This is Dom Cooke and today we are breaking down the world’s fastest growing sports league, The Indian Premier League. The Indian Premier League, often shortened to IPL, is a cricket competition that takes place in India every year between the end of March and end of May. There are 10 teams, 74 matches in total, and the competition starts and ends within 2 months.    The biggest sports leagues tend to come with long histories. You can trace the NFL back to 1920, the NBA to 1946, and Formula 1 to 1950. In stark contrast, the IPL and its teams were founded in 2008. This year’s tournament, which begins in a few weeks, will be the 16th in its history. But despite its relative youth, the IPL is already a sporting giant. It has revolutionized the game of cricket and is the second biggest sports league in the world if you measure it on a per-game basis.   To break down the story and business, I’m joined by Ed Cowan. Ed played professional cricket for Australia in the early 2010s and is now an investor at TDM Growth Partners. We structured the conversation in three parts. We first talk about how the IPL came to be and its place in Indian society. We then walk through the business model, from both the league and team perspectives. We round out the discussion by looking at the competitive position of the league and what the future might hold. Please enjoy this breakdown of the Indian Premier League.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.    -----   This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors. I’m a longtime user and advocate of Tegus, a company that I’ve been so consistently impressed with that last fall my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20M to support Tegus’ mission to expand its product ecosystem. Whether it’s quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls - Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4000 fully driveable financial models. Tegus’ maniacal focus on quality, as well as its depth, breadth and recency of content makes it the one-stop, end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction and surface high-quality, alpha-driving insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick.   -----   Business Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Business Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @JoinColossus | @patrick_oshag | @jspujji | @zbfuss | @ReustleMatt | @domcooke   Show Notes (00:03:05) - [First question] - An overview of the Indian Premier League (IPL) today (00:05:07) - How impressive viewership numbers are monetized in India (00:07:41) - How cricket fits in the context of Indian culture and markets (00:11:06) - The mechanics of T20 cricket and its history (00:19:33) - The genesis and explosion of the IPL (00:21:42) - How the original eight teams were sold by the league and seeded by investors (00:24:44) - The IPL’s conception and the rockier aspects of its startup phase (00:30:13) - The revenue structure and business model broken down into their many streams (00:33:44) - How Indian culture influences media deals in cricket (00:41:55) - How operators have structured the IPL to optimize for media rights  (00:44:53) - More on league-level economics, costs, and IP monetization  (00:47:22) - Dynamics of individual franchises within the league (00:53:36) - The unique nature of the IPL’s auction draft  (00:55:19) - The infrastructure model and overhead costs for individual franchises (00:56:41) - How market