There is a moment in every sporting dynasty when the scoreboard stops mattering as much as the spreadsheet. For Mumbai Indians, that moment came not when they won their fifth IPL title, but when they started losing money on purpose.
In 2024, while the parent franchise sat comfortably on profits of ₹109 crore, their new baby in New York bled ₹21.97 crore. Their South African outpost in Cape Town lost ₹22.7 crore. The UAE franchise, despite winning a championship, was deep in the red.
Any traditional sports owner would have called this failure. Reliance Industries called it Tuesday.
This is the story of how a cricket team became something else entirely; not a club, not a brand, but a network. And networks, as any telecom billionaire knows, lose money before they start printing it.
The philosophy they didn’t steal from anyone
Every sports empire borrows its language from somewhere. The City Football Group talks about “geopolitical influence.” Red Bull speaks of “energy” and “performance.” Mumbai Indians reached back 3,000 years and pulled out Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam; the world is one family.
Nita Ambani says this at every press conference. The players wear it on their sleeves. The scouting reports probably have it watermarked. At first glance, it looks like corporate word salad, the kind of thing consultants charge millions to laminate onto mission statements.
But watch how it actually works
In 2022, Mahela Jayawardene stopped being just a coach and became “Global Head of Performance.” Zaheer Khan became “Global Head of Cricket Development.” These weren’t vanity titles. They were structural changes.
Suddenly, a player’s performance in a school tournament in Baroda could be cross-referenced with data from a T20 league in Dubai, evaluated against metrics from a nets session in Cape Town, and tracked through to a potential debut in Mumbai.
The family metaphor isn’t just for fans. It is the operating system.
When Dewald Brevis, a South African teenager who hits the ball like AB de Villiers in a parallel universe, says his dream was always to play for Mumbai Indians, he isn’t being polite. He has been inside their system since he was a child cricketer.
The network spotted him, tracked him, signed him, and gave him a jersey before he had a beard. That is not how cricket scouting used to work. That is how it works now.
The boys who ate Maggi
Rahul Sanghvi has run Mumbai Indians scouting since 2008. He doesn’t give many interviews. The job requires watching cricket that nobody watches; U-16 tournaments in small towns, local T20 leagues where the prize money wouldn’t cover dinner.
In 2015, his network found two brothers in Baroda. Hardik and Krunal Pandya were playing for whatever they could get. The story Nita Ambani tells and she tells it often; is that they survived on Maggi noodles. Two-minute meals between matches that paid nothing and promised less.
Mumbai Indians bought Hardik for $10,000. Today, he is one of the most expensive players in IPL history. Krunal became a mainstay for a long time. The Maggi detail sticks because it tells you what this franchise thinks it is doing. They are not buying talent. They are buying hunger.
Jasprit Bumrah was another Sanghvi find in 2013. Coaches said his action would break his back. They said he ran too straight. They said he released the ball from the wrong angle.
Mumbai Indians saw something else; reaction time measured in milliseconds, a wrist position that physics couldn’t explain, and the kind of competitive nastiness that doesn’t show up in statistics.
These stories accumulate. Tristan Stubbs was an injury replacement nobody had heard of. Now he is South Africa’s all format batter. The network finds them, tests them in satellite leagues, and either brings them to Mumbai or sells the intelligence to the highest bidder.
Cricket doesn’t have a transfer market yet. When it does, Mumbai Indians will own it.
The vertical empire
City Football Group owns thirteen clubs. They wear sky blue. They use “City” in their names. They are everywhere, and they are the same everywhere. This is horizontal expansion; breadth without depth.
Mumbai Indians is building something different. Call it vertical, call it pyramidal, call it whatever you want. The point is that their teams in New York, Cape Town, London and Dubai are not just billboards for the mother brand. They are finishing schools.
A young player who isn’t quite ready for the IPL pressure cooker might spend a season in South Africa’s SA20. A South African teenager who needs to learn handling big crowds gets dropped into a final in front of 30,000 in New York. An American prospect who has never faced quality spin gets thrown into the UAE league to sink or swim.
This is player development as risk management. The IPL team doesn’t gamble on unknowns anymore. The network gambles for them, in smaller leagues with smaller stakes, and only ships the survivors to Mumbai.
It also solves cricket’s oldest problem: the off-season. Manchester United disappears for three months every year. Their fans find other hobbies. Their sponsors find other billboards.
