One of the first casualties of the post-Lalit Modi era could be the International Management Group’s (IMG) role in the Indian Premier League (IPL).
Reports say the top brass of the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI) in India think that the IMG’s role in the IPL could be revisited once the dust over l’affaire Modi settles.
Some board officials reportedly believe there is no need for the professional agency, which was originally roped in by the BCCI to “utilise its resources, expertise and brand to conceptualise, create and commercially exploit and implement” the IPL in India. “It will be a working committee decision,” said one board official, without elaborating.
There was an attempt last August to scrap the contract with the agency, but the deal eventually got saved because of Sharad Pawar’s intervention. He was solidly backed by seven of the eight existing franchises. Modi, of course, has been championing the IMG for a long time.
But board officials think the IMG’s role was substantially reduced once the conceptualisation of the tournament is over. At this stage, the BCCI is paying Rs26 crore a year to the London-based company. The price was renegotiated in August 2009. Before that, the IMG was signed on in 2007 and for the first year it was paid Rs49.92 crore. But in subsequent years, it was agreed that the agency will be paid Rs26 crore.
The thinking in a section of the BCCI is that the agency has very little role when the tournament is played in India. The contention is that most of the work is done by the local association.
IMG had played a key role during IPL II, which was shifted to the South Africa at short notice. In fact, in one of the communications exchanged between the BCCI and the IMG, Andrew Wildblood, a senior vice-president at the agency, had mentioned the “efforts and commitment made by the IMG to successfully relocate the tournament to South Africa in 2009”.
None of the board officials was willing to comment on the deal. Wildblood did not respond to messages and calls from this paper.
