Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
In January 2008, someone, or several someones, made one of the shrewdest, murkiest investments in the history of sport. For $67 million, they acquired the rights to a cricket franchise in Rajasthan, a desert state with no great cricketing tradition, no glamorous city centre, and no obvious commercial appeal. It was the cheapest of the eight original IPL franchises. Nobody else wanted it at that price.
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Eighteen years later, that same franchise sold for USD 1.63 billion. That is a return of over 2,300%. But the story of how that money was made and, more importantly, who it was made for and how the ownership was structured is one of the most convoluted, scandal-ridden, legally contested tales in cricket history.
This is the full story of the Rajasthan Royals.
The Murky Beginning
In January 2008, the BCCI auctioned off eight brand-new IPL franchises to the highest bidder. Mumbai went for $111 million. Chennai fetched $91 million. Kolkata, Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Punjab commanded premiums. The bidding rooms crackled with Bollywood money, industrial dynasties, and the vibe that Indian cricket was becoming something else entirely.
And then there was Rajasthan.
The winning bid came in at $67 million, the floor of the market. The entity that won was Emerging Media, a subsidiary of the UK-based technology group Blenheim Chalcot, fronted by a British-Indian entrepreneur named Manoj Badale.
The Labyrinth in the Desert
From the very beginning, nothing about Rajasthan Royals’ ownership was straightforward. The franchise agreement wasn’t signed by Emerging Media.
The official franchise agreement with the BCCI was signed on April 14, nearly three months after the auction, by Jaipur IPL Cricket Pvt Ltd. This entity was incorporated after the auction was won.
At that precise moment, JICPL’s share register listed just two names: Ranjit Barthakur and Fraser Castellino, each holding 5,000 shares. Shortly after signing, the shares flipped: Castellino transferred his shares by October 2008, Barthakur by January 2009. The real power settled into EM Sporting Holdings Ltd, a Mauritius-based vehicle designed for opacity.
Here’s where the plot thickened into a labyrinth. EM Sporting had many partners. Tresco International Ltd, controlled by Suresh Chellaram, Lalit Modi’s own brother-in-law, commanded a whopping 44.2% stake, making it the single largest shareholder. Badale’s Emerging Media IPL Ltd held 32.4%. Blue Water Estate, linked to Lachlan Murdoch (son of media mogul Rupert), took 11.7%. Rounding it out was Kuki Investments, associated with Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty and her husband Raj Kundra, also at 11.7%. On paper, Badale was the public face, a credible tech investor with a cricket academy in his past. In reality, Modi’s family loomed largest, fueling whispers of conflict: the IPL commissioner allegedly backdooring his kin into a franchise he oversaw.
Modi had personally designed the tournament, run the auction, and recruited the franchise owners. He had also, investigators would later allege, ensured that his family held a majority stake in one of the eight teams he oversaw. The Rajasthan Royals were not just cheap. They were, from the first day, controversial.
The Probe
When the Foreign Investment Promotion Board tried to scrutinise the ownership in 2009, it asked one question that nobody could answer cleanly: how did Badale pay $5 million in earnest money on behalf of a company that didn’t yet exist? When the BCCI investigated further in 2010 and discovered shareholders whose names allegedly appeared nowhere in the franchise’s disclosed ownership, they expelled the team entirely. The Rajasthan High Court secured reinstatement, but the damage was done. Rajasthan Royals were now the franchise with something to hide.
But on the field something close to magic had happened.
Warne’s Team
Shane Warne was 38 when he took the Rajasthan captaincy in 2008. He had retired from international cricket. He was a legend playing in a new format with a team of budget buys and unknowns. Shane Watson, Sohail Tanvir, Yusuf Pathan. The Royals had no stars, no budget, no glamour.
They won the tournament. They became, almost instantly, cricket’s great romantic story: the cheapest team, the forgotten franchise, lifting the trophy.
Warne’s connection to the franchise would outlast the captaincy. When the team was rebuilt in 2018 after its darkest years, he returned as a stakeholder, receiving equity in recognition of everything he had meant to the club.
The Scandals
The Chellaram-Modi shadow never fully lifted, but it was joined by newer catastrophes. In 2013, three Rajasthan Royals players–Sreesanth, Ankeet Chavan, and Ajit Chandila –were arrested by Delhi Police for spot-fixing.
That same year, the Income Tax department launched a formal benaami investigation into the franchise’s founding ownership structure, sending detailed questionnaires to the BCCI about the Modi-Chellaram nexus and the post-auction shell company labyrinth.
Then, in 2015, the Supreme Court-appointed Mudgal