The Complete Story of IPL’s Meteoric Rise: A Deep Dive

The Complete Story of IPL’s Meteoric Rise

Contributor - Bhavana Ramesh
May 7, 2025
20 min read

I : The Spark That Changed Cricket Forever

In 2007, cricket found itself at a crossroads.

Test matches sprawled over five days. One-Day Internationals still dominated television, but patience was wearing thin. A younger, faster India was taking shape , and the old rhythms of the game struggled to keep up.

Cricket, in many ways, felt frozen in time.

Into this scene stepped Lalit Modi. Sharp, ambitious, and famously impatient, Modi saw something the establishment could not. Cricket didn’t need minor fixes. It needed a full-scale transformation.

He envisioned matches that fit neatly into an evening, packed with action, music, celebrity, and spectacle. A format built not for sleepy afternoons, but for prime time. Where others clung to tradition, Modi designed an experience for a new era.

Cricket wasn’t just a game to watch. It was about to become a game to experience.|

The idea was bold: a franchise-based T20 league where teams represented cities, players became icons, and every match felt like an event. A shorter game. A faster tempo. A broader audience.

Many traditionalists scoffed. T20 was viewed as a sideshow , too frantic, too shallow to carry cricket’s dignity. Betting the future of Indian cricket on it seemed reckless.

Modi moved anyway.

The Race Against Rivals

While Modi shaped his plans, another challenger appeared: the Indian Cricket League (ICL), quietly backed by Zee Entertainment. Though unofficial, the ICL began to gather players and media attention. It was a direct threat to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

The response was swift. The BCCI banned players who associated with the ICL , and doubled down. Rather than simply fight off the competition, they fast-tracked Modi’s idea, giving it their full backing.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) was officially born.
And Modi had only months to build it from scratch.

Blueprint of a Revolution

Everything moved at breathtaking speed.
Modi, thinking like a founder rather than a bureaucrat, structured the IPL with a mix of sport, business, and spectacle. He opened team ownership to corporate giants, celebrities, and entrepreneurs.
The message was clear: this was bigger than cricket.

Build the teams right, and you don’t just sell cricket. You sell identity, loyalty, and dreams.

At the first auction, Mumbai Indians sold for $67 million. Royal Challengers Bangalore fetched $111 million. Shah Rukh Khan’s Kolkata Knight Riders went for $75 million. At the time, those numbers looked extravagant. Today, they seem like bargains.

To secure television dominance, Modi engineered a ten-year, $1 billion broadcasting deal with Sony and World Sport Group. No Indian sporting event had ever attracted anything close.

The IPL was not launching quietly. It was setting off fireworks from day one.

Opening Night: A New Era Begins

In 2008, the inaugural match delivered exactly what Modi had promised , and then some.
Brendon McCullum’s 158-run blitz electrified the crowd. Cheerleaders lined the boundary. Fireworks lit the night sky. Bollywood stars waved from the stands.

It was cricket, but unrecognizable from anything India had seen before.

And in that moment, it was clear: the IPL was not a side project. It was the future of the sport.

II: Cricket, Capital, and the Making of an Empire

If the IPL’s launch felt like a revolution, what followed was something even more remarkable: the construction of an empire.

Right from the beginning, the IPL was not content to simply be a sports league. It was designed as a business ecosystem, where every boundary, every wicket, and every flashing billboard was part of a larger machine.

The Auction That Redefined Athletes

Before fans chose their favorite teams, the owners did. In boardrooms filled with billionaires and celebrities, players became investments , assets to be bought, sold, and marketed.

MS Dhoni, the heartthrob from Ranchi, went to Chennai Super Kings for nearly $1.5 million. Andrew Symonds drew $1.3 million. Stars who once represented national pride were now representing city pride, for a price.

In the IPL, loyalty was measured in contracts, and fame could be won overnight.

The auction wasn’t just entertainment. It rewired the economics of the sport. Players were no longer reliant only on national boards. They could now earn global money on a domestic stage.

The Rise of the Team Brands

Owning an IPL team wasn’t simply a matter of sporting ambition. It was an investment in culture.

Franchises were built like consumer brands. Shah Rukh Khan turned the Kolkata Knight Riders into a Bollywood-backed phenomenon. Mumbai Indians, anchored by Sachin Tendulkar, captured the country’s biggest city and its endless appetite for heroes. Kings XI Punjab, fueled by Preity Zinta’s charm, became a regional powerhouse.

