As a kid, I wanted nothing more than to be a professional cricket player. From the age of 7, I was enthralled by all things cricket:

I watched all the international cricket I could and had posters of all my favorite players on my bedroom walls. I spent most of my free time from school either playing the sport outdoors — or playing makeshift versions indoors. As I became a teenager, I first represented my high school — and then, my country’s youth team at the Asian Championships. I even launched my career in tech by building a fantasy cricket Facebook application that I eventually sold as an 18 year old. So it’s only fitting to see this passion come a full circle. I’m excited to share that I recently bought a tiny stake of a professional cricket team to become a (small) owner. Here’s why I did this deal:

Full Disclosure: I’m writing this as myself, not as some investment adviser or broker-dealer representative. This is just educational stuff and my personal thoughts – not investment, legal, tax, or professional advice. While my startup Carry owns an investment advisor and broker dealer, this is not meant to be an advertisement and nothing here represents them. Financial decisions involve risk, including losing money. Taxes are complex. Please do your own research or talk to a licensed pro before acting on anything you read here.

The Team and the League

I bought a small stake in the most valuable cricket team in the world, the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League. For the uninitiated, cricket is the primary sport in the world’s most populous country, India. It’s also the top sport in the rest of the Indian subcontinent — and a top 3 sport in England, Australia, South Africa and a most of the former British commonwealth. Largely driven by South Asian immigration, it is now also one of the fastest growing sports in the United States, Canada and other western countries. Until relatively recently, the top level of the sport largely existed at the international level, with countries playing against each other. This paradigm completely changed in 2008 when the richest governing body in the world, the Board of Control for Cricket in India launched the Indian Premier League or the IPL. In the last 17 years, the IPL has grown to be one of the most powerful leagues in all of worldwide sport:

  • Record media rights revenue Despite the league only being “active” for 6 weeks a year, with no more than one game per day, the media rights for 5 years were sold for a record $6B+. On a per-game basis, this makes it the richest league in the world after the NFL.
  • Top 4 leagues in the world in total annual revenue The IPL pulled in ~$9.5B in 2024, ranking it number 4 in global sports leagues in total revenue. This is a staggering statistic when you consider how short the IPL season is and the fact that India is still a developing economy globally. For those interested, the top 3 are the NFL, the MLB and the NBA with the IPL coming in 4th. This is ahead of every football league, and the NHL. While the NFL is a juggernaut, I expect the IPL to break the top 3 soon.
  • Unparalleled in cultural cachet in one of world’s fastest growing economies While the IPL trails the NFL, NBA and MLB in total revenue — the cultural impact of the league is equivalent to all those leagues put together. India is truly a one-sport country, and this is the most significant annual sporting event of the year in the nation.

The IPL started with 8 franchises, and currently has 10 teams, with another 2 planned for the coming years. The team I bought a stake in, the Chennai Super Kings is tied for the most successful team in the history of the league with 5 titles, and is potentially also the most valuable franchise in terms of economic value. There is no “official” valuation so the most valuable franchise tag is debatable along with the Mumbai Indians, but they are certainly up there.

The Deal Structure

For anyone that has followed me on social media, I have made no secret of my love for the sport and my desire to get involved financially. When this opportunity presented itself towards last year, I was immediately intrigued. I jumped into analyzing the transaction to understand if this was also a good business opportunity. Eventually, I concluded this was a no-brainer. This was the final deal structure we invested in:

  • Ownership in the Super Kings holding company In addition to the ownership stake in the Chennai Super Kings, our deal was into the holding company of all the Super Kings franchises. This included valuable stakes into two other teams in different leagues:
    • The Johannesburg Super Kings in the South African league
    • Texas Super Kings in the Major League Cricket in the US

    This was attractive, particularly since I’m a big believer in the commercial opportunity of cricket in the US. South Asians are the richest demographic in America, and relatively untapped in terms of sporting affiliations.

  • Secondary transaction from one of the early shareholders This deal was brought to me by my friend Abhinav, who knew one of the original shareholders that needed liquidity. I’m not allowed to publicly disclose the valuation, but it was at an attractive price relative to both the financial performance, as well as some of the publicly stated valuations for top franchises.
  • I ran an SPV on top of my personal investment for a larger stake While I made a sizable personal investment, I also run an SPV or “special purpose vehicle” where we raised money from other investors in my network that wanted a piece of the action. This allowed me to have a larger ownership stake than I would have just with my own dollars. An SPV is an instrument created specifically for this deal (hence the “special purpose”) that allows me to pool together capital from a lot of different investors, while controlling the ownership and management stake myself.

ln time, I’d love to own a more material stake by continually buying smaller pieces to chip away at something more significant. If you want to be informed the next time we run a cricket SPV, you can fill out this form. The deal mechanics were relatively straightforward. Once I decided I wanted to invest, my partner handled most of the logistics of facilitating a transaction in India and we were off to the races.

My Motivations

If you have read my other posts, particularly How to (Not) Invest Life Changing Money, you know I’m not a big believer in finding “alpha” by making exotic investments. So, why go through the trouble of investing in a cricket team in India? There are a few different reasons, ranking in decreasing order of importance:

  1. Fun The older I get, the more drawn I am to the things I found awesome as a kid. Cricket was my first love and investing in a cricket team feels like homage to the 8-year old version of me. I’m already a cricket tragic, and this was a great way of having some actual skin in the game. Sadly, I don’t think I can make it to India during the league this year, but at some point, it would be fun to sit in the owners box.
  2. I’d love to fully own a team, someday. While this small transaction was a great way of whetting my appetite, it’s not equivalent to majority ownership in a sports franchise. That is still something I’d love to pursue in the next decade of life, and this is a great way of starting to learn the inside baseball (inside cricket?) of the business.
  3. It’s a pretty darn good investment While the returns from this investment were not the biggest reason I did the deal, my back of napkin math still shows a pretty good expected IRR (rate of return) from the transaction. I genuinely find it hard to imagine these franchises fall in value anytime soon. I’m not expecting a 100x from this investment, but I suspect it will return a solid low double digit IRR over the coming years.

The biggest downside of this investment? We had to use yet another custom investing platform, so now I have yet another K-1 making my taxes even more complicated, smh.

If y’all didn’t know already, the IPL kicks off today so I thought this would be a fun topical post. If you do not already have your loyalties set, you better be rooting for my team now! Next week, we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming of content on entrepreneurship and personal finance strategies.