Quote:
Originally Posted by Da_Chief
The IPL isn't going to last forever. India is cricket money-maker right now when that runs out the IPL will expire too and be just like the other T20 county tournaments.
Look at right now, its really just India and South Africa playing there, rest of the big countries are playing their series (England, NZ, Australia, Bangladesh) or controversially not invited (Pakistan).
How the new franchises expect to get there money back is beyond me.They get something like 8? home games. The obvious thing would be the TV money but taking that. Even that, they'll get $102 million per year, divide that among 10 teams and your looking at 10 mill per team. Now for an expansion team, you would need a lot of other revenues to make up for that $350 million dollar expansion fee.
It is fun cricket though, but when you have the T20 World cup coming up right after the IPL season every other year I'm not sure how many players would want to risk playing in this tourny especially looking at all the injuries right now.
To me the next big thing is the NLL. Its slowly coming around, good markets are getting around 10K attendance per game. Give it 15-20 years and it will be a strong league with around 16 good teams. I think the NHL probably started off slow like this too.
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With the cash being thrown around I'm not sure why any player wouldn't want to play in this tourney. And plenty of foreign players have played in the IPL in the past, IIRC Ponting was the first pick when the league started. Most of these players have retired from test cricket, but they are still elite players and often among the most famous names.
Look at this list of players in this years tournament:
http://blog.sport.co.uk/Cricket/679/...n_the_IPL.aspx
I'm a very casual observer of cricket, and even I know those names. Whether or not the format will die out as a fad remains to be seen, but I really don't see any reason to think that right now.