Explainer · evergreen
How the IPL works: franchise cricket's money machine
In one line: The Indian Premier League in plain terms: the auction, the salary cap, the playoff format — and how a six-week tournament became cricket's economic centre of gravity.
The Indian Premier League lasts about ten weeks a year and now moves more money than any competition in cricket — more, in broadcast terms, than everything else in the sport combined. It is also the clearest example in world sport of the franchise model applied to a traditional game. The mechanics explain the power.
Franchises, auction, salary cap
Ten city-based franchises — owned by everyone from Bollywood stars to sovereign-scale investment groups — compete in a closed league with no promotion or relegation: the same structural choice the NWSL explainer covers, with cricket's transfer market on top. Players are not bought freely between seasons; they are acquired through an auction, where franchises bid against each other from purses bounded by a salary cap with squad-composition rules (overseas-player limits, retention slots). The auction is itself a televised spectacle and a genuine skill contest — squads are built by valuation under pressure, which is why "auction genius" is a real job description.
The tournament
The season runs a double round-robin league phase — every franchise plays the others home and away, each match a T20 of roughly three and a half hours — then a four-team playoff with a distinctive fairness twist: the qualifier structure gives the top two sides two routes to the final, so the table-toppers are rewarded with a second chance while third and fourth play an elimination knockout. It is the group-plus-knockout hybrid with a double-elimination top, a format choice designed to make every league position matter — the logic the tournament formats guide unpacks.
Why it moved the centre of cricket
The IPL's economics reordered the sport's power structure in one generation. Its broadcast deals are among the largest in world sport per match; its salary offers exceed what most national boards can pay per month, so the world's best players organise their calendars around it; and its success spawned a dozen copycat leagues — a franchise T20 circuit now runs most of the year somewhere on earth. The tension this creates is real and unresolved: club cricket increasingly outpays country cricket, and the calendar is a constant negotiation between leagues, international boards and players' bodies. What is not in doubt: for understanding where cricket is heading — money, format and audience — the IPL is the case study, and its six-week season is the sport's most consequential ten weeks.
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