At 9.30 on Saturday night in Mumbai, while a fevered city eases into the weekend and the spring spiritual celebration of Holi, Lalit Modi keeps grinding away. The chairman of the Indian Premier League works incessantly as he expands an empire that has transformed the way in which cricket is played and watched around the world.
Work comes to Modi in many guises. He still faces various late-night meetings to assess the few remaining security issues before the latest IPL tournament starts a week on Friday. Beyond this interview, and his ongoing analysis of international sporting trends, Modi's work is also shaped by constant tweeting as he uses Twitter to communicate the IPL's unstoppable blend of Twenty20 cricket, Bollywood and big business.
Ambition and entertainment fuse further in his mind as he digests the soap opera of a clash that took place three hours earlier between his beloved Chelsea and a bristling Manchester City on the other side of the world. The Premier League is a striking barometer for the massive scale of Modi's IPL – and more relevant to his global plans for Twenty20 cricket than an insignificant one-day international being played this same Saturday evening between India and South Africa in Ahmedabad.
"Unfortunately I never get a chance to watch cricket – ever," the bustling but charming 46-year-old says. "Even with the IPL I've never watched a full match. It's unfortunate but I'm working and I only get to watch a few small sections of matches. We're up a lot of nights, until two or three every morning. The IPL keeps me busy."
Modi laughs huskily – then unveils his ultimate goal. "We hope to become the dominant sporting league in the world," he says calmly, brushing aside the swaggering football powerhouses across Europe and the giant franchises of American sport. "That's our aim. We are only a two-year-old league but we had close to 3.8 billion eyeballs last year. I use that phrase every time a person sits down and watches an IPL game live or on TV – that's an 'eyeball'. Every game last year we had 100m eyeballs. But because our objective is to become the most watched sporting event in the world we are now targeting 150m every day.
"This new deal with Google and YouTube will take us to a new level. I strongly believe my job as an administrator is to make sure our product is available to the widest possible audience in the world. Until now, if you're sitting in America or Finland and you want to watch cricket, you have a problem. Because cricket is not a major sport in these countries it will not be broadcast. But the IPL will now be live on YouTube. If someone watches the IPL we can monitor it and the numbers will mean advertisers and subscribers are going to follow.
"Of course we want it to be traditionally broadcast as well. The IPL has sold broadcasting rights for $2.4bn [£1.6bn]. Our Champions League, for clubs, will receive a billion dollars for 10 years of broadcasting rights. But there are so many devices now you can just connect your broadband to the TV and watch that way. Or you can watch it on your mobile. The consumer can decide. He can communicate with his friends on a social network site at the same time as he watches the IPL."
Modi stresses his belief that Twenty20 cricket will eventually surpass the Test game. "Twenty20 will become the dominant format – without doubt. It lasts only three hours and people don't have time any more to sit all day watching cricket. We're competing with football and other sports and I think three hours is a good time limit to help us expand the market. We are definitely bringing new consumers to cricket."
All this talk of "product" and "consumers" will distress followers of the ancient and still compelling art of Test cricket. But Modi is relentless in his logic. "I am a great supporter of Test cricket. People say I'm not but I also run the marketing department of the BCCI [the Indian board of control] and Test cricket is extremely important to us. All I am trying to do is remind people that we live in a modern age and Test cricket has a big problem: it is played in the daytime when most people are working.
"We should be embracing every opportunity for getting viewers into watching Tests and the most effective way is making it a day-night game. If you take it to day-night, then people can watch it on TV when they get home from work – or they can go to the stadium. There has been a big drop in Test cricket viewing [outside England and the Ashes] and it's because people don't have the leisure time in the day to watch it."
If Test cricket does not adapt to a floodlit future could it eventually disappear? "Yes," Modi says, "because the broadcaster won't be interested. Whether we like it or not, broadcasting determines whether a game survives. Without broadcasters you don't have money to pay players or keep the sport alive."
