After having a blockbuster outing at the Indian Street Premier League (ISPL) auction and securing multiple reputed brands as sponsors for the inaugural edition, Chennai Singams have gathered much-needed momentum ahead of the competition.
With an INR 1 crore budget, the team owned by Rajdip Gupta, Sandipkumar Gupta, and actor Suriya Sivakumar spent INR 96.4 lakh to onboard 16 players.
Following the auction, the Chennai team also bagged several renowned entities like YES BANK, Hell Energy, ibis hotels, Nuvama Wealth, Route Energy, and TYKA as its sponsors for the first-ever ISPL season.
At the high-octane ISPL auction, SportsMint Media had an exclusive interaction with Mr Rajdip Gupta. In the tete-a-tete, Mr Gupta spoke at length on the competition helping players monetarily, the benefits of having celebrity owners and much more.
1. Following a lucrative auction, to what extent will ISPL help the tennis ball cricketers monetarily?
More than monetary benefits, players would be more excited about the opportunity. All these players might have never gotten a chance to appear on national TV. Players are not looking out for how much money they’ll get out of this tournament but they probably want to make sure that they get an opportunity to come on TV. Many cricketers have always played in gullies but never had an opportunity even to come on YouTube. So definitely, them getting watched by millions over TV will be more exciting and, with the one crore pool money, certain players got INR 27 lakh, which is a big amount for the first season. Money is secondary, but this platform is very critical and most players are excited because of the platform.
2. How will the celebrity presence is going to help in the influx of viewership and in-stadium fans for these matches?
The idea behind adding celebrities is to bring more audience for matches and we believe that because of them, there will be a full stadium for all the matches. Bollywood in India, always adds additional favour to any kind of tournament or league and we have seen the same in IPL’s first season as well. This is a brilliant idea by ISPL to have a corner as a celebrity who can definitely get more audience at the venue.
3. What will be the marketing strategy or how will the unit proceed on the business front as a franchise?
We have a team of people who are taking care of the business aspect of the entire unit. Multiple well-known corporate houses have partnered with this Chennai team and at the same time, many corporates also want to be associated with the ISPL.
4. In addition to the opportunity, what are the other plans surrounding the cricketers in ISPL?
Apart from the platform, there is also an aspect of creating local heroes. These players are the local heroes who are going to be created based on their performance in the first edition. In addition, those who are well known in the market will get the opportunity possibly next year in some advertisements as well. Need to see how big the league goes and based on that, the players can create their value by themselves.