There are 13 IPL players turning out across Madhya Pradesh League franchises this season. The ownership in the league includes a cement company, educational institutes, and a pipe manufacturer—which sponsors just one of the competition’s five teams. Somewhere between those two facts sits the real story of state-level T20 cricket in India: not the rags-to-riches arc of an individual player getting picked, but a maturing business model built on cement, classrooms, and brand equity.
Rohan Gupta runs MPL as a third-party operator — the same role his company-Sport Ex Consultancy plays for the Pro Wrestling League, the 72 Golf League under Kapil Dev’s stewardship, and the Saurashtra Premier League before it.
“We are a service provider,” he says of the arrangement. “Like the BCCI might hire people to take care of IPL, we are hired by the association to take care of the league. They pay us professional fees. We do our work, we try to put forward the best foot, and we go home.”
The MP League money map: smaller zeros, same structure
Strip away the scale and MPL’s revenue model is a photocopy of the IPL’s: franchise fees from team sales, central sponsorship, ticketing, and a nascent stream of media rights. “The structure is the same,” Gupta says. “The numbers are quite different — of course there are much fewer zeros that are involved, whether it is inflow or outflow.”
The franchise-fee trajectory shows that structure in motion. MPL’s first team sold for ₹15 -20 crore spread over ten years. The next teams went for 3-4x value. This year’s three newest entrants in the boys’ category are a testimony of the same.
The broadcast inversion nobody talks about
Here’s the counterintuitive reality of the MP League economy that most fans miss: state leagues don’t get paid by TV channels to broadcast their matches — they pay the channels. “A TV channel in fact charges the association to showcase their matches,” Gupta explains.
“They say, I am giving you a platform for you to showcase your 20, 30, 40 matches on my platform in prime time from 7pm to 10pm. So for that, they charge a hosting fee.”
It’s the reverse of the BCCI-IPL relationship, and Gupta admits it surprises people close to the sport: “The misconception… is that if a league is being shown on a Sony TV or a Star Sports or a Jio Hotstar, they are getting money. It is very much the opposite.”
That’s beginning to shift, marginally, for the MP League. Sports-only OTT platforms have started paying token fees for exclusive match rights in MPL’s core viewership belt — Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, UP, Delhi — separate from the TV deal. “A sports platform… might approach us saying that we might give you X amount to get rights for your Y matches,” Gupta says, distinguishing it from the bigger broadcasters MPL still pays.
Who actually owns MP League, and why
MPL’s 15 teams — 10 men’s, 5 women’s — sit with 12 owners, and the ownership map looks less like a cricket investment than a regional brand-building exercise.
JK Cement is one of the best examples. A listed, Delhi-headquartered conglomerate with a sports portfolio spanning hockey, kabaddi and multiple state leagues, now also owning an MP League team. Gupta’s read on the motive is blunt: “JK group has big investment in the state of Madhya Pradesh. So for them, it is about creating brand equity or brand value for their core business through sports… If not directly on the team, they are able to see the return on the core business.” The franchise becomes a relationship tool — a way to give “a better experience to their supply chain, which might be their dealers, which might be their distributors,” who get invited to events where a player like Rajat Patidar shows up.
Then there’s the education-group model. Abhishek Gupta’s group — which runs Jagran Lake City University and a residential school network in Bhopal — owns the Bhopal Leopards. The franchise isn’t a side project; it’s a customer-acquisition engine.
“What they have smartly done is they have opened a residential academy, cricket academy, by the name of Bhopal Leopards Cricket Academy under the MPL umbrella,” Gupta says. “If earlier they were having 40 students who wanted to join their academy, now that pool has increased to 150 students who are happy to pay them a certain money every month” for access to MPL-affiliated coaches and players like Arshad Khan training alongside them. The franchise monetises spare campus capacity — in Gupta’s own words, infrastructure that “is not being used after 4 o’clock.”
Operationally underwater, strategically fine with it
Gupta is blunt about the cash-flow reality. “If you invest 100 rupees into league expenses, you aren’t getting 100 rupees back,” he says. This isn’t unique to Madhya Pradesh, either—it’s the case in Uttar Pradesh and even Tamil Nadu. “Operational revenue is coming in,” Gupta adds, “but it doesn’t match the cost. Operational expenses are always higher.”
