcaster, Zee Telefilms Ltd, this should not cost them too much. "Around Rs 20 lakh a day totalling to around Rs 10 crore for the season," the analysts say.

As far as revenues go, they have plenty of options to make their margins and much more. India's cricket circus today romps in between Rs 20,00-3,000 crore. A 10% share of this would be enough to cover ICL's base costs.

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