These weren’t teams. They were movements. And every win, every loss, every Instagram post fueled their rise.

Television: The Lifeline

Modi’s masterstroke was understanding that the real IPL wasn’t played only on grass. It was played on television screens.

The Sony-WSG broadcast deal locked in a decade of prime-time exposure. Every evening, households across India tuned in, not for soaps or news, but for the drama of cricket in a three-hour package.

Advertisers rushed in. Brands scrambled to plaster their logos on every square inch of the broadcast. The IPL wasn’t just cricket anymore. It was India’s new national entertainment.

When prime time becomes match time, you know the culture has shifted.

The Stadiums Become Stages

It wasn’t enough for matches to be watched. They had to be experienced.

Lights. Music. Flashing cameras. VIP boxes. Cheering crowds draped in team colors. Walking into an IPL stadium was more like entering a movie premiere than a sporting venue.

Within a single season, the IPL created a new expectation: cricket wasn’t background noise anymore. It was an event you dressed up for, scheduled around, and celebrated like a festival.

The foundation had been laid. What had begun as an experiment was now bigger than anyone had imagined.

And the real game had only just begun.

III: When the Big Money Showed Up

If the IPL’s first season proved the concept, what happened next proved its market power.

In 2010, the league added two new franchises: the Pune Warriors and Kochi Tuskers Kerala. The winning bids? $370 million combined.
At a time when the global economy was still licking its wounds from the financial crisis, the IPL had no such problems.

The message was clear: cricket wasn’t just surviving. It was scaling.

These deals nearly doubled the original franchise prices from 2008. Investors were lining up, and valuations were heating up. Fast.

But the money wasn’t the only thing multiplying. So were the problems.

Storm Clouds: Scandals and Suspensions

Even as franchise values soared, the league found itself tangled in controversy. Allegations of corruption and conflicts of interest began swirling around Lalit Modi himself.

By 2010, Modi was suspended by the BCCI.
The architect of the IPL was suddenly out of the very house he had built.
And yet, the IPL kept growing.
If anything, it got sharper. Cleaner. More professional.

In 2015, after a spot-fixing scandal hit the Rajasthan Royals and Chennai Super Kings, the Supreme Court stepped in. Two teams were suspended for two seasons. It could have been a death blow. Instead, it turned into a reset.

New ownership groups, stricter governance, and a fresh set of eyes on league management set the stage for the next phase of expansion.

The Bidding War of 2021

When the BCCI auctioned two new franchises in 2021, the world got a glimpse of how far the IPL had come.

Sanjiv Goenka’s RPSG Group bought the Lucknow Super Giants for $950 million.
CVC Capital Partners secured the Ahmedabad franchise (now Gujarat Titans) for $740 million.

Those numbers weren’t mistakes.
They represented almost 10x the original 2008 franchise valuations.

The IPL had officially crossed into billion-dollar territory and it wasn’t slowing down.

Payment Terms and Payouts

The franchise fees were structured to be paid over a ten-year period, smoothing out the cash outflows for the new owners. Smart move. Meanwhile, those franchise payments were redistributed among the original eight teams as compensation for dilution.

The setup wasn’t just fair.
It was a masterclass in keeping early stakeholders loyal while still expanding the pie.

And behind the scenes, the real accelerant was waiting: a brand-new media rights auction that would make the 2017 numbers look like small change.

The next phase was pure rocket fuel.

IV: The $6 Billion Broadcast Jackpot

By 2022, it was time to renegotiate the media rights. The 2017 deal — a then-record $2.5 billion with Star India — was up. And the market? Completely different. Streaming was surging. Smartphone penetration in India had exploded. Global investors were circling.

The BCCI didn’t just hold an auction. They split the rights into four buckets:

Domestic TV
Domestic digital
International TV
International digital

A classic 2×2 matrix.
Separate bidders. Separate checkbooks. Bigger payday.

When you slice the pie right, you don't get a bigger slice. You get a whole second pie.

The Winners and the Numbers

Disney Star (the incumbent) won the domestic TV rights.
Price: $3.02 billion for five seasons.
Viacom18 (a joint venture between Reliance and Paramount) stunned everyone by winning the digital rights.
Price: $3.05 billion — yes, digital topped TV for the first time.

In total, the domestic rights alone crossed $6 billion.

Quick comparison:
2017 combined rights? $2.5 billion.
2022 domestic rights alone? $6.1 billion.

