The IPL story is a game of snakes and ladders

As the seventh season kicks off in UAE next month, Osman Samiuddin traces the origin of cricket’s richest and most controversial tournament, which dates back to the 1990s.

The Indian Premier League Twenty20 competition is played between eight city-based franchises, a concept that has given several thousand cricket fans the chance to follow their local team and, in the process, a new identity. Tom Shaw / Getty ImagesShow less

It sounds strange to write now of a tournament with such an established and distinct sense of nationality about it, but the Indian Premier League (IPL) happened in spite of Indian cricket itself.

Even now, as the sport prepares for the seventh season of cricket’s richest, most-envied league, while distracted by court cases and board purges, it feels as if it happens every season only after clearing any number of self-made obstacles.

That, perhaps, is the way it is meant to be, given its origins because the idea for such a league was floating around Indian cricket since the 1990s, at least. That would mean it took comfortably over a decade to put the idea into action. Even then, it required events beyond the control of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) for it to emerge.

The now-deposed Lalit Modi is acknowledged as the father of the IPL, not least by himself. On his website he modestly titles himself the league's "founder and architect". He is justified in doing so, but it is not as if there are not other narratives to consider.

There are, for instance, those who say that Madhav Rao Scindia, a Congress party leader and minister and BCCI president from 1990-93, had the inklings of an inter-city cricket league in the mid-1990s. He wanted to structure it along the lines of English football, with the world’s best players taking part.

The action would revolve around the Captain Roop Singh Stadium in Gwalior, the ancient Madhya Pradesh city of which Scindia was a maharajah. The stadium underwent an overhaul for the purposes of the idea, with floodlights installed and facilities upgraded.

He even went as far as to secure a blueprint for the league, drawn up by IMG in 1996. “At the time we were working on several concepts, including an idea similar to the Hong Kong Sixes, or a league that could co-exist with the domestic structure,” a former head of IMG told the authors of IPL, an Inside Story: Cricket & Commerce.

As Twenty20 cricket, as a format, was still seven to eight years away, Scindia’s league was to be a 50-over competition. It would run over four to six weeks in the summer and be played at a series of new stadiums. There would be no auctioning for players, but the league was ready to offer up to 200,000 Indian rupees (Dh12,260) as an annual contract to players. By the standards of the time, those were astronomical figures.

Scindia recruited Arun Lal, the former international and current commentator, to bring in the best players from within India and outside.

Even the origins of Scindia’s plans, however, are traced back by some people to Modi, as long ago as the mid-1990s when nobody in cricket really knew him. Modi had returned to India from the US at the turn of the decade to join Modi enterprises, a large, successful business group owned by his family.

He reportedly had been a keen sportsman at school. But it was in the US, where he went to study, that his eyes were opened to the ideas of private franchise ownership of sports and the boundless possibilities of sport’s monetisation. In particular he was fascinated by the NBA.

When he returned to India, conditions were already ripening around him for cricket to explode. He saw an ideal opportunity to Americanise the game and drew up plans for an inter-city league. At that stage he had no contacts within cricket administration, so he pulled together Lal and the legendary adman Piyush Pandey, to push the idea upwards.

With the help of a long-standing administrator, Amrit Mathur (now a consultant with Delhi Daredevils), the trio put together a feasibility report for an inter-city league of privately owned franchises.

Even at that time, according to an interview Pandey gave to Indian magazine The Caravan, the idea of the league was to function as “a festival, entertainment beyond just cricket — that was [Modi’s] learning from the NBA.”

They wrangled an audience with the BCCI but saw the project turned down; a wary board arguing such ideas can only come from state associations and not private individuals.

It was after this rejection that Modi, through some friends, is said to have approached Scindia, who was at the time head of his state association. Scindia liked the idea and by identifying potential sponsors, owners and players, added robustness to it.

Now with a form of official sanction behind it, in the shape of Scindia, the proposal was put to the BCCI again. It was rejected again. This time the board was said to be spooked by the possibility of ceding its own control and influence over the game to new, private owners.

The board wanted to pick its own teams and own the event, not let it run independently. Publicly, they muttered something protectionist about not really wanting foreign players in such a league.

“In a way, it was good because, in hindsight, the market was not ready for such an idea,” Mathur wrote in his book. “The event was tiny compared to today’s IPL.”

There are other avenues worth noting in tracing the origins of the league.

GMR, the owners of the Delhi Daredevils, have previously claimed sending similar proposals to the BCCI.

But the imprint of Modi behind the first and subsequently, the most persistent push, is impossible to miss. The only problem was that he was initially an outsider as far as the board was concerned.

All he needed to do was bide his time until he was on the inside.

Having traced the origin of the idea behind the IPL in Sunday’s piece, Osman Samiuddin will deal with the implementation on Monday.

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