The Indian Premier League is raking in money but its teams are not

FOR cricket connoisseurs, the Indian Premier League, a six-week contest involving a shortened version of the game known as Twenty20, is horribly crass. With the onus on fast scoring, the world’s best batsmen are encouraged to swipe at every ball, inducing a monotonous sort of thrill, not unlike what the IPL’s European cheerleaders achieve with sparkly miniskirts and pompoms. Cricket punters, needless to say, love it, and the IPL, which recently began its third six-week season, is booming. On March 21st two new IPL teams were sold at auction for a total of $703m (32 billion rupees), only slightly less than all eight existing teams sold for two years ago, when the IPL was launched.

For Lalit Modi, the IPL’s boss, this showed it was “recession-proof”. No kidding. Mr Modi has brought previously unimagined riches to a sport that was until recently managed amateurishly in India and elsewhere. Having sold the main broadcasting rights to the contest for 82 billion rupees, he has hawked it widely—striking recent deals with, among others, Google, to broadcast IPL matches on YouTube, and Britain’s ITV. According to Brand Finance, a consultancy, the IPL is worth over $4 billion, double its valuation of a year ago. …