Raman Raheja on creating a niche for Legends League Cricket in T20 format

Founded by Raman Raheja and Vivek Khushalani, Legends League Cricket is owned by Absolute Legends Sports. Legends League Cricket has emerged as a captivating T20 cricket extravaganza, featuring revered retired international players and earning its place as India’s second most-watched T20 league.

At Legends League Cricket, there are two distinctive cricketing formats being played: Regional and Franchise.

Legends League Cricket introduced its global format, LLC Masters, in 2022 in an effort to push the limits of cricketing excellence. Its inaugural season was hosted by Muscat, Oman, and the most recent season was hosted by Doha, Qatar. The three teams that compete in this format to showcase the best of talent are: Indian Maharajas, Asia Lions, and World Giants.

It has also presented the franchise-based edition of Legends League Cricket, which is held in India. Four privately owned teams compete in this tournament: India Capitals, Gujarat Giants, Bhilwara Kings, and Manipal Tiger. Two new teams joined in the second season: Urbanrisers Hyderabad and Southern Super Stars.

The upcoming franchise-based edition of Legends League Cricket is scheduled to be held in India between November 18 and December 9, 2023, featuring six teams.

Raman Raheja is a luminary in the realm of sports, live entertainment, and event management. He has been instrumental in steering high-profile projects such as IIFA, IPL, Commonwealth Games, and the World Kabaddi League. In this exclusive interview with Adgully, Raman Raheja, CEO, Legends League Cricket, speaks at length about the journey of Legends League Cricket, creating a platform for cricketing legends who have retired from the game, promotion and engagement strategies, forming strategic content creation collaborations with social media influencers, and more.

The Legends League has managed to achieve such high viewership, becoming the second most-watched T20 league in India after the IPL. What, according to you, are the key factors that have contributed to the remarkable success of Legends League Cricket over the past three seasons?

Essentially, my biggest asset is the cricketer who plays with us, the legends who play with us. So, they are the heroes. They’ve been icons for so many years in their country with the clubs that they played. So, when you have the icons coming back on the cricket field, the fans want to go back and watch them. So, that has been the biggest strength. Cricketers who have retired from the game may have at least 4-5 years of competitive cricket in them. And if we peg them against a similar stature of physical fitness on the other side, then they can offer competitive cricket for at least 3-4 years – rekindling and reinitiating the rivalries that they were known for. And that’s what fans want to watch.

Those have been the primary reasons for the viewership and the fans thronging the stadium. It’s not just the nostalgia factor that is a hook, but it is also to retain that particular audience if the competitiveness or the quality of cricket is good. We have not compromised on the game, the seriousness, and the competitiveness, which remains the key driver for the fans to keep coming back.

With the upcoming T20 season starting from November 18, what are the key highlights and the expectations for this season?

We’re trying to mirror the way active cricket is played. Cricket is played in two forms these days. One, the cricketers play for their country or the cricketers play for the clubs. Legends League Cricket has two formats, which are exactly the replica of active cricket. We have LLC Masters, where the cricketers play for their country. This tournament is held outside India. We have finished two seasons, with the last one being held in March 2023 in Doha.

The second format is LLC T20 Legends League Cricket, which is essentially a franchise model. Last year, when we came to India with four teams, we travelled to six cities. We started from Kolkata to Delhi, then to Lucknow. Then we moved into smaller towns of Bhubaneswar, Jodhpur, and Jaipur. We saw that there was a lot of attraction for these matches in the smaller towns. While the tournament saw pan-India viewership, but the audience in Jodhpur, Jaipur, and Cuttack was amazing. It was a big learning for us. In Season 2 of the franchise model, we will be travelling to the smaller towns, starting from Ranchi, we will go to Dehradun, Jammu, Vishakapattnam and finally to Surat. Of these five cities, three have not seen any international cricket, at least for 30 years. For instance, international cricket is returning to Jammu after 30 years; Dehradun has not seen any India-related international cricket; while Surat has not seen international cricket at all.

