Here’s how much cricket fans spend on IPL

The Indian Premier League (IPL) has been named the most expensive T20 league in the world. There are numerous reports and data on advertisers’ spends on the tournament each year. Title sponsor (except for the 2020 edition) Vivo alone shells out Rs 440 crore annually on the T20 league. However, there is hardly any data available on the true, overall cost of supporting a T20 team around the world.

Also read: IPL 2020 to go ahead minus Vivo as title sponsor

A new study by online cricket betting specialists Cricket Bet India, titled ‘The Price of T20’, has broken down all the individual prices of tickets across six of the most popular T20 leagues around the world to show which teams offer the best value for money, and who is the most expensive. The new research reveals how much money fans have to pay to follow their team each season.

The study reveals that on average, Indian cricket fans have to pay 0.9 per cent of their annual salary just to watch every home game of their team in the IPL every season.

After studying the price of tickets across six major T20/franchise leagues (the IPL, the Big Bash League, the Vitality Blast, the Pakistan Super League, the Bangladesh Premier League and the Hundred) across the world, the IPL proves to be the most costly for fans.

Cricket Bet India have worked out the most expensive ticket, the cheapest ticket, the average annual salary in each area for each team in each league, the cost of watching per season and percentage of annual salary it would cost per season, to rank each league in terms of its true expense.

However, while the IPL is the most expensive league for local costs, tickets for the Vitality Blast in the UK cost far more than anywhere else at an average price of £123.45 to watch every game of your team’s campaign when purchasing the cheapest ticket each time.

By comparison, the IPL costs £73.34 to attend each game on average, the Big Bash is £74.16, the Hundred will be £20 when it starts in 2021, the BPL is just £11.28, while the PSL is the cheapest tournament for fans at £6.94 on average for a whole season.

For individual tickets, the most expensive teams to follow across the six leagues are Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) – who charge from £28.99-£405.91 per game and a total of £202.93 for the season – and Somerset, who charge £30-£40 per game at a total of £210 over the course of a campaign.

However, given annual salaries in the respective areas, this works out at a far greater cost for fans in Bangalore, who have to spend 2.2 per cent of their annual salary to watch their team, compared to the much lower rate of 0.9 per cent in Somerset.

The cheapest tickets in the world of domestic T20 come in Pakistan, where fans can pay just £1.19 (or 250 PKR in domestic currency) across Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Multan for each game of the PSL.

The cheapest IPL ticket is in Kolkata, at £4.22 or 400Rs per game to watch the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Key stats:

• IPL costs fans 0.9% of their annual salary to attend matches
• Vitality Blast next most expensive T20 league at just 0.2%
• RCB by far the most expensive IPL team at £202 per season
• PSL the cheapest major T20 league at £6.94