Lalit Modi does not sleep like other people sleep. In April this year, while the IPL danced through its usual circus of sixes and after parties, he was doing maths that stung.
94 matches minus 74 matches equals twenty missing games. Multiply that by 118 crore rupees per match. The answer is 2,400 crore rupees vanishing into thin air every season. Poof. Gone.
He says the BCCI promised a home and away league. Ten teams, everyone plays everyone twice, simple as that. Instead they run a truncated tournament and call it business as usual. The franchises paid entry fees believing in the full schedule.
Now they collect central pool money split 50-50 with the board, but they collect it on 74 matches instead of 94. Modi calculates that each franchise loses 120 crore rupees annually because of this gap. That is not spare change. That is the difference between profit and serious wealth.
The calculation sits there on his social media like a bomb no one wants to defuse. The BCCI stays quiet. The franchise owners stay quiet. They are too busy counting their blessings to count their losses, perhaps.
Or maybe they know that arguing with Modi is like arguing with the architect who drew the blueprint. He knows where the bodies are buried because he buried them.
The Boundary Line Incident
Sanjiv Goenka lost his temper on the boundary line in Lucknow. The cameras caught him waving arms at Rishabh Pant, the captain, treating him like a servant who spilled the tea. The video went viral. The internet judged. And from his exile, Modi wrote five words that cut deeper than any fine.
“Football level patience and class.”
He meant that owners in the NFL or Premier League do not behave like this. They understand that the asset is the team, not their ego. That players are investments, not property.
That public humiliation devalues the brand you are trying to build. Modi called it amateur hour. He said the league had money and glamour and eyeballs but lacked the maturity to match.
He was watching the behaviour of the new money, the industrialists who bought teams as vanity projects, and comparing it to the institutional investors now arriving. Blackstone. The Walton family.
People who do not shout at employees on television because they have lawyers and protocols and boards of directors. Modi seemed to be saying that he built this league for the big leagues, but the current residents are still playing gully cricket with billion dollar toys.
The Memory War
When Goenka credited Jay Shah for the IPL’s recent boom, Modi replied with a phrase that sounded like a door slamming. “Jog his memory.” As if to say, you are all living in a world I created, eating fruit from trees I planted, and you have forgotten who dug the holes.
There is something almost tragic about this. The architect of the IPL in 2008, the man who stayed up nights negotiating franchise deals in hotel lobbies when nobody believed Twenty20 cricket could matter, now watches from outside. He cannot enter India.
He is a fugitive from the law, exiled, disgraced depending on who you ask. Yet he remains the only person auditing the league’s commercial performance with any rigor.
He claims the current administration lives in its own world. He claims they ignore the foundations. He claims they are letting the asset leak value through laziness or incompetence. And because he is outside, because he has nothing left to lose, he can say these things. The owners inside the tent cannot. They need the BCCI too much.
The Irony of Abrar Ahmed
In March, Sunrisers Leeds signed a Pakistani spinner for The Hundred. The internet exploded. Indian fans found old posts, called him anti India, reported the team’s account into suspension. Modi watched this and wrote two words. “Call me.”
He was the man who banned Pakistani players from the IPL in 2008. Now he watched an IPL linked franchise learn why that ban existed the hard way. He took no pleasure in it, or maybe he took all the pleasure.
He noted that he was now a mere spectator watching unwritten rules being defied in England. The founder who had been erased from the official history, watching his successors make the mistakes he warned them about.
The sarcasm was thick enough to choke on. He offered his services to fix the public relations disaster. As if to say, you have the money but not the sense. You have the team but not the wisdom. Call me. I told you so.
The Five Billion Dollar Dream
Despite all the blood in the water, Modi remains bullish. He predicts franchise valuations will hit five billion dollars within five years. He sees the smartphone revolution, the digital streaming wars, the Indian market opening up like a flower.
He believes if owners can just act professional, if the BCCI can just fix the schedule, if they can stop leaving 2,400 crore rupees on the table every year, then his original vision will finally arrive.
It is a strange position to hold. To love something so much that you attack it daily. To build something and then be locked outside it, throwing stones at the windows to wake up the people sleeping inside.
He critiques the revenue leakages. He critiques the owner behaviour. He critiques the calendar. But he never critiques the product itself. He knows it works. He built it to work.
The IPL moves toward its next media rights cycle with questions hanging over it. Will JioStar pay more or less? Will the tournament expand to ninety four matches? Will the franchises ever demand the money Modi says they are owed?
He will be watching from his exile. Calculating the losses. Counting the matches that never were. Waiting for the phone to ring. Call me, he says. As if the league he built could ever really forget who built it, no matter how hard it tries.