Lalit Modi Drops a Bombshell: IPL Is Leaving ₹2,400 Crore on the Table Every Single Season

The man who built the IPL from scratch says the world’s richest cricket league is bleeding money — and the fix is simpler than you’d think.

There is something uniquely provocative about the founder of a billion-dollar institution pointing out that it is being run below its potential. Lalit Modi, the man who conceived the Indian Premier League in 2008 and turned it into the most commercially powerful franchise cricket competition on the planet, has fired a broadside at the BCCI — and the numbers he’s citing are impossible to ignore.

The ₹2,400 Crore Gap — At a Glance

The Argument: Fewer Matches, Fewer Crores

Since the IPL expanded to 10 teams in 2022, a complete home-and-away system would ideally result in a 94-match season. However, the BCCI has continued with a shortened 74-match format, using a grouping system instead.

Modi’s maths is brutally straightforward. At approximately ₹118 crore per match in media rights value, the 20 missing matches translate into ₹2,400 crore in lost revenue every season. And under the IPL’s existing revenue-sharing structure, that loss is split right down the middle.

“Every game, the BCCI gets 50 per cent, and the remaining 50 per cent is distributed to teams. So teams are now losing out on 20 games. It is by contractual obligation, for the fees that they’re paying, to provide them home and away,” Modi told Sportstar.

He further elaborated: “If there were 94 matches today on a home-and-away basis at ₹118 crore a game, it’s ₹2,400 crore just the media rights. Of this, ₹1,200 crore would have gone to the 10 teams — ₹120 crore each — and team values would automatically have been higher.”

More Than Money — A Question of Contractual Integrity

What makes Modi’s critique sting harder is that this isn’t just a financial argument — it’s a commercial and contractual one. “That is not what we sold,” he said pointedly, arguing that the league was built on the promise of a full home-and-away format where each team plays every other team twice — a structure he believes was not just a preference but a fundamental part of the IPL’s original commercial model.

The irony is not lost on anyone watching the current season. Modi acknowledged the IPL’s rising franchise valuations — with RCB and Rajasthan Royals recently sold for a combined ₹31,000 crore — but insists the league is still not operating at its true ceiling.

IPL chairman Arun Dhumal has previously acknowledged the 94-match aspiration, citing the need for a larger international cricket calendar window as the primary constraint. But with the BCCI already the world’s most powerful cricket board and the IPL valued at over $18 billion, the gap between what is and what could be is now being measured in thousands of crores.

The question Modi is really asking is: when does the world’s richest T20 league start acting like it?

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