Beyond the boundaries

Even if we were to assume that there was no other major news to cover, was media's relentless focus on scandal in BCCI really warranted?

The scandal in the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) may bestride television news channels like a colossus, not least because of the spicy mix of glamour, big money, drama and politics. But even if we were to assume that there was no other significant news to cover, was this saturation coverage really warranted?

True, in this essentially one-sport nation, the hugely profitable and cash-rich BCCI is the equivalent of a large and powerful corporate group like, say, Reliance or Tata. Within the tiny world of global cricket, it would be what ExxonMobil is to the giant global oil industry - it even bankrolls the International Cricket Council (ICC).

But here's a reality check. If the BCCI were a listed company on the National Stock Exchange, it would be a minnow. With revenues of Rs 849.44 crore (around $160 million) for 2011-12, it would weigh in at number 612 in BS 1000, Business Standard's annual ranking of the country's largest companies. That would put it a little behind Rajshree Sugars, ironically also a Chennai-based company like India Cements, the company at the centre of the current maelstrom.

And set against other major sports bodies in the global sporting industry, the BCCI would be an SME. The National Football League in the United States earned revenues of $9.5 billion in 2012, with Major League Baseball close behind with $7.7 billion. Like the BCCI, both these bodies are the national governing bodies for their respective sports in the US and are roughly of the same vintage.

If we honed the comparison down to the BCCI's star asset, the popular but controversy-prone Indian Premier League (IPL) that is now at the centre of a deliciously scandalous spot-betting crisis, the difference is even more stark. The accounting for the IPL is opaque - publicity literature talks of an amorphous brand valuation of roughly $4 billion, which is not the same as hard revenue - but if we take TV and broadcast revenue as a proxy, that comes to Rs 180 crore (roughly $31 million). The English Premier League (EPL), with which the press loves to make comparisons, earned revenues of $2.4 billion last year.

If we look at markets, too, the comparisons pale. Approximately 300,000 people watched the IPL tournament last year, according to some estimates. Compare this with 75 million who watched the 2012 American baseball league. For the EPL, the global TV audience alone is 4.7 billion.

In fairness, the globally popular English football tournament has had a 16-year head start over the Indian cricket counterpart, and the latter has created far more cachet within its sport than, say, the Major League Soccer (MLS) tournament has in its 20 years of existence in the US. But where the MLS, initially dismissed as negligible in the hyper-competitive world of football, is steadily acquiring a brand equity by making patient and incremental improvements, the IPL was discredited from its second year onwards with accusations of income tax evasion, opaque franchise records, and serial "spot-fixing" scandals.

This is not to say that sports is a squeaky clean business in the West - there is bound to be crookery in an industry in which the average life of an asset (the sportsman or woman) is less than a decade. But little of it impacts the overall health or reputation of the games elsewhere. That is primarily because the industry operates in a business environment in which disclosure, rules, regulation, open-ness and private sector dominance are the basics of economic activity. Indian business, on the other hand, has rarely enjoyed any of these privileges on a sustained basis and nothing reflects this more than the mess that is the Indian sporting establishment, of which cricket is a stark and depressing reminder. Global sports bodies put in place strict conflict of interest strictures and "fit and proper persons" ownership rules; subject themselves to some sort of oversight; and run on professional, commercial lines. The BCCI and other sports bodies - whether autonomously funded or dependent on government funding - remain chronically opaque and are administered by office-holders who run other businesses and regard their positions as opportunities for enrichment and rentiering.

In none of the international examples cited above do businessmen or politicians run the leagues as an incidental activity on the side; they are administered by salaried professionals who cannot also own teams, players, franchises and so on. Even in Italy, a politician like Silvio Berlusconi, whose morals are as elastic as a bungee rope, cannot suborn Serie A through his ownership of a football club. In 2006, for instance, his club was docked 15 points in a betting scandal. Yet consider the IPL/BCCI: the current scandal involves a gamut of individuals from leading industrialists to major politicians. No wonder news-starved TV thinks it is worth all the airtime.