There is a moment in every boom when the numbers stop feeling real.

When Royal Challengers Bengaluru commands a sale price of USD 1.78 billion and Rajasthan Royals follows at USD 1.63 billion, it is tempting to read this as the triumph of Indian sport. It is, in truth, the triumph of one sport and an indictment of the rest.

In India, cricket is no longer merely leading the pack; it has lapped every other sport in the country.

The Indian Premier League is not a league in the conventional sense. It is a tightly held, 74-match property, compressed into a two-and-a-half-month window to engineer maximum yield. Its economic engine is calibrated and controlled: centralised media rights, franchise permanence, revenue sharing, all designed to compound value, season after season.

But to credit the IPL alone is to mistake the fruit for the tree.

Its extraordinary valuation rests on foundations laid long before April 18, 2008, when Brendon McCullum unleashed bedlam in Bengaluru. Beneath the spectacle lies a domestic system that stages over 2,000 matches a year, giving the league the depth it leans on. Without it, the IPL would be hollow.

No other sport in India has built that base.

Football comes closest in ambition. The All India Football Federation conducts roughly 1,800 matches across 22 national tournaments. The Indian Super League arrived in 2014 with money, momentum and a touch of glamour, with names like Alessandro Del Piero, Roberto Carlos and David Trezeguet briefly turning Indian stadiums into something resembling a global stage. But without promotion, relegation or a coherent calendar, it drifted, uncertain of an identity to build or sustain.

The Hockey India League flickered. The Pro Kabaddi League, once a television disruptor, now carries the fatigue of repetition, its novelty worn thin without a deeper sporting ecosystem to support its growth.

While others chased the IPL’s visibility, they missed the harder, slower work that makes such visibility durable.

This is where a comparison with the United States sharpens the contrast. In the US, sporting success is diversified, with the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL operating as self-sustaining, deeply rooted systems. Talent advances through collegiate pathways, revenues are equitably distributed, and calendars are respected, each league playing its part in a wider sporting economy.

India, for now, has built excellence in isolation. The spectacle has been replicated in parts, but not the system.

And so Indian sport sits at an inflection point. Cricket’s rise has not come at the cost of others, but its dominance has exposed their structural fragility.

The money has arrived. The system, beyond cricket, remains a work in progress.

Published on Apr 08, 2026