What cricket's IPL can teach to UEFA and FIFA

A new edition of one of the biggest sport events in the world just began this week. Although if you do not live in India, you probably did not notice it at all. It is the Indian Premier League (IPL), India’s short-format cricket tournament, being played across the country in the months of April and May. The IPL is a young competition -started in 2008- but in a short time it has become a sporting event of gigantic proportions, with a total TV audience estimated at around 500 million people and a top-5 per-game live attendance amongst all the sports in the world. IPL’s brand value is estimated at $11 billion. The TV rights revenue per game is second in the world, only behind the NFL. A massive deal.

And how many teams would you expect such a big sporting event to have? Well, actually, the IPL only has ten franchises (and two of those just joined last year). This creates a fascinating contrast with other major sports, which tend to run competitions with an ever-increasing number of teams. Case in point, European football’s governing body, UEFA, recently announced that its flagship competition, the UEFA Champions League, will be expanded from 32 to 36 teams. This follows shortly after the world football’s body, FIFA, had extended the World Cup event from 36 to 48 (!) teams, starting in 2026.

This contrast provides a lot of fodder for strategic considerations. For example, from a product attractiveness/customer experience perspective, is IPL managing its product more wisely than the football brain trusts? Are the football bodies diluting the quality of the viewing experience by adding more (and weaker!) teams to their events? Or is IPL leaving viewership growth (and money!) on the table by unnecessarily keeping the number of teams small?

UEFA and FIFA justify their expansions by arguing that having more teams increases the attractiveness of the competition, by creating unique matchups (a top English team against a modest Norwegian one!) and possibilities of upsets. For the followers of that modest team, that sounds very attractive, but one has to consider much bigger factors that act in the opposite way.

First, more teams in the competition means adding increasingly weaker teams. In other words, worse games in terms of quality of play and competitive parity, only justified by a very outside chance of an upset. So global audiences shrug and switch the channel. For instance, while the final rounds of the Champions League have gigantic viewership numbers, audiences during the group stage (where all 32, soon 36, teams are playing) have been decreasing in recent times.

There is another factor that can greatly lower the quality of the product and that is the more intense schedule that a larger number of teams requires. FIFA and UEFA have been receiving constant complaints from clubs that their players cannot sustain the current number of games in any reasonable way (and responded by basically throwing more money at those clubs while increasing the number of games). More games mean more injuries. In fact, some estimates put the increase in player injuries at around 20% in recent years, with a particular high increase among younger (and thus healthier) players.

This, on one hand, increases player absences in games. For example, much was made when the Brazilian star Neymar joined PSG in 2016 to team up with Kylian Mbappe, France’s top player. Well, it has been six years since then and the two of them have played a grand total of 136 games together. That is an average of around 20 games per season, or about one-third of the total games that PSG typically plays in a year. And this is not an outlier at all.

Moreover, long and intense seasons wreak havoc in players’ fitness levels, creating significant volatility in their performances. Players and teams “taking it easy” in one competition so they can be at peak level in another is a common occurrence these days. And injuries and fitness levels not only lower the quality of play in a very direct way but also indirectly. In order to minimize the impact of those factors in their competitiveness, top teams need to keep larger rosters of good players, leading to stronger pressure on their finances and more concentration of top players in just a few teams. None of this is good.

And thus we end up with two huge factors that can easily alter the quality of any game played in the Champions League or the World Cup.

Meanwhile, the IPL plays out in two months (also the months of summer in India which helps viewership) and the experience could not be more different. Having only ten teams means that every team has a high number of top Indian and international players. And a short season helps fitness levels and makes every game matter more. So every IPL game is competitive and blowouts are less frequent. For instance, every team that has finished the season at the top of the table in recent years lost at least 30% of its games. Comparatively, the top teams in the Champions League group stage rarely lose a game. Competition and lack thereof.

Football governing bodies remind me of companies that pursue growth by expanding into more and more geographical markets, without really considering their relative strength in those markets and the increasing constraints on their resources. It is a very unimaginative and ultimately dangerous growth strategy. Football has been playing with the proverbial “house money” for a very long time, stretching an uber-cultural product to its limits. Indian cricket and IPL so far is showing much more restraint.

A parting thought. IPL is the second most valuable league in the world, just behind the National Football League in the U.S. What do those two have in common, you might ask? Well, although the NFL has more teams, most of the season is played in groups for a total of 17 games over 5 months (playoffs add a maximum of 4 extra games to that total). And nothing else for the rest of the year. Is it a coincidence that two leagues that take care of the quality of their products by limiting the number of games end up with the most valuable brand, together with the large revenues?

All this obviously implies that UEFA and FIFA should try to imitate IPL and the NFL a little bit more to improve their customers’ viewing experience. From their recent actions -increasing the number of teams even further and harshly opposing the creation of a Super-League with only the top teams- it seems clear that they are moving in the opposite direction.