The objective is to take the sport and reach out to the smaller towns with all of these big cricketing legends. Never before have any of these cities seen 120-plus legends together in one single town. The Indian Premier League takes place across multiple cities, with each city seeing only the two competing teams, whereas in our case, all six teams reach that particular city, which is where that city is going to see for the first time 120 legends of cricket together in a town. So, that’s the USP which will attract a lot of audience and eyeballs in that particular city. Next season, we will go into newer towns.

What are the new features, players, line-ups, or innovations that fans can look forward to in this season?

We have endeavoured to create this Legends League Cricket as a natural second innings for all the cricketers who are looking at taking up retirement and give them a platform where they can play in the same environment, competitively. All the big names of cricket in the last 7-8 years are going to be seen in this forthcoming season.

In terms of the format, we want to offer what is liked by the fans. And T20 is a format that has been consumed well. So, we are not tinkering with that format. But we have other interesting elements. For the first time in the history of cricket, we have taken up women umpires and all women officials to host the matches and we’ll continue with that endeavour. We continue our association with the Star Sports Network and FanCode to showcase the Legends of the sport in five languages – English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. We are trying to increase consumption in the regional markets as well.

What is your promotion strategy to engage a wide and diverse audience? 

We are not bound by any contractual obligations of an ICC or a BCCI. These players are retired, so they are free to do a lot more things and are more flexible. Content is the key, so, we are focused on content marketing by creating unique content. In the last season, we brought in a lot of influencers from different walks of life. We co-created content with these cricketers and social media influencers, which was loved by the fans. We will continue to do that as it helps in wider promotion and extending our reach. Thus, we have unique content that can be consumed across various segments, and not just the male cricket fan, but also the family, the female audiences, wherein the lighter side of cricketers can be projected.

Could you highlight any significant partnership or collaboration that has played an effective role in the success of Legends League Cricket?

We have entered into multiple collaborations – right from Star Sports Network to FanCode to 14 other platforms around the world. We have collaborations in the regional markets to promote the sport. For example, in the ongoing ICC World Cup, which is being broadcast on Star Sports, there is a collaboration with Star Sports for in-match integration. Some of the cricketers taking part in Legends League Cricket are on commentary assignments for the ICC World Cup. These are integrations that are being done to promote the League. Such kind of content creation has been successfully executed in the past, and we will continue to do that, especially with the broadcasters and some social media influencers, who are also big names from different walks of life.

Are there any specific technologies or approaches that the League is adopting to stay at the forefront of innovation in cricket?

We always wanted to give comfort to the cricketer who has been representing their country or their clubs at the highest level for many years. For them to be comfortable in Legends League Cricket, we have to replicate the same environment. So, we pick up all the best technology that is currently being used by ICC or BCCI or any other board in the world. We have used state-of-the-art technology to create a product that is as good as any other cricket product in the world. We are innovating with newer things. For instance, we all hear about the speed of the ball when the ball delivery is happening, but nobody talks about the speed of the bat. So, we are launching the speed of the bat, when the bat hits the shot in this upcoming season, which probably could be adopted later at the international level as well. We are going to be working with Anil Kumble, who has a company that is launching this technology.

What initiative has Legends League Cricket taken to engage with fans and communities, both locally and globally?

When you have a franchise model, the franchise has to have a certain region earmarked to build their fan base, and that is what we are working on. So, each of our six franchise teams has a region and they are doing activations and partnerships at the regional level to be able to create fan engagement from the region. So, it’s a starting point. When IPL had started, nobody could relate to the state-owned teams at first, but now it is a phenomenon which is very popular. That is something that we are doing at our end, with those franchises picking up integrations and partnerships at the regional level for fan engagement.

Secondly, using social media influencers from different walks of life to co-create content with the cricketers is also a very unique way of engaging the fans. We are doing such kind of partnerships to create a community or expand the community of the fans who already are watching cricket.

In the competitive landscape of T20 cricket, what challenges has Legends League Cricket faced, and how you overcoming them?

I never see myself as a competition to active cricket, but being essentially a way to complement active cricket. The challenges that we generally face have to do more with finding a particular window where we should place this particular season in order to avoid a clash with active cricket since so much cricket is happening today. So, we have found ourselves a certain window, where it is relatively clean. And even if some other international matches are happening at that time, we do not coincide our matches with those days. The time needs to be changed so that we can complement cricket instead of competing with that.