Sometimes we tend to take the things that are around us for granted. For instance, I had never realized quite how much of a phenomenon the Indian Premier League (IPL) is till I interviewed Lalit Modi, whose brainchild the league is.

   Lalit Modi has been dreaming of creating a cricket league for decades. In the 1990s, he was about to start a privately-owned league of his own (rather as Subhash Chandra was later to do with ICL) and had already given names to teams and identified players when the cricket establishment came down on him.

   He says now that he still believes that the establishment was acting out of a dislike for him personally rather than any great love of cricket. But while nothing came of that idea, Lalit remained committed to the idea of a league.

   He got his opportunity when Sharad Pawar, as head of the BCCI, told him that he could start an official league. It would not be privately owned and he would make no money out of it. But at least it would be a league that he could run.

   Lalit had spent years studying sporting leagues all over the world. He looked closely at the UK model for soccer. He discovered that something like 70 per cent of a team’s expenses went not on buying players but on maintaining stadiums. In the UK, Manchester United and other teams own their stadiums. As they play at home a maximum of 30 days a year, the stadium is unused for the other 335. It is this unproductive asset that burns the biggest hole in balance sheets.

   Studying this pattern, Lalit came to the conclusion that a league would only work if the BCCI allowed team owners to play in its stadiums for free. That way, the teams would not be landed with unproductive assets.

   Then, Lalit worked out that in nearly every country where there are leagues, a few teams always dominate because they buy all the best players. For instance in Europe, Real Madrid or Chelsea will always draw full houses and play well because they have top players. Other teams, with lesser players, will get nowhere.

   He decided that the best way to ensure a relatively level playing field was to control the way in which players were auctioned among teams and to deny team owners the ability to buy players in the open market.

   This has had two advantages. One, expenditure on players is capped. Mukesh Ambani cannot spend much more than say, Ram Reddy, who does not have Mukesh’s resources. Two, it also allows an element of unpredictability. In the UK’s soccer league, you know that one of three or four teams will come out on top. But in the IPL, such teams as Bangalore and Hyderabad which had performed really badly in the first year, were able to grab the top slots in the second year.

   According to Lalit, these two innovations created a league that was financially sustainable. In the US and the UK, owners find it difficult to sustain football, baseball and soccer teams. In India, every single owner has seen the value of his investment shoot up. Nobody has lost money.

   Then, there was the question of whether cricket could sustain a league. Lalit says that he noticed that his son had got into such televised sports as Premier League soccer and Formula One racing because they seemed hot and glamorous while cricket seemed boring.

   The challenge before the IPL was to turn the image of cricket around so that young Indians who thrilled to the adventures of Ronaldo and Manchester United would rediscover their own players and their own teams.

   Nobody will dispute that the IPL has succeeded in doing this beyond Lalit’s wildest expectations. Everyone focuses on how well the teams have done. But the real surprise is the profile of the viewers: many of them are young and had no interest in cricket before.

   Lalit reckons that the enforced shift to South Africa for the second year’s IPL was a blessing in disguise. The idea had always been to give the IPL an international following in the way that the English Premiership is a global craze.

   The achievement of the South African tournament is that it globalised the IPL much sooner than had been expected. Up to 70 per cent of the audiences in the stadiums were non-Indian. Many had never been to a cricket match before.

   Lalit believes that if the IPL sustains its momentum, it will be the first sporting phenomenon to emerge from the Third World. Already, the IPL has been valued at $1.65 billion, making it the fourth most valuable sporting property in the world.

   Within three years, he says, it will be in the top three. In five years, it will be number one, ahead of America’s NFL.

   He might well be right. And it’s great to know that India, a nation that shames itself in the global sporting arena with a depressing regularity, finally has something to crow about.