That’s 2.5x growth in just five years.

The Streaming Bet

Viacom18’s win was strategic.Reliance wasn’t just buying sports content. They were buying traffic for JioCinema, their OTT platform.

Disney, meanwhile, had a tough pill to swallow. Losing the IPL digital rights was a massive blow for Disney+ Hotstar, which had built much of its subscriber base around cricket.

You can’t be the king of streaming in India if you don’t have cricket.

Disney’s loss showed up immediately:

Hotstar lost millions of subscribers.
Disney’s global streaming growth hit a wall.

Meanwhile, JioCinema started offering IPL matches for free — a classic Reliance move — using cricket to dominate the Indian OTT space almost overnight.

International Rights: A Side Dish

Viacom18 also picked up much of the international package:

Australia, New Zealand, the UK, South Africa.

Times Internet snagged the Middle East and USA rights for a relatively tiny fee ($26 million and $33 million respectively).

In other words:

Indian rights = $6.1 billion
Rest of the world combined = pocket change

Because when it comes to cricket, the Indian subcontinent is the market.

Guaranteed Cash Flows

Add it all up:

- $1.25 billion per year from media rights.
- $150–200 million annually from central sponsorships.
- Nearly $1.5 billion flowing into the league every year — locked in for five years.

Asset-light. Guaranteed revenues.
No heavy stadium investments (yet).
Minimal player costs (compared to revenue).
On paper, the IPL was starting to look like the perfect private equity asset.
And the story wasn’t even close to peaking.

V: The Most Valuable Two Months in Sports

If you want to understand the IPL’s rise, strip it down to a simple stat:
The league plays 74 matches a year, yet it’s already second only to the NFL when you measure revenue per game.

Here’s the math:

The IPL’s annual central revenue sits between $1.5–$1.6 billion.
Divide that across 74 games, and you land at roughly $20–$22 million per match.

To put that in perspective, Major League Baseball drags itself through over 2,400 games a year, generating just $1.7 million per game. Meanwhile, the English Premier League, seen as a global powerhouse, averages around $15–$16 million per match. The NBA hovers at about $5 million per game.
Only the NFL blows everyone out of the water, pulling in an eye-watering $45–$49 million per game.

One night of IPL brings in more money than a full week of Major League Baseball.

The design is deliberate. Fewer games create scarcity. Scarcity drives up ad rates, inflates sponsorships, and creates genuine appointment viewing. Every match matters because there simply aren’t that many.

And all of this value — all of this frenzy — happens in just two months each year. The IPL isn’t trying to be a year-round machine. It’s a highly condensed, high-stakes financial blitz. Like a fireworks show that lights up the sky and vanishes before you can blink.

The Operating Model: A Business School Case Study

Now here’s where it gets really attractive from a business standpoint.

Teams are structurally built for high-margin cash flows. Player salaries are capped at about $17 million per team. Franchises, for the most part, do not own their stadiums yet, which means they avoid the debt and maintenance nightmares that NFL or NBA teams endure. Stadium ownership may come later, but right now, the model is practically asset-light.

On top of that, the BCCI handles the central media rights deals, takes a 50% cut, and distributes the rest to the teams. That leaves most franchises running at a jaw-dropping 65% EBITDA margin.

In simple terms:

An average IPL team pulls in $70–$80 million in annual revenue after the BCCI’s cut.
Their operating profits (EBITDA) are roughly $45–$55 million.

At a $1 billion valuation, you’re looking at about 20x EBITDA multiples.

If you love SaaS economics, you should love IPL economics. It's SaaS, except the customers show up wearing face paint and beating drums.

The Scarcity Playbook

And scarcity is the magic word here. The IPL has only 10 franchises right now. Maybe that grows to 12 or 14. But fundamentally, this is a gated community. No open promotions. No relegations. No freebies.

If you own an IPL team, you own a fortress. In an economy growing faster than almost any other major market on Earth, that’s about as good as it gets.

Valuations are already climbing.

The Mumbai Indians have been pegged at around $1.3–$1.4 billion.
The Chennai Super Kings are in similar territory.
The average team hovers close to the $1 billion mark.

That puts them toe-to-toe with legacy NBA franchises, and the kicker is that the IPL has accomplished this in just 16 years. A blink, compared to the half-century it took the NBA to climb into billion-dollar valuations.

