In today’s Finshots, we talk about the Indian Premier League (IPL) and why its growth is slowing.

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Now, onto today’s story.

The Story

For nearly two decades, Indian cricket seemed economically unstoppable. The IPL went from being a domestic T20 tournament to one of the world’s most valuable sports leagues, with media rights revenues jumping nearly 6 times from the 2008–2017 cycle to over ₹48,000 crore for 2023–2027.

During the same period, franchise valuations surged, sponsorship money flooded the ecosystem, and pretty much every fast-growing company in India wanted visibility somewhere around the league. Fintech apps, fantasy gaming firms, crypto platforms, and edtech startups all treated cricket as the fastest way to capture mass attention in a country where few things united audiences at scale.

And for a while, the economics looked flawless.

Because, you see, the IPL happened to rise at the perfect intersection of three massive trends unfolding simultaneously in India: 

1. Cheap mobile internet, 
2. Exploding smartphone penetration, and 
3. A venture capital boom that flooded startups with money.

Traditional television also worked beautifully for sports because audiences behaved predictably. Families sat through entire matches, advertisements were unavoidable, and broadcasters could confidently charge premiums because viewers remained locked into the event for hours.

So, if a company wanted to reach tens of millions of Indians at once, cricket remained the perfect distribution engine and the easiest way to do it.

But here’s the thing. The IPL seems to be losing some steam. For context, according to the latest data from BARC India, the first half of this year’s IPL suffered an 18.8% drop in TV ratings and a 26% decline in average viewership.

And with the IPL finals approaching this Sunday, we found ourselves wondering: what happens when a league that spent years growing almost effortlessly suddenly begins to slow down?

To understand that, we need to understand what’s causing the slowdown in the first place.

For starters, digital attention is more fragmented, impatient, and infinitely easier to distract. Thanks to the rise of smartphones, audiences have started to behave very differently. To put things in perspective, a viewer who watches IPL highlights through Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts, creator reactions or meme pages generates far less value than an entire household watching a full match on television. So at any given moment, viewers are competing not just between sports channels but against creators, short-form videos, Netflix, gaming, and the entire internet itself.

In fact, we recently wrote an entire story about how the “attention economy” itself is beginning to shape policy decisions globally. Because the battle for human attention is increasingly becoming an economic issue, too.

At the same time, the sponsorship ecosystem that once aggressively funded cricket has changed dramatically.

During the low-interest-rate startup boom, companies spent huge amounts of money acquiring users because the dominant philosophy across the startup ecosystem was to grow first, then figure out profits later. 

But that era is largely over now.

Interest rates are higher, venture funding has slowed, and investors are more focused on sustainable cash flows than they were a few years ago. Naturally, marketing budgets are being scrutinised much more aggressively. When those startups cut spending, cricket immediately feels the impact because the ecosystem has largely become dependent on these new-age advertisers.

Then there’s another issue that Indian cricket may not have fully acknowledged yet: oversupply.

Cricket once felt premium partly because it was scarce. Bilateral tours, ICC tournaments, and major events were spaced apart enough for audiences to build anticipation around them. 

But today, cricket is readily available all year-round. Between the IPL, bilateral series, franchise leagues abroad, ICC tournaments, women’s leagues, and overlapping international schedules, fans are constantly flooded with matches. And when something that was scarce becomes available more often, the premium erodes, and people naturally begin to value it differently.

So you could say that this constant availability turned it into background entertainment that people casually consume rather than actively prioritise.

But perhaps a more overlooked factor behind the slowdown is the decline in fantasy gaming and informal betting activity around cricket. 

During the pandemic boom, a large layer of engagement came not just from fandom itself but from having some form of financial stake riding on outcomes. Lakhs of viewers were not merely watching matches; they were participating emotionally because fantasy teams, prediction games, or betting activity gave them “skin in the game”.

That layer of speculative engagement naturally changes behaviour because someone who has money emotionally tied to a match is far more likely to watch ball-by-ball instead of simply catching highlights later.

However, over the last few years, tighter regulations, GST changes, and growing legal scrutiny have sharply slowed many of these platforms. So a person who once watched an entire match because they had financial exposure to outcomes may now feel perfectly satisfied consuming short clips or highlights afterwards.

At the same time, Indian cricket is undergoing a generational transition that may prove economically significant over the next decade. For millions of Indians, cricket was deeply tied to personalities such as Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni or Virat Kohli. At the risk of sounding like ChatGPT, these players were not just athletes, they are cultural figures.

As many of them retire or move toward the twilight of their careers, a portion of older audiences naturally disengages emotionally from the sport.

And that creates a serious challenge for the traditional broadcasting model, which was built around long viewing durations and uninterrupted attention.

So, in many ways, Indian cricket is no longer competing only against other sports leagues. It is competing against the “infinite-scroll” internet economy that constantly fragments user attention.

Put all of this together and you’ll see why, for the first time since it began, the IPL’s valuation has fallen for two straight years from a peak of ₹92,500 crore in 2023 to ₹76,100 crore in 2025. That’s an almost 18% drop over just two seasons.

But none of this means Indian “cricket” itself is in decline. The IPL remains one of the richest sports leagues in the world, and cricket still commands unmatched cultural relevance in India. But the business model supporting that dominance is clearly becoming more complicated than it once was.

So how does it revive itself, you ask?

Well, one way could be to widen its sponsor base. Right now, the league leans heavily on a few sectors. Expanding deeper into auto, BFSI, healthcare, and consumer tech could help spread the risk. At the same time, it may need to get smarter about digital monetisation too. Think bundles, regional packs, and even e-commerce integrations.

But perhaps the bigger shift lies elsewhere. The IPL may have to stop thinking of itself as just a seller of broadcasting rights and start adapting to how people actually consume content today. Because reviving the old media rights frenzy may not be easy. Global OTT giants like Netflix or Apple TV+ have largely stayed away, partly because India’s price-sensitive market makes it tough to justify the massive licensing costs and earn a meaningful return on investment.

Because as we’ve seen, the IPL’s value was always somewhat artificially inflated by two engines that were never entirely sustainable — real-money or fantasy gaming, and fierce broadcast rivalry.

Which is why what we’re seeing today may not be a crisis at all. It could simply be a correction to a more honest baseline.

After all, cricket itself has never been more popular. It’s the business model that now needs reinvention.

And the winners will likely be the organisations that figure out how to monetise fragmented digital attention instead of relying mainly on traditional television audiences.

Until then…

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