His projection: MPL’s earliest team owners should start breaking even on an annual operational basis by 2026 or 2027 — a timeline he points out roughly tracks the IPL’s own path. “Keeping in mind that in IPL also, starting 4th, 5th, 6th year, teams started operationally… becoming break-even or might get into the green,” he says.
The secondary market: where the MP League bet starts paying off
Ownership transfers are permitted with league approval — Gupta describes the process as informing MPL, securing a no-objection certificate, and a background check on the buyer, with no cap on resale price. “We will rather be happy,” he says, “because the value of the property is becoming bigger. There is no restriction.”
It’s already happened. A season-one owner sold his team to another investor at a profit after a successful debut campaign. Jabalpur franchise — which won the inaugural season — was sold at what Gupta estimates was roughly a 25% premium. (These transactions are as recounted by Gupta in the interview; exact financial terms were not independently disclosed.)
He frames the long game against the IPL’s own arc. Mumbai Indians was the most expensive team in the league’s 2008 inaugural auction, bought by Reliance for $111.9 million, paid out over ten years at a contractually fixed exchange rate of roughly ₹44 to the dollar — a rate that moved considerably in the franchise’s favour by the time that window closed.
It’s a currency tailwind state-league owners don’t have, since MPL’s franchise fees are rupee-denominated from day one. But it’s the same brand-appreciation logic Gupta is betting MPL can replicate domestically: Rajasthan Royals, bought for a fraction of today’s worth in 2008, is now valued at roughly ₹15,660 crore; Royal Challengers Bengaluru at roughly ₹16,660 crore. “Team is same, league is same, matches are same,” Gupta says of the gap between the two IPL franchises specifically. “So that jump… is because Bangalore is able to develop their brand.”
Where the player money actually lands
For context on the foundation under all this: MPL ran its season auction with a ₹50 lakh purse per team for 15-16 players, base prices starting at ₹2 lakh and rising in ₹20,000 increments, with Charu Sharma as auctioneer. The headline price belonged to Ashutosh Sharma — who also plays IPL cricket for Delhi — picked up for ₹15 lakh. IPL-contracted players like Venkatesh Iyer and Rajat Patidar were retained by their existing MPL teams rather than re-auctioned.
But the league’s real wage floor sits well below the headline numbers. “An average district level player was earning around 2.5 to 3 lakh rupees,” Gupta says, for a season that runs roughly two to three months including preparation. A capped Ranji player like Shubham Sharma, a former MPCA captain, earned closer to ₹4.5-5 lakh. Each MPL team was also required to run open trials and select two uncapped, unranked players at a ₹50,000 base — “a good case study for us,” in Gupta’s words, has been a 37-year-old picked up by Royal Nimar Eagles, who he’s hopeful “will be a Praveen Tambay 2.0 story three years down the line.”
Where the framework could travel next
Gupta’s read on which non-cricket sports can replicate this template is itself a useful financial filter. “A lot of sports which have a physical or combative characteristic, and indoor arenas, I think might do quite well in the next 3-5 years,” he says, naming wrestling, kho-kho, kabaddi and kickboxing — formats where “in an event industry everything works on a per day basis… my costs are probably 10% of what they are for a cricket stadium.” He contrasts that with what he calls a cautionary tale: Reliance’s push into football. “I think they just touched it too long — 6 months, 8 months, and it became very difficult to sustain viewer interest,” he says. “10 days, 15 days, 20 days maximum. Make it a festive period.”
The bottom line
Strip the sentiment out of MP League and what’s left is a recognisable private-equity pattern: buy an undervalued regional asset early, accept negative operating cash flow for several years while building brand equity, and exit — or hold — once the secondary market starts pricing in a premium. MPL’s franchise fees have moved from ₹1.5 -2 crore annually to ₹5-6 crore a year in three seasons. Whether that trajectory holds past breakeven, the way the IPL’s did from year four onward, is the number every other state association watching this experiment will be tracking.
Note: Financial figures in this piece are as stated by Rohan Gupta in the interview and reflect his own estimates and league-reported numbers; the RR/RCB valuation figures and the Jabalpur sale premium were not independently verified against MPCA, MPL, or franchise financial disclosures.