Room Left to Run

This isn’t even the end of the road.
India’s total ad market is still about one-tenth the size of the U.S. Streaming monetization is still early. Smartphone usage is still expanding.

If India’s advertising sector and middle class keep growing — and there’s every reason to think they will — the IPL’s central revenues could double or triple before it even needs to think about tapping international markets in a meaningful way.

In other words, for investors and team owners already on the inside, this isn’t a mature, peaking asset.
It’s early innings, with a lot of upside still left to grab.

VI: IPL as an Empire – More Than a League, It’s Its Own Economy

At this point, calling the IPL a “sports league” feels quaint. It’s more accurate to think of it as an economy — an entire ecosystem buzzing with businesses, products, services, and millions of participants.

In India, cricket isn’t just a sport. It's a religion. And for two months every year, the IPL is the pilgrimage.

Every April and May, the country bends around it. Advertising budgets tilt toward it. Consumer behavior changes. Entire startups are born to ride its wave — fantasy gaming platforms, merchandise companies, mobile streaming apps, snack brands, event planners, and even travel agencies that offer “IPL experience” packages.

And this economy is built on three unstoppable forces:
Media Rights.
Expansion.
Untapped Markets.

The Bull Case: Why the IPL Could 10x Again

First, let’s follow the straight numbers. Since its birth in 2008, IPL’s media rights have grown at an 18% compound annual growth rate.

$100 million per year in the early days.
Now sitting at about $1.2–$1.3 billion per year.

If India’s advertising market keeps growing at its current 6–7% clip, and if media rights pricing tracks consumer purchasing power, the IPL could 5x its media rights alone in the next 15–20 years. And that’s before you consider international growth.

Then layer on match expansion. Right now, the IPL runs for two months with 10 teams playing 74 matches.

If the league gradually adds:

2–4 more teams
Extends the season to 10–12 weeks
Adds a second mini-season or an international playoff window

… you’re looking at a 2x expansion in match inventory. And if viewership holds steady — or better yet, grows — the revenue engine doubles again.

In pure financial terms: 5x ad market growth × 2x inventory expansion = 10x total revenue opportunity.

Which would put the IPL on par with the NFL’s current revenue scale.

The IPL's Growing Real Estate

Then there’s the physical world.
As stadium ownership and upgrades become more sophisticated, the IPL teams will follow the NFL playbook:

Luxury suites
Naming rights
Premium seating licenses
Retail and entertainment zones around stadiums

Right now, stadiums are state-owned or BCCI-managed, and IPL teams lease them. That keeps costs low, but it also caps potential upside. Once teams start investing in infrastructure — think Bollywood meets Jerry Jones’ AT&T Stadium — local revenues could easily rise from 15% to 30–35% of total revenues.

It would mean the IPL shifts from an events business to a real estate + media hybrid machine.

The Megabull Case: Global Expansion

If you really want to stretch the imagination, here’s the wildest possibility:
The IPL becomes India’s first true global consumer export.

Already, cricket has 2.5 billion fans globally. Most of them are concentrated in South Asia, Australia, England, South Africa, and the Caribbean. But with the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics featuring T20 cricket, there’s a golden ticket to introduce IPL-style cricket to the US, China, and beyond.

Imagine:

IPL matches staged in New York, London, Dubai, Singapore
American and British investors buying stakes in new expansion teams
Bollywood stars hosting halftime shows in Yankee Stadium

It’s not impossible. It’s already happening in small ways. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund has shown interest. US tech billionaires are sniffing around. Major League Cricket (the US domestic T20 league) already has IPL team owners involved.

Cricket might still be a religion in India. But soon, the IPL pilgrimage could become international.

Reality Check: It’s Still a Heavy Lift

Now, nobody’s pretending this is automatic.
India’s media environment is changing fast. Consolidations like Disney-Star and Viacom18 merging reduce the number of bidders for broadcast rights. Streaming monetization is still shaky compared to traditional TV. And while the IPL owns India, growing globally would mean fighting time zones, unfamiliarity, and entrenched sports habits.

Also, expansion comes with risks. Diluting the product. Fan fatigue. Cannibalizing viewership.

When you have the golden goose, you don't cut it open to look for more eggs. You feed it carefully, and you let it grow fat.

The IPL has to balance its ambition with patience.

Bottom Line

Today, the IPL looks like a once-in-a-generation asset.

