It’s been 18 years since the first Indian Premier League (IPL) tournament was played in India with 8 franchised teams across the country. Since then, the league has lost much of its sheen, even as the event seems to continue to grow grander by the day.
With the IPL almost over, we have seen 10 teams competing for the title, up from 8, with the IPL now becoming a yearly summer extravaganza that isn’t as popular as the Cricket World Cup or T20 World Cup, which come once every four years.
But the IPL doesn’t feel that special anymore, especially since the tournament is held every summer. There was the initial novelty, but that has, so far, worn out, as the tournament has become more about business opportunities than the soul of the game.
“When you watch football anywhere in the world, the soul of the sport remains the same. Same with tennis, basketball or even Formula 1. The leagues become bigger, richer and more entertaining, but the core sport still remains untouched,” Nitin Ahlawat, a brand marketing consultant, says in a Linkedin post that has now gone viral.
“Today it feels less like a sport and more like an entertainment ecosystem built around cricket. Strategic timeouts designed for ads, music after every ball, influencer culture, fantasy gaming, auction drama bigger than actual matches, teams changing identities, and fans supporting players instead of the game itself,” he rues.
Over saturation
Before the IPL and the popularity of T20, most international teams played about 10 test matches and 20 ODIs in a year. With the IPL itself seeing 70 matches in just one tournament, it has meant a doubling of viewership, even after assuming die-hard fans choose just one team over the others.
But with their teams playing multiple times a week, this has meant an oversaturation of cricket.
This phenomenon is like if you like a song so much that you use it as your alarm ringtone, and you eventually get yourself to hate it because you hear the same song so many times.
Though the IPL is held during the summer vacations, not everyone would be watching their favourite teams play, especially if they are playing more than once in a week, every week for more than a month.
Declining viewership
The decline in its popularity is showing, with viewership now dropping 18.8% from 4.57 million in 2025 to 3.7 million this year. One reason has been the growing popularity of on-demand viewership on mobile phones and OTT platforms, which discourages watching the match in one go.
This decline has also showed through the advertisement revenues from the IPL, where the number of brands advertising through the traditional television broadcasts have dropped by 31% this season, from 65 last year to 45 this time, as per data from BARC India and TAM Sports.
This sharp decline has come as viewers are spending lesser time watching the matches, based on the decline in the Average Minute Audience (AMA) as the analysts have said.
The Real Money Gaming Ban
With real money gaming now banned, a big chunk of viewers who tuned in to monitor their daily fantasy lineups have now gone. In the previous seasons, Dream11 and My11Circle accounted for over 6% of the total commercial airtime on television, with both even sponsoring the tournament and its teams.
Now that real-money games are completely banned, these platforms have been effectively removed from the IPL ecosystem.
What next?
Currently valued at Rs.76,100 crore, the IPL remains one of the world’s biggest sporting properties. It has seen its ups and downs, with the tournament seeing broadcasting auction rights values soars to almost $6.2 billion in 2022, second just to the NFL.
But that may not last, as declining viewership may force lower auctions and rights, as advertisers and viewers have started to lose interest in the tournament.
