Two Cricket Teams Just Sold for $3.4 Billion in One Day. The Buyers Have Never Watched Much Cricket

The people buying Indian cricket teams are the same ones who turned American and European sports into goldmines. Their playbook has worked before. It has also failed before.

The bet that made people rich

In 2010, a Silicon Valley investor named Joe Lacob bought the Golden State Warriors basketball team for $450 million. The price was widely mocked. The Warriors had been losing for years, the NBA was heading into a lockout, and nearly everyone said he had overpaid. Fifteen years later, the team is worth over $8 billion, roughly 18 times what he paid. In 2003, a Russian billionaire named Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea football club in London for about $140 million. When he was forced to sell in 2022, it went for $5.2 billion, a return of 37 times. The playbook in both cases was the same: buy a sports team when its value is tied to today's revenue, then ride a wave of exploding broadcast money, richer sponsorships, and growing global audiences until the asset is worth many times more. That is exactly the playbook now being run on Indian cricket.

A few numbers that frame the IPL deals:

• RCB sold for $1.78 billion. In 2008, it cost $111 million. That is roughly a 16-fold increase, or 37 times the invested capital for the original owner.
• Rajasthan Royals sold for $1.63 billion. In 2008, it cost $67 million.
• The buyers are paying 20 to 22 times what an IPL team earns in a year, a price that only makes sense if earnings keep climbing fast.
• On a per-match basis, the IPL is already the second most valuable sports league on earth, behind only America's NFL.

Who is buying, and why they are not here for the cricket

The group buying Rajasthan Royals is backed by Rob Walton of the Walmart family and the Hamp family, who own the NFL's Detroit Lions. The group buying RCB includes Blackstone, one of the largest investment firms in the world, and David Blitzer, an American who already owns pieces of teams in basketball, hockey, and English football. These are not fans. They are professional sports-asset buyers who have watched the same pattern play out across the NBA, the NFL, and the English Premier League, where broadcast rights kept growing, team values kept rising, and early buyers ended up absurdly rich. They look at the IPL and see the same ingredients: a cricket-obsessed nation of 1.4 billion people, a fast-growing economy, and cheap mobile internet putting live matches on every phone. They are betting the pattern repeats.

They are not buying cricket. They are buying a proven playbook that has made billions in American and European sport, and running it on the world's biggest untapped audience.

When the same playbook failed

But the playbook does not always work, and the failures are worth knowing. Italian football clubs kept getting bought at ever-higher prices by wealthy investors convinced that Serie A, once Europe's glamour league, would keep growing. It did not. Broadcast revenues stagnated, stadiums aged, and clubs like AC Milan and Inter Milan were sold and resold while losing money operationally for years. Closer to the IPL's world, several English football clubs bought by overseas investors at premium prices, including Everton, Aston Villa, and Sunderland, spent heavily and still struggled because the economics depend almost entirely on whether broadcast revenue keeps leaping upward. When the TV money plateaus, the maths that justified the purchase price collapses. Every one of these investors was smart. Every one of them believed the growth was inevitable. The ones who were wrong shared a single trait: they bought at the peak of a broadcast cycle and assumed the next deal would be bigger.

The one number that decides everything

So here is the concrete thing to watch, the single fact that will tell you whether $3.4 billion was genius or madness. The IPL's current broadcast rights, held by JioStar, were bought for about $6.4 billion for the 2023 to 2027 cycle. When those rights come up for renewal, likely around 2027, the price they fetch will settle the entire debate. If the next deal jumps to $8 or $10 billion, the billionaires win, because rising broadcast money flows directly to team owners and lifts every franchise value. If it stalls or dips, these buyers are stuck holding teams bought at 20 times earnings in a league whose growth engine has slowed. That one negotiation, probably two years from now, is worth more than every analyst opinion combined. The Warriors playbook minted fortunes because American broadcast money kept exploding for two decades.

The Italian football playbook destroyed wealth because the TV money stopped growing. Indian cricket now faces the same fork in the road, and $3.4 billion is riding on which direction it takes.