It rides on the back of India’s growing middle class.
It captures attention with unmatched entertainment value.
It throws off cash at startup-like growth rates but with luxury brand margins.

If you’re betting on India, betting on media, and betting on live entertainment surviving the digital era, it’s hard to find a cleaner asset to admire — or to wish you had bought a piece of back in 2008.

VII: The Bear Case – Where the IPL’s Dream Could Hit Reality

It has been all fireworks and billion-dollar deals so far, but the IPL is not invincible. Every empire faces its pressure points, and the IPL is no exception. Underneath the booming numbers, there are cracks that could widen if the league is not careful.

1. India’s Business Environment: Growing, but Uneven

First, there is the reality of operating at scale in India. The Indian economy is growing fast, and the consumer base is expanding. But when you move past the headlines, some old challenges remain. Contract enforcement can be inconsistent. Regulatory frameworks are not always clear. Delays in infrastructure and operational execution can quietly erode even the best-laid plans.

When you are running a $100 million business, these are frustrations. When you are steering a $20 billion ecosystem, they can become risks that compound over time. If the IPL wants to compete with the NFL on global terms, it cannot afford systemic inefficiencies dragging it down.

A world-class league needs world-class reliability behind the scenes.

2. Media Market Shrinking: Fewer Bidders, Lower Bids

Another brewing problem is the shrinking pool of media rights bidders. After the merger of Viacom18 and Disney-Star in 2024, India now has one massive media giant holding most of the cards. The last IPL rights auction worked so well because of intense competition. Next time, with fewer players in the game, who will push the price up?

Sure, Google and Meta could swoop in, especially given their huge user bases in India. But they have not shown much appetite for heavy sports rights spending globally. Hoping they join the fight is more wishful thinking than strategy.

Without real bidding wars, the media rights rocket ship could lose altitude. If growth slows here, it hits the heart of the IPL’s financial model.

3. Streaming Monetization: The Big Bet That Still Has to Pay Off

Viacom18 made a bold move by paying over $3 billion for IPL digital rights. That bet assumes that Indian consumers will spend more time streaming sports and that advertisers will flood in to reach them.

The reality is tougher.

Mobile data in India remains the cheapest in the world.
Subscription fatigue is real.
Advertisers are still cautious when it comes to digital spending.

Disney found out the hard way when it lost IPL digital rights and watched millions of Disney+ Hotstar subscribers vanish almost overnight. If JioCinema cannot turn streaming into a serious revenue engine, that $3 billion price tag will start to look a lot heavier than it did at the auction.

4. Players Could Demand a Bigger Slice

Today, players are locked into a relatively small share of league revenue. There is a salary cap. There is no active players’ union. The BCCI still sets most of the terms. For team owners, this setup is gold. It keeps costs predictable and margins high.

But this situation may not last forever. As the league becomes a bigger global phenomenon and the money piles up, players will notice. In the NFL and NBA, players collect close to 50% of league revenues. In the IPL, it is closer to 12%. That gap will start to feel very obvious.

If players begin to organize or push back, the economics of owning a team could shift quickly.

5. Expansion: Growth Could Weaken the Core

Adding more teams and matches sounds great when you are trying to juice revenue. More games mean more media rights and sponsorship slots. But there is a fine line between growing the pie and diluting the product.

Too many matches could stretch fans’ attention. Loyalty to teams could weaken. The scarcity that made every match a can’t-miss event could vanish.

The IPL’s magic was built on concentrated excitement.
If the league turns into a year-round grind, it risks becoming just another cricket league rather than the phenomenon it is today.

The IPL was a miracle of focus. Lose that focus, and you lose the magic.

The Bottom Line

The IPL has climbed to rare heights.
It has the momentum, the money, and the market. But growth brings new risks.
If the BCCI and the owners start taking the good times for granted, if the hunger and discipline that built the IPL soften, cracks will widen.
No competitor is going to bring the IPL down.
The real danger will come from inside the house.

VIII: The IPL Experience: A Stadium, A Spectacle, A Social Shift

After all the valuations, margins, and media deals, it’s worth stepping back to look at the IPL economy not as a pie chart, but as a living, breathing organism. One that moves, earns, influences, and expands every season.

By now, we’ve seen the financial core: central revenue drives the league. Broadcasting and sponsorships pull in the big numbers. Local earnings such as ticket sales, in-stadium spending, and regional sponsorships add some flavor to the mix. Teams run with enviable margins, thanks to a lean operating structure and a revenue model stacked in their favor. There’s no need for billion-dollar stadium builds or massive player unions. With a salary cap that barely dents the top line, team owners are sitting on what may be the most efficient sports businesses in the world.

But the ripple effects go far beyond franchise books.

When IPL is in season, it powers an entire web of dependent activity. Every match lights up dozens of industries: hospitality, travel, merchandise, advertising, design, media production, influencer marketing, digital streaming. Platforms like JioCinema build engagement playbooks around it. Agencies pitch seasonal campaigns pegged to match days. Designers roll out graphics, theme nights, and fan gear tailored for those two golden months.

The IPL functions more like an economic engine than a typical sports league. It becomes a festival circuit, a seasonal boom that ignites consumer energy across sectors. With each passing year, this ecosystem grows more self-sustaining. Entire job categories now exist solely because of the IPL. Roles that had no name a decade ago are now essential to the machinery.

And much like any festival that draws a crowd, the IPL builds its own orbit. Food vendors near stadiums stock up for the rush. Local businesses tune their inventory and services. Tech firms align product launches. It’s no exaggeration to say that the IPL acts as a marker of economic activity, much like Diwali or Eid. The product is entertainment, and the currency is attention.

You could call it a pilgrimage of a different kind. Cricket remains a religion in India. IPL season, however, feels more like a high-energy carnival. Fans don’t quietly observe. They enter the arena, wear their loyalties on their sleeves, raise chants that shake rafters, and follow their icons with relentless devotion. The IPL thrives on the spectacle.

Which brings us to the next act: how all of this translates into design. How stadiums, screens, kits, graphics, and experiences were reinvented to carry the weight of a phenomenon this massive. Because when a league shifts culture, the visuals need to shift too.

IX: Designing the Spectacle – How the IPL Rewired Spectator Experience

As the IPL scaled new heights in commerce and reach, another less obvious revolution was brewing beneath the surface. One that wasn’t driven by rights deals or franchise bids, but by the visceral thrill of watching. Whether inside the stadium or behind a screen, the spectator experience became its own discipline. In the IPL’s world, design isn’t just decoration. It’s delivery.

This is where the league carved out a niche most others missed. By treating entertainment design not as an afterthought but as a competitive edge.

Look at the stadiums. Even when the infrastructure was aging, the in-stadium experience evolved rapidly. Lighting effects, curated fan zones, giant LED screens, coordinated chants, and match-day rituals gave the average cricket game the feel of a high-stakes rock concert. Teams began treating their home grounds like stages, not just fields. It wasn’t only about watching players hit sixes. It was about being part of a shared, sensory event.

And the experience extended beyond the walls of the arena. Match broadcasts started to resemble music videos. Hyper-edited highlight reels, player closeups, crowd cutaways, and augmented stat overlays changed how people engaged with cricket. Streaming platforms like JioCinema doubled down, layering in interactive features, multi-camera options, and real-time polls to let fans control how they watched. It transformed passive viewing into something closer to participation.

On social media, franchises rolled out content pipelines that looked more like digital brands than sports teams. Stylized posts, behind-the-scenes footage, and team memes created a steady rhythm of engagement. The design wasn’t only visual — it was strategic. It turned a two-month season into a year-long conversation.

Every detail was shaped with spectators in mind: logos, mascots, anthem songs, Instagram grids, fan jerseys, LED wristbands, motion graphics. The goal wasn’t just to look good, but to create repeatable rituals that brought fans back. Spectator experience design became a field that pulled from stagecraft, product design, content strategy, and psychology.

And there’s room to grow.

Today, the IPL has a front-row opportunity to build deeper, more layered experiences. Imagine immersive zones in stadiums with AR-based coaching simulations. Fan data profiles that travel across platforms, unlocking personalized content and exclusive perks. Interactive merchandise embedded with NFC for real-time updates. These aren’t distant ideas. The audience is ready, and the infrastructure is catching up.

More than entertainment, this is a lesson in design intelligence. The IPL shows what happens when a league invests in how something feels, not just what it sells. When form meets fervor, design becomes the glue between fandom and memory.

And it all points to a bigger truth: experience is the product. Cricket gave the IPL its structure. Design gave it a soul.