Mumbai Indians never stops. When the IPL ends, SA20 begins. When that finishes, The Hundred starts. Then the UAE league. Then back to India. It is cricket as a perpetual motion machine, and it keeps the money flowing even when the wickets are empty.
The American experiment
Kieron Pollard talks about cricket in America like someone describing a religious conversion. He has seen it change. He has helped change it.
When he first played there, cricket was a private shame. Immigrant communities gathered on old parade grounds, the same spaces where the National Guard once drilled and played matches that nobody watched. It was a way to remember home, not to build a new one.
Major League Cricket changed the math. In 2023, Pollard captained MI New York to the inaugural title. They played in Texas stadiums and planned for Brooklyn.
The broadcast team started measuring bowling speeds in miles per hour, not kilometers. Sixes were described in feet, not meters. It was a small thing, but it mattered. One fan told a reporter that this made the sport feel “made for me.”
That is the game within the game. Mumbai Indians isn’t just selling cricket to Americans. It is selling cricket as American; familiar units, familiar rhythms, familiar packaging. The sport is ancient. The presentation is new.
There is a story about Rushil Ugarkar that tells you how this works in practice. Twenty-two years old. Uncapped. Unknown. In the 2025 final, he had to defend twelve runs in the last over against International stars. Most teams would have pulled him. Most captains would have lost their nerve.
Pollard kept him on. Ugarkar finished the over. Mumbai Indians won. The kid who nearly lost it became the kid who won it, and that story will be told in American cricket clubs for years. That is how you build a sport. Not through marketing campaigns. Through moments that feel impossible until they happen.
The women who were never an afterthought
In 2023, Reliance paid ₹912.99 crore for a Women’s Premier League franchise. Adjusted for inflation and currency shifts, that is almost exactly what they paid for the men’s team in 2008. They did not wait to see if women’s cricket would be profitable. They bet that it would be equally profitable.
Harmanpreet Kaur has won them two titles already. The same scouting system that found Pandya and Bumrah now runs parallel operations for the women’s team. The same coaching infrastructure. The same “One Family” branding.
There is no sense that this is a charitable project or a compliance requirement. It is a business unit, treated with the same seriousness as the men’s side.
This matters because most of global sport still treats women’s leagues as secondary. The WPL is new enough to have avoided that trap. Mumbai Indians made sure of it.
What they are actually building
The financial documents tell part of the story. Media rights worth $6.4 billion. A brand valuation of $108 million reported in 2025. Thirty-seven sponsorship deals. A profit in India that covers losses everywhere else.
But the real asset is harder to quantify. It is the database of players. The relationships with coaches who have worked in the system and will recommend the next generation.
The institutional knowledge of how to run a cricket team in New York when nobody in the room has done it before. The trust of parents in small Indian towns who believe that if Mumbai Indians scouts their son, his future is secure.
Reliance is a conglomerate that runs oil refineries and telecom networks and retail chains. They understand infrastructure. They understand that the thing you build today determines what you can charge for tomorrow.
The cricket network is infrastructure. It is pipes and wires and switching stations, except the pipes are scouting relationships, the wires are data analytics, and the switching stations are the seven franchises that move players and money and stories around the world.
When cricket enters the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, Mumbai Indians will be ready. When the American market finally opens, they will already be inside. When a global transfer market emerges, they will set the prices.
The last question
There is always a last question with empires: what happens when the money stops?
Reliance has shown no signs of stopping. They are buying into The Hundred in England. They are expanding the junior tournaments that feed the system. They are treating losses in new markets as investments, not problems.
But the deeper answer is that this network might survive even if the money changed. The “One Family” philosophy, for all its corporate packaging, has created genuine loyalty.
Players who came through the system; Pollard, Malinga, Hardik Pandya: become captain, coaches and mentors. The culture perpetuates itself. The knowledge transfers.
That is the difference between a team and an institution. Teams win championships and fade. Institutions reshape the sport around them.
Mumbai Indians is not the best cricket team in the world. They are something more interesting than that. They are the template for what cricket will become; global, year-round, vertically integrated, and permanently hungry.
The Maggi-eating boys from Baroda built this. The lanky pacers with wrong actions built this. The kids playing on National Guard parade grounds in New York are building it now.
The world is one family. The family is a factory. And the factory never closes.