The Tendulkar Effect on Indian Cricket

In the United States on any Saturday in the summer months, there will be 14 Major League Baseball (MLB) stadiums that will be filled to almost capacity – around 50,000 paying customers. The teams will draw fans from a wide region. Sometimes people will take the family 300 or more miles for a weekend trip that includes watching several ball games. In most cases, there was a minor league team close by that was playing the same game of baseball and the stadium was empty. Why would these fans drive 300 miles, pay a whole lot more, just to sit in nose-bleed seats next to some 500 pound obnoxious slob? Why not just go see the local team?

A similar story plays out in India, but its much more extreme. In the United States, there might be more than 1000 MLB baseball games per year. In India, there are likely to be only a dozen major cricket matches in a year. For those games, the stadiums will be packed with as many as 100,000 fans. However, there are hundreds of domestic cricket matches played every year and the stadiums will be nearly empty. With so many people in India, the only opportunity that most of them will ever see a cricket match live is to watch a domestic cricket match, but nobody cares about domestic cricket, they only want to watch the 11-member national cricket team. Consequently, the only cricket players that make any serious money are the members of the national team and maybe a few substitutes.

Why is it that people will pay so much to see the superstars play the game and nothing to see the same game played at a very high level by relative unknowns? The answer is the Tendulkar effect. Sachin Tendulkar is the greatest cricket player in Indian cricket history. He is not the greatest because he has scored more runs than anyone or scored more centuries or won more matches or anything like that. He is the greatest primarily because he earns so very much more money than any cricket player ever did. The enormous amount of money he makes creates enormous amount of “buzz”about him, the national cricket team, and cricket in general. People watch sport to see millionaires run around and sweat. The Tendulkar effect in cricket is the same as the Tiger Woods effect in golf, the Michael Jordan effect in basketball, and the Babe Ruth effect in baseball.

The curious thing about sport in general is that people are interested in sports because the enormous money that sportsmen make and these sportsmen make enormous money because so many people want to watch them. It’s very circular. The same thing happens in game shows: would anyone want to watch “Who Wants To Make $1000”? I don’t think so. Of course, this virtuous circle could just as easily be a vicious circle: nobody is interested in the sport because nobody makes any money playing it and vice versa.

The reason why the Indian cricket team is not the best in the world, despite the enormous talent pool that they can draw from, is because the market for Indian cricket players is underdeveloped. There are only about a dozen players who big money playing cricket. And since advertisers would rather pay a crore (10,000,000 rupees = $250,000) to have Tendulkar pitch their product than pay a lakh (100,000 rupees = $2,500) to have the number 20 player in India pitch their product, there will never be more than dozen star players in India. If the BCCI (the Indian cricket board) wants to create the best team in the world, they need to shell out the money to promote the domestic game.

One reason why India does not produce good pace bowlers is simply because the ones they have produced don’t create as much buzz as a quality batsman. There isn’t as much money in bowling as there is in batting, so consequently the market produces more quality batsmen than bowlers. Also, the injury rate is much higher for pace bowlers, which greatly reduces the expected payoff of pursuing pace bowling as a profession. In general, most people with the talent to be great cricket players in India decide at an early age that pursuing cricket is a silly dream. There are one billion Indians and only 11 spots on the national team. The only ones who pursue their cricketing dreams are the independently wealthy (Ganguly) and the idiots. My guess is that quality pace bowling takes more intelligence than it would appear.

The BCCI can promote the domestic game by making the domestic competition more lucrative. They can announce a big cash prize for the winner and runner-ups of the domestic competition. This will create buzz. And if they want quality pace bowlers, they should simply pay for it. They could announce a special prize for the top 20 pace bowlers in the country and award crores for each of them (more for number 1, less for number 20). Seeing lots of people getting rich by being good but not enormously great pace bowlers will encourage more people with to pursue pace bowling and this will increase the effective talent pool. But more than anything, seeing that kind of money will create the buzz necessary to promote the domestic game and to increase the advertisement revenue of these players.

In sports as in anything else, you get what you pay for.