X: From the Stands to the Studio – Designing for the Game, with the Game

The Indian Premier League did more than just commercialize cricket. It transformed the way we watch it, the way it’s played, and the way products around it are imagined, built, and sold. When the stadiums filled, a new opportunity opened up for design—not only in what fans saw, but in the gear they wore, the tools athletes used, and the stories brands told. It was no longer just about the sport. It became about the entire ecosystem of experience, performance, and culture.

This is where Bang Design has played a part.

Our work in the cricketing world isn’t limited to slick visuals or trend-based branding. We go deep—into product design, materials research, user behavior, and brand architecture. We’ve helped build category-defining products that serve both the professional athlete and the grassroots player. Here are two that stand out.

Moonwalkr: Designing the Future of Player Protection

Moonwalkr came to us with a bold ambition: to reimagine cricket safety gear so it could actually keep up with the game. Traditional equipment had stayed stuck in the past. It was rigid, bulky, and lacking in performance cues. For a game that had evolved into high-velocity entertainment, the gear hadn’t kept pace.

Our role was to design and develop an entire line of next-gen protection gear, including helmets, thigh guards, and leg guards. We worked with athletes, tested materials under impact, and studied body mechanics during play. Our goal was to engineer performance without compromise—gear that was lightweight, breathable, and optimized for movement. At the same time, we created a distinct visual language for Moonwalkr, one that would make its products instantly recognizable on the field.

The final products didn’t just meet international standards—they set new ones. And today, Moonwalkr is worn by some of the most recognized names in cricket.

To see how we combined form, function, and identity into a single narrative, explore the full Moonwalkr case study.

Freebowler: Making Professional Practice Portable

Freebowler started with a simple challenge: how do you give aspiring players access to high-quality practice without needing a stadium, an electric ball machine, or a coaching crew? Their early prototype of a manual bowling machine held potential, but needed refinement. It needed to be rugged, portable, and easy to use—even in backyard settings.

We stepped in to take it from working idea to finished product. Our team focused on design for usability, iterative form development, and manufacturing support. The final outcome was compact, intuitive, and ready for scaled production. Today, Freebowler is used across schools, clubs, and coaching academies in India and abroad. It was also featured on Shark Tank India, gaining national attention for its innovation and accessibility.

This was design applied to solve real problems—helping bring elite-level training to anyone with a patch of ground and a will to play.

What We Offer to the Sports and Performance Sector

At Bang Design, we bring together industrial design, digital experience, engineering, and brand development. This integrated approach allows us to build not just products, but ecosystems.

For sports clients, our services typically include:

Product Design and Engineering: Full-cycle support from concept sketches to CAD to tooling and production, customized for athletic use.
Brand Identity and Positioning: Strategy and creative direction that helps emerging brands punch above their weight in competitive markets.
UX and UI for Fan and Athlete Platforms: Designing interfaces for player dashboards, streaming tools, or app-based coaching systems.
Packaging, Retail Displays, and Visual Merchandising: Physical brand touchpoints that extend the impact of the product.
Marketing and Launch Collateral: Investor decks, explainer videos, digital campaigns, and web content that prepare the product for market.

Learn more about how we work on our Services page or dive into more of our case studies to see our impact across industries.

Designing the Culture Around the Game

Cricket is no longer confined to the pitch. It lives in the gear, the fan rituals, the digital moments, and the training innovations that feed into every over. With the IPL fueling new demand and ambition in the sport, design now sits at the core of its growth. What was once a game of skill and tradition has evolved into an ecosystem that touches industries far beyond sport itself.

At Bang Design, we believe design is a force that shapes behavior, defines brands, and unlocks new business models. Whether it’s helping a startup bring a training innovation to life, or building a global-ready sports brand from scratch, we’ve done it—and we’re doing more of it every year. If you’re working at the edges of sport, product, or fandom and need a design partner who understands performance, scale, and storytelling, reach out to us. We’re always ready to build what’s next.

Services

Product Design

Product Engineering

Services & Digital Design

Advanced 3D Surfacing

Creative Visualization

2D Configurator

3D Configurator

Immersive CX

Product Documentation

Brand Assets

Intelligent Sales

Micro Offshore Design

Managed Production

Agency Partner

Programs

Partner

Corporate Innovation

Launchpad

Small Business

21 day marketing

Design Exchange

Industries

Automobile Vehicle and mobility

Aviation

Agriculture and Construction

Consumer

Food and Beverage

Health And Life Sciences

Industrial and Capital Goods

Manufacturing

Technology

Marine

Space Exploration

Telecommunication