More than eight months after approving the addition of two new franchises into the Indian Premier League (IPL) fold, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on Tuesday released an Invitation to Tender (ITT) for prospective owners to enter the auction.
While announcing its decision on behalf of the IPL Governing Council, BCCI secretary Jay Shah said in a statement: “The detailed terms and conditions governing the submission and evaluation of bids including eligibility requirements, process for submissions of bids, proposed new teams’ rights, and obligations, etc. are contained in the ITT.”
The ITT can be purchased till October 5, on payment of ₹10 lakh, excluding taxes. It will be followed by an online closed-bidding process.
The Hindu understands that the base price for each of the two new teams is set at ₹1,500 crore and any entity — either a corporate or a consortium — is required to have valuation worth ₹3,000 crore to be eligible for bidding.
In 2010, when the BCCI had expanded IPL into a 10-team affair ahead of the 2011 edition, the owners of Kochi and Pune franchises had agreed to shell out ₹1,530 crore and ₹1700 crore, approximately.
Unlike in 2010, when more than a dozen venues were made available for the interested bidders, the BCCI is likely to restrict the venues list to Ahmedabad, Kochi, Guwahati, Lucknow, Pune and Dehradun.
An interested bidder is likely to be presented with an option to submit a maximum of two bids — either for the same or different cities, unlike in the past when there was no cap on submitting bids.
On December 24 last year, the BCCI AGM had passed the proposal to add two new teams and had asked the IPL Governing Council to work out the nitty-gritty.
With Tuesday’s development, it appears that IPL 2022 will be played in a format similar to 2011, with a total of 74 games.
Each team is set to face five teams on home-and-away basis while competing against the remaining four teams once during the league stage.
