Indian Premier League (IPL) - What to do Next

The Indian Premier League (IPL) provides cricket fans all over the world - the best & not so good of what cricket and commercialization of cricket is today. With a franchise based business model, there is money, hope & city based passion that has crept into the game of cricket since 2008 when the first season of IPL was held. 

Context 
Over the past 8 seasons, IPL has gained in strength albeit a dip in ratings in 2012/2013 when there was spot fixing & betting by select co-owners of the teams happened. 

Spot fixing is an act where a player has a fix in with a bookie where the player alone in most cases can control the outcome of the fix, so this makes the probability of the fix happening very high - such as bowling a no-ball, dropping a catch, getting out a certain way.  

The team co-owner of Rajasthan Royals & the son-in-law of Managing Director of India Cements who own Chennai Superkings were held for giving team inside information to bookies & placed bets. 

The Board of Cricket Control of India(BCCI), a non-profit organization that is responsible for all things cricket in India including IPL conducted an internal inquiry to the spot-fixing & betting claims and banned a few cricketers who were involved but took no action against the teams whose owners were involved in betting. This resulted in a public interest petition filed in the Supreme Court and after a detailed investigation a committee set up by the court has come up with a judgement/recommendation to the BCCI on the co-owner & son-in-law who are "banned for life" on cricketing activities and the 2 teams - "ownership group" be banned for 2 years. 

Given the above judgement, there is plenty of speculations & ambiguity as to what BCCI should be doing to the 2 IPL teams for IPL Season 9 in April 2016. Some of the actions that are being proposed are - 

• Ban Rajasthan Royals (RR) & Chennai Superkings (CSK) for 2 Seasons 
• Bring in 2 new teams and put players from the banned teams into an auction for these new teams 
• 2018 IPL then goes from 8 teams to 10 teams
• Scrap IPL all together for an year & revamp it with more credible owners & management 

My Way Forward 

If I was in the BCCI, here are how things that can be done to handle the current situation, though this might seem to be moving away from what has been agreed to the respective agreements within IPL & BCCI but there has to be past precedents that one can learn from before arriving at a decision that is reasonable, well-thought out & fair to all stakeholders 

Firstly, the judgement cannot deny the players from each of the 2 teams a livelihood or the entire entity be disqualified or banned just because a owner or CEO of a company has done something wrong. A few examples that we can look at in terms as a reference & leverage the learning's in this situation for IPL 

1. Owner/Coach bringing disrepute for a team/league - many instances exist but the recent ones in memory are from NFL - Indianapolis Colts Owner Jim Irsay was caught with drugs & was banned for 6 games. New England Patriots were caught for video taping opponents signals & deflating footballs and were handed steep fines & draft picks were taken away 
2. Satyam Computer's- Ramalinga Raju's financial fraud but a company is an ongoing entity & government supported a careful takeover by TechM where the interests of employees, shareholders & other partners were protected  
3. Collusion - There have been instances where 3 or 4 banks have colluded to fix exchange rates, predatory home mortgage rates & terms where only fines were imposed & the banks were not banned & asked to close down 

Looking at some of these examples, here are the aspects that BCCI's Working Group can look into - 

1. Banning RR & CSK as teams or scrapping them is NOT an option. Ban the owners of RR & CSK - meaning none from the ownership group can be involved in the day to day activities of the teams for 2 years 
2. Impose a large fine on RR & CSK. Maybe BCCI donates this money to develop cricket in Associate countries in the region - Nepal, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. 
3. RR & CSK will be managed by a Supreme Court appointed Committee  
• All income & expenses will be managed by this committee & at the end of 2 years any profit left is transferred to the respective owners of RR & CSK 
4. RR & CSK - lose the right to participate in the auction in 2016 & 2017 (similar to NFL teams losing Draft picks) 
• RR & CSK will play with the same team that were contracted in the 2015 Season for the next 2 seasons 
5. Finally, IPL Management is transferred from BCCI to Team Owners similar to NFL, MLB, NBA, etc. This will remove the political angle that exists in day to day management of the league 

The idea is to retain stability in IPL as there has been a lot of investment made in the past 8 years from the fans & players aside from the owners and one cannot dilute this because of a owner & son-in-law. 

IPL is a global brand and despite the controversies, the 2015 Season 8 was a big hit, which indicates that fans have moved past these issues & have placed faith on the players & on the game than what happens off field. 

Further, the support for the recent World Cup shows that fans are more interested in the action on the field and we shows throngs of Indian & other country fans travel to Australia & New Zealand to catch the game. 

The media trying to manipulate the public discourse that fans have lost faith in cricket & players is not accurate as if this was the case then we wouldn't have seen the kind of fan following & viewership that IPL & World Cup had recently. 

Let's all look at this in a more practical way than rushing to a decision for the sake of doing something drastic. 

Cheers!!