The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on Tuesday awarded the two new Indian Premier League (IPL) teams to Intex and New Rising.
Mobile phone manufacturer Intex group will pay 10 crores for Rajkot, while Sanjeev Goenka-owned New Rising consortium will shell out for Pune.
“People want to associate with cricket and IPL for reasons beyond money and economics,” IPL commissioner Rajeev Shukla said.
Goenka is also the co-owner of Indian Super League’s Kolkata franchise.
Both the winning bids went into the negative.
Both new teams will not be a slice of the revenues that franchises get from the IPL’s central revenue pool.
“They won’t take a single penny from the BCCI. In fact they will pay the BCCI,” Board Secretary Anurag Thakur said after a meeting of the IPL Governing Council.
The teams were sold through the reverse bidding process for which the base price was set at Rs. 40 crore and bidders had to quote an amount less than that. The lowest bidder was given the franchises.
Pune and Rajkot will replace Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals. Both teams have been suspended by a Supreme Court-appointed panel as their team officials – CSK’s Gurunath Meiyappan and RR co-owner Raj Kundra – were charged with betting during the 2013 edition of the tournament.
“I’m a big sports enthusiast and cricket lover, my passion is cricket so we had to win,” Intex Director Keshav Bansal said.
“It was a very fierce competition, exciting and thrilling. Very happy to be announced as the new owner of Rajkot team,” Bansal added.
The process was necessitated by the suspension of CSK and RR for the involvement some of their officials and co-owners in the 2013 IPL spot-fixing scandal, which was probed by the Supreme Court-appointed Justice (retd) R M Lodha committee.
However, both the CSK and RR will be allowed back in the league after serving out their suspension.
The interim franchises, which have been picked today, will be participate in a draft to first retain their share of players. On Tuesday, five bids were submitted after a number of companies had shown initial interest. This was the first occasion that the Indian cricket board followed such a policy to ensure that the valuation of the teams did not go below the base price of Rs. 40 crore.
Players from CSK and RR will be divided into two groups of capped and uncapped and the top names will be sold through the draft system. The two new teams will have a minimum of Rs. 40 crore and a maximum of Rs. 66 crore to buy their players.
The other three bidders in fray were Harsh Goenka of RPG properties, Axis Clinical and Chettinad Cement, all of whom quoted higher bids than New Rising and Intex Mobiles.
The BCCI is set to make a major gain as a result of two new franchises joining the league. However, CSK and RR will in all likelihood return after serving their two-year suspension.
“The two new bids will increase BCCI’s revenue by Rs. 360 cr over the next two years,” BCCI president, Shashank Manohar, said after the announcement on Tuesday.
