With an average salary of $4,330,799 per year, the players in the Indian Premier League are collectively the second best-paid sportsmen in any single professional league in the world. A recently released Global Sports Salaries survey produced annually by www.sportingintelligence.com suggests the eight-season-old league is breathing down the neck of America’s NBA (National Basketball Association) which offers an average salary of $4,575,918 per year.
IPL also finds a spot in top three for its impressive figures of 7.3 million average social media followers per team. Only the English Premier League (11.5 million) and La Liga clubs (10.9 million) have better following on social media. The IPL, launched in 2008 on the bedrock of a $1 billion TV deal for a 10-year period, might have been placed ahead of other marquee leagues such as Major League Baseball, EPL and La Liga in terms of average salary paid per year, but the survey report is not entirely convinced about the ‘statistical success’ of the cricket league.
There are areas of the IPL that remain opaque, according to Nick Harris, editor of Sporting Intelligence that released the survey. “Are the teams profitable or not? We don’t know because there is little transparency. How many people actually go to matches? We don’t know, for certain, because no attendances are published. Is that because tickets are having to be given away? We don’t know. Our attendance data in this report has been painstakingly, individually compiled on an individual match basis, using best local knowledge not official numbers, which don’t exist,” Mr Harris writes in his summary.
The report calculated salaries of 17 leagues across the world on the basis of annual pay, but for IPL where the players are contracted for the period of the event (seven weeks), the starting point for salaries is average weekly pay, extrapolated pro rata to get an annual average sum. As a league, IPL might have been offering astonishing salaries, but when it comes down to the teams, franchisees of IPL are nowhere near the top European football clubs. Thanks to the largesse of the owners (Qatar Sports Investments QSI), French club PSG are the best paymasters with an average pay of $9,083,993 a year. Real Madrid have climbed to second place, from fourth last year, with their players earning an average $8.64m a year. That puts them just ahead of Manchester City (on $8.59m) who were on top last year.
The top dozen payers are completed by Bayern Munich of the German Bundesliga, Chelsea of the English Premier League, the Yankees, Arsenal of the EPL, the Brooklyn Nets of the NBA and the Detroit Tigers of the MLB. The best IPL payers, according to the report, are Royal Challengers Bangalore who are ranked 41st with an annual average pay of $4,503,571. Chennai Super Kings pay $4,474,321 to be placed just behind RCB.
In the digital era, the popularity of a team can be gauged by number of followers on social media and not surprisingly IPL is in the elite club with an aggregate of 58 million followers for the eight franchisees. While IPL is ranked seventh among global leagues, EPL (229 million) and La Liga (217.6 million) are way ahead of others at No.1 and 2 respectively. Barcelona are the most popular team on social media with close to a billion followers on Facebook and Twitter. IPL teams Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders have more followers than historical American clubs such as NBA’s Boston Celtics and MLB’s New York Yankees. CSK and KKR are ranked 17th and 18th in the list of ‘Super Clubs’ determined by criteria such as social media followers, average salary per year and average crowd per game.
