New Delhi: Empty ticket counters, vacant stadiums and rock-bottom television ratings say it all. Cricket fans in India— where the game is supposed to be a religion—have been left cold by the inaugural Champions League, hyped as a billion-dollar sporting spectacle.
“Cape Cobras, who?” was 26-year-old Madhav Krishna’s response to a query about the South African club, one of the 12 teams participating in the two-week tournament that ends on Friday. Krishna, an avid cricket fan otherwise, has given the tournament a complete miss.
Empty stadiums: A 10 October Champions League Twenty20 cricket match between the Otago club players and the Cape Cobras team at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad failed to draw crowds. PTI
“I don’t feel I’m missing anything. Besides, there have been other social obligations such as weddings and Diwali in the last one month,” added Krishna, a clinical counsellor.
An overwhelming majority of India’s cricket fans seem to have done the same and ignored the World Twenty20 (T20) club championship, staying away from the stadiums and switching off the telecast of the tournament in the shortest format of the game, to the disappointment of advertisers.
Television rating points (TRPs) for the first 13 days of the Champions League matches beginning 8 October were an average of 0.67% on ESPN’s Star Sports and Star Cricket channels, according to Audience Measurement and Analytics Ltd, a television audience measurement agency. The data has been collated in cable and satellite homes for viewers in the 15-plus age group.
Compare this with the first 13 days of the inaugural Indian Premier League (IPL) and IPL 2, which attracted five times the TRPs—at 3.6% and 3.3%,respectively.
ESPN paid $975 million (Rs4,553 crore now) for 10-year rights to telecast the event, only to find the inaugural edition had left Indian cricket fans unenthused.
Although two senior executives in the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which runs the sport in the country, said average stadium occupancy had not yet been calculated, an executive from the Delhi Daredevils team, one of the three participating domestic clubs from India, conceded that audience response hadn’t met expectations.
“The average stadium occupancy has been around 50% during India matches and about 10% on other days,” said the executive, who didn’t want to be identified.
Hyderabad’s Deccan Chargers and the Royal Challengers Bangalore are the other Indian teams in the tournament.
“Ticket sales have been very low for the Champions League, with nearly 60-70% of the tickets for most matches remaining unsold,” said an official ticketing agent for the tournament, who also didn’t want to be named.
The response of cricket fans from New Delhi has been the coldest.