The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium was nearly packed, with 30,000 people watching the RCB versus UPW match, according to media reports. The WPL, started in 2023, isn’t as popular as the men’s version, the quick-format T20 Indian Premier League that has dominated Indian cricket since 2008. Women’s cricket in India has been gaining momentum the past few years but doesn’t enjoy the frenzied loyalty men’s cricket does.
And yet RCB was able to draw a massive crowd to the stadium for a league women’s cricket match on a workday evening, braving Bengaluru’s notorious traffic. In sports business parlance, RCB was able to park enough “bums on seats” to fetch a handsome ticketing revenue.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru has consistently topped the charts in terms of ticketing income in recent years, industry insiders told Mint, despite the franchise winning only one championship—the 2024 WPL title—in more than 15 years.
In the 2023 season, the latest for which data was available, RCB’s ticketing revenue jumped sixfold to ₹47.39 crore, significantly ahead of its IPL franchise peers Mumbai Indians ( ₹42 crore), Chennai Super Kings ( ₹36.8 crore), and Kolkata Knight Riders ( ₹36.8 crore), according to the industry insiders who shared the data but requested not to be identified. Its overall revenue jumped to ₹650 crore from ₹247 crore the previous year.
RCB’s recent upturn is remarkable considering its flagship IPL team hasn’t won a single title despite the likes of Virat Kohli, Yuvraj Singh and Chris Gayle donning its red, black and gold. Also because RCB, named after liquor brand Royal Challenge, had evolved from a non-core segment within fugitive-businessman Vijay Mallay’s United Spirits Ltd, now majority-owned by London-headquartered Diageo Plc., which sells Johnnie Walker, Guinness and Smirnoff.
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“The saleable capacity of Chinnaswamy (stadium) is the lowest. But the ticket (revenue) per seat is the highest,” Rajesh Menon, vice president and head of RCB, told Mint in a Zoom conversation. “When we discuss internally, we don’t discuss how much of what is ticketing revenue. Instead, we look at the gross margin per seat. This means, we are giving a rental to the stadium… (so) how do we monetise it?”
To this end, RCB is in talks with the Karnataka State Cricket Association, or KSCA, to double the seating capacity of the 50-year-old Chinnaswamy Stadium over the next three years.
“We have hit that top tier of ticket pricing points… We don’t want to alienate core fans by increasing ticket prices so we want to expand the stadium along with KSCA,” Menon said. “The question is, how can we take this 25,000 saleable (seats) to maybe 4,050,000 in the next couple of years? We want to make tickets cheaper so that more fans can come in and participate and enjoy the game.”
KSCA, which administers all cricket in Karnataka, confirmed these discussions. “We have also been keen to expand the stadium and we engaged in conversations with (RCB),” said KSCA vice president B.K. Sampath Kumar. “RCB thought they would have a fixed number of seats after expansion, but unfortunately, it got stalled over technical reasons.”
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Beyond men’s cricket
RCB’s investment in women’s cricket dovetails with a growing global interest in women’s sports. In November 2023, Deloitte forecast that women’s sport globally would hit $1.28 billion in 2024, surpassing the$1 billion milestone for the first time.
“What WPL has done for women’s cricket is show that women’s cricket can sell, which I feel no other league could go to that extent,” Smriti Mandhana, Indian cricketer and captain of RCB’s women’s team, told Mint. “The WPL has brought a lot of girls who wouldn’t know much about sport or cricket into it. Young girls to college-going girls who don’t play cricket, come to us and say, we love your cover drive, which is a dream for us, that women who don’t play the sport know its technicalities.”
What WPL has done for women’s cricket is show that women’s cricket can sell.
RCB has elevated the fan-following for women’s cricket, said Arjun Dev Nagendra, co-founder of a Bengaluru-based cricket academy. “During an India versus South Africa international match in Chennai, of all places, the crowd shouted RCB chants. The eyeballs they’ve managed to get have helped Smriti Mandhana (who was already a big player) become a bigger player. And Shreyanka (Patil) is today the second-most followed women’s cricketer.”
RCB has also taken the mantle in uplifting grassroots sports with its “Innovation Lab”. The franchise has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras to leverage technology and research to solve everyday, systemic sporting problems beyond cricket.
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“We are creating our own talent scouting software, which can be replicated in other sports. We are also looking at research papers,” said RCB’s Menon. “Our entire CSR (corporate social responsibility) fund is going into sports development.”
Which probably explains why RCB has not expanded globally while many of its IPL rivals have established a presence in international markets, acquiring franchises in T20 leagues across the Caribbean, South Africa, the UAE, the US, and, most recently, England.
A couple of days after Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd spent £60 million to acquire a franchise in England’s The Hundred competition, RCB and Sports and Society Accelerator, a nonprofit, launched a report titled “Sports-Forward Nation”. The report maps India’s sports ecosystem and features case studies such as the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy and RCB’s sports development programme for tribal communities in North Karnataka.
Also read | The WPL, a tournament based in India, is transforming women’s cricket
RCB: A destination lifestyle
Royal Challengers Bengaluru has borrowed some of the flamboyance of Vijay Mallya to establish itself as a consummate lifestyle brand, with its offline and online business strategies opening up significantly more opportunities than a traditional city-level sports team could have.
For instance, the company has one of its two eponymous RCB Bar and Cafe at Bengaluru’s flashy Kempegowda International Airport’s T2 terminal. “We see this (the RCB Bar and Cafe) as a temple or a melting pot for RCB fans,” said Menon, “and as we discuss, we are looking at expanding it to maybe 20-30 over the next four years across India and globally.”
RCB also aims to differentiate itself online by building what it envisions as a consumer-facing commerce platform for all things sports: a one-stop destination where people can book tickets, purchase merchandise, and eventually, even subscribe to membership for workouts or reserve sports venues. “We are not just a booking platform, but we also feel that if you wish to buy your bat there, or supplements, or anything sports-related, you should be able to do that,” Menon said.
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These strategies stem from RCB’s obsession with first-party data, which it continues to pursue with its ticketing system and other tweaks, including dynamic pricing.
“We need to understand the consumers better, and we have done everything possible to do that and experiment with that,” Menon said. One such instance is simplifying the matchday experience with food orders. “When you buy your ticket, you can book your food. Go into the stadium, show the coupon, and get your food. Ideally, it would have been where the food comes to your seat, but Indian consumers don’t believe in sitting in their seat,” Menon explained.
Given Diageo’s consumer background, RCB’s “lifestyle” moves might come across as inherently commercial. “They need direct consumer data, especially in the 18-40 male demographic, which they could use to shift culture,” said Shiv Burman, founder of the eponymous sports consulting firm Burman Sports. “This ‘play-to-participate’ model is all about serving consumers better at the end of the day.”
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