Intriguingly, for a man wedded to the modern media phenomenon, Modi does not believe Test cricket needs to change its actual format where matches can unfold with deliciously slow subtlety. "The five-day game should still be the pinnacle and the ultimate test of skills. You don't need to fiddle with the format at this stage. All you need do is change the timing. If we went day-night then we would see a real resurgence in the ratings. Look at Twenty20. It has gone to night cricket and the viewership has exploded."
In the face of Modi's rampant commercialism fears have grown in England. There have been concerns he could threaten the stability of England's Test team or use his Champions League to ride roughshod over the County Championship. Yet, diplomatically, he seems willing to compromise. Commenting on his strained relationship with English administrators, Modi is conciliatory: "I don't really blame them. They have a schedule to worry about. I understand that. All I keep saying is that we are ready to adjust and bring our games forward a few weeks. If they do the same and move their season back a few weeks, we'll find a happy medium."
Modi talks animatedly about how Twenty20 cricket, unlike its Test equivalent, can reach new markets in America and China. He also believes the IPL can eventually take on the Premier League. "Don't forget that our model is unique. All our teams are equal. And the sports fan wants unpredictability. Look, my son is a Manchester United fan and I'm a Chelsea fan – and I was very upset to see my team lose [last Saturday]. But, normally, we know exactly what is going to happen. My son and I know that nine times out 10 either Man U or Chelsea is going to win it. The Premier League is basically so predictable. I wanted to base my league on an unpredictable model – so we don't have a Man U or a Chelsea in the IPL.
"Everybody has the same purse and it is a healthy purse. Individual players are earning a lot. Some are earning $200,000 a day as they only play about 14 IPL matches. But the IPL is built around the teams. You all buy on the same auction day and you all have a chance to pick the best players. One team may pick up the best batsman but someone else will get the best fast bowler or the best all-rounder. It automatically gets evened out.
"If you look at our ratings, all 59 games in the IPL last year were within a 5% margin of each other in ratings. That has never happened in any other league in the world. From a broadcaster's or advertiser's point of view this is a dream because when they buy a match, or advertising, they know they are going to get value for money. The other key point is that 52 out of those 59 matches went down to the wire. No one knew who was going to win until the final stages."
The IPL's unpredictability will continue this Sunday when Modi holds another auction for new franchises to emerge. "Our model works but a lot of English football clubs are going under. Look at Portsmouth going bankrupt. With the next auction we might have even more surprising figures and people coming into the IPL."
Yet uncertainty also prevails in a worrying security risk which, last year, forced the IPL to move temporarily to South Africa. "This year we are definitely going ahead in India. Our top priority is to ensure security – but we cannot let terrorist organisations dictate to us.That's why we work closely with national security companies and governments. I think all the players will be here for the IPL because we have made the correct precautions. Reg Dickason [English cricket's security expert] had some suggestions which were very good. He also wanted to know how some of our strategies were being implemented but I don't see any problems."
Nothing can be guaranteed in a volatile world. And there is fleeting weariness in Modi's voice when he reflects on other serious concerns closer to home. His wife, Minal, has been stricken with cancer. "She has been in the US for treatment and she just got back home. She is recovering and the outlook is good but it has been very tough to deal with and to balance my time with her and my family and the IPL."
Modi takes refuge in more amusing stories – and laughs uproariously when confirming that he shocked his family when he went to university in the US. His millionaire father had given him $5,000 to buy a second-hand car. Modi, instead, used the money for the first instalment on a spanking new Mercedes. That same gambling instinct emerged when, over a cup of tea at Wimbledon in 2007, Modi broached his ideas to Andrew Wildblood, a sports agent with IMG.
"I had been working towards the IPL for 14 years when I asked Andrew to help me prepare a blueprint. When we announced our plans in September 2007 India had not even played a Twenty20 match. But then they went to the Twenty20 World Cup and won it. Everything changed. I knew cricket had undervalued itself for so long but I still thought it would take us five years to get where we were in year one. So it was quite dramatic – even for me. And, now, all our hard work is paying off. The future looks very promising."
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