The 2022 season will likely include 74 matches and not follow the home-and-away format
This will not be the first time the IPL will comprise 10 teams – that already happened a decade ago. The BCCI is likely to revert to the format used in 2011, which scrapped the simple home-and-away model, and included a total of 74 matches (instead of the current 60). In case the home-and-away format is used, the IPL will end up with a total of 94 matches. Fitting a tournament that big into an already packed cricket calendar will be a massive challenge, even for the BCCI.
The 2011 season comprised 70 league matches and four playoffs games. The 10 teams were broken into two groups of five but were ranked on one consolidated points table. Each team played the other four in their group both home and away (eight matches), four of the teams in the other group once each (four matches, either home or away), and the remaining team in the other group twice, both home and away. A random draw decided the composition of the groups as well as who played whom across the groups once and twice.
The last time more than eight teams played in the IPL was in 2013, when nine teams took part and played a total of 76 matches.
Will it affect player retention?
The IPL has not shared any firm details of its retention policy with the franchises, but it is now known that there will be no right-to-match cards. It is also likely that a franchise will be allowed to retain a maximum of four players, with the local and overseas combinations yet to be ascertained.
The two new franchises will then get to buy an equal number of players before the auction through a draft system, the same one that was used in 2016 when Rising Pune Supergiant and Gujarat Lions briefly replaced Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals.
Will it impact the value of the eight original franchises?
According to one analyst who has been crunching IPL numbers since its inception in 2008, if each of the two new franchises had sold for at least INR 3000 crore, then each of the original eight would have had a minimum value close to INR 2500 crore. And the two new franchises have sold for much bigger sums: INR 7090 crore (Ahmedabad) and INR 5625 (Lucknow).
Is there a downside to paying such huge sums of money to own an IPL team?
Paying these massive amounts to the BCCI means the new franchises will take that much longer to make a profit.
There are three main revenue streams for a franchise: the central rights income (a share of media rights income and central sponsorship), team sponsorship and gate revenues. After the record sum paid by Star India in 2017 for media rights, each of the existing eight franchises earned close to INR 200 crore from the IPL’s media rights central pool. That is bound to get even bigger as a result of Monday’s events, potentially inching up to the INR 275-350 crore mark per season per franchise going forward for 10 years. All the franchises derive their main income from IPL’s central media rights pool.
The new franchises will need to pay out their bid amount over a 10-year period. From year 11, each franchise has to pay 20% of its overall revenue as franchise fee to the BCCI.
Nagraj Gollapudi is news editor at ESPNcricinfo