When the game is run as a Modicracy

With great power comes great responsibility,” said Spiderman. And he added for good measure, “This is my gift, my curse.” Till last week, IPL chairman Lalit Modi, who has woven an intricate web of intrigue around cricket, big money, politics and glamour had known only the ‘gift side’ of the supreme power he wielded as the big boss of global cricketainment. Now the time has come for him to wake up to the ‘curse side’ of it. For, as Spiderman well realised, the curse kicks in when the intoxication of power blinds you to the responsibility that power bestows.

The controversy raging for the past week was sparked off by Modi himself, when he tweeted insinuating remarks about the stakeholders of Team Kochi. By taking on a Union minister in Shashi Tharoor, it now appears he may have gotten into a bigger battle than he had bargained for, and today he is on the defensive.
For one, his powerful adversaries within the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) who had lain low till now would be looking to clip his wings — there is talk of BCCI president Shashank Manohar being appointed as co-chairman of the IPL.

Secondly, he has to contend with the might of the Central government in the form of rampaging taxmen scanning the IPL accounts with a magnifying glass.

Thirdly, he has to defend himself against charges of nepotism and ‘fixing’, if not interfering with, the bidding process. There appears to be some in-law or the other of Modi holding a sizeable stake in every other IPL team, from Rajasthan Royals (33.33 per cent held by husband of his sister-in-law), to Kings XI Punjab (25 per cent held by husband of his stepdaughter), to Kolkata Knight Riders, while Global Cricket Ventures, which has bagged the digital and mobile rights for the IPL, is partly owned by his step son-in-law.
And then, of course, there are allegations of financial irregularities and money being routed into IPL and BCCI from tax havens abroad that are now being investigated.

Modi-fication of IPL
Question one: Is a tweet the forum for resolving IPL franchise issues? This singular act — by no means the first such — by the top boss of the IPL is enough of a pointer to the sources of the current mess: lack of systems for managing the whole shebang, and zero transparency.

Let’s start with the Team Kochi controversy. There are all kinds of allegations being made: from hawala funds being routed in from Dubai, to Modi trying to muscle out the current stakeholders by offering them a $50 million bribe, to the illegal sweat equity (or ‘free stakes’) being bestowed on Shashi Tharoor’s girl friend, Sunanda Pushkar.

Rather than attempt to follow the murky trail of allegations and counter-allegations — a maze that may or may not lead one to the truth — it may be more pertinent to ask what makes such allegations possible. And the answer: absence of systems that could ensure transparency and some form of checks and balances. Instead, what we have is too much power concentrated in the hands of one man, Modi, with the shadow of Sharad Pawar looming in the background. Is this the way to manage a sports league?

At the governance level
Look at it from any level. At the level of governance, there is too little power with the IPL governing council and too much with Modi, with the result that he sets the rules, changes them at will, and can even determine the outcomes. It is now becoming clear that the results of the inaugural auction where his relatives ended up as part-owners of the cheapest teams may not be just coincidence.

Even the original bidding process for the two new teams this year had to be cancelled, and rules rewritten, when it was discovered that the ‘stringent’ rules of the bidding document shaped by Modi had been ‘fixed’ to favour his cronies. In the fresh bidding process, with rewritten rules — the $1 billion net worth clause was removed and the $100 million bank guarantee was lowered to $10 million — the two teams were successfully bid for by Rendezvous Sports Group and Sahara Group. Neither of the two bidders who were ‘successful’ in the aborted ‘first round’ — Videocon/Kareena/Saif for Pune and the Adani Group for Ahmedabad — had made the cut. Evidently, they had bid lower, and BCCI had emerged winner in the second, more transparent round, getting higher bids, and raking in $703 million for the two teams.

The result was not what Modi had planned, and his ire is understandable. But this raises the central question: why did BCCI let IPL be run like a glorified, giant kirana store instead of — given the amount of money involved — along professional lines, with institutional mechanisms to prevent abuse of power?

At the franchise level
Even at the level of the franchises, it is the same story. Right now, the franchises are an elite club of industrialists and big names from the entertainment and corporate world.

The exception is the new entrant, Team Kochi. Who is behind Rendezvous Sports World (RSW), and who are these upstarts who dare gatecrash into the rarefied world of IPL, and that too against the IPL boss’s will? Nobody apparently knew, not even Lalit Modi.

That Shashi Tharoor, the lone known name associated with the group, was presumably involved solely as a ‘mentor’ only highlighted the lack of transparency even at the level of franchises. It was natural for people to wonder who the stakeholders are, and where the money — all of $333.33 million — was coming from.
Yet, there is no reason why bidding for the IPL franchise should be restricted to an elite club. Anyone should be able to take part, provided the money is clean, and can be seen to be clean.

The very idea of IPL was to develop a platform where local talent can get to play with the best of international players. This would, we were told, also aid the development of the sport in the country, bringing in money for upgrade of cricket infrastructure such as stadia, training academies, etc.

But the flow of money has been in reverse — from the tax-paying public into the private pockets of franchise owners. The IPL, which has hitherto been run purely as a money-making racket — has been exempted from entertainment tax, getting stadia at discounted rates, and the extra security provided at low cost has sometimes been at the cost of public security, as was reported in the case of the German Bakery blasts in Pune. If the franchises are raking it in, shouldn’t the IPL have a system in place to plough some of the profits back into the game? Rajasthan or Jaipur can hardly be said to have benefited from the victory of Rajasthan Royals in 2008, and it is unlikely that RSW is going to spend a paisa in developing a decent cricket stadium in Kochi.

At the player level
Speaking of the game — it is so easy to forget these days that IPL is also about cricketers and not just businessmen or filmstars or politicians — the biggest losers due to the absence of professional management are the local players, widely reported as one of the purported beneficiaries of the League.

Giving the lie to this claim is the curious case of Rajasthan Royals player Ravindra Jadeja, who was banned from this year’s IPL for supposedly reneging on his contractual obligations and trying to move to another franchise for a higher fee.

Jadeja lost out because the IPL has capped the fees per season of the Under-19 World Cup-winning team members as follows: Rs12 lakh for a player who has not played Ranji Trophy/first-class cricket; Rs20 lakh for a Ranji-level player; Rs40 lakh for a player who has represented India.

Now, in a format supposedly aimed at promoting local talent, what is the need to put a cap on how much a young player can be paid? Why not let the franchises compete among each other for the best Indian talent? Clearly, these rules have been framed to benefit the franchises at the cost of the players.

Right now, the IPL is held to ransom by one man whose primary talent is in deal-making and money-making —  not in sports management. And in hindsight, it would seem that the IPL bandwagon was destined for a speed-breaker. Hopefully the current controversy would impel the mandarins of the BCCI to usher in a more professional approach to managing the IPL and put in place a system of checks and balances geared towards protecting the interests of two key stakeholders — the players and the cricket fans — instead of devoting all their energies to filling their coffers. If they don’t learn this lesson soon, they would have to learn it later, and by then the IPL goose that has been laying them golden eggs might well and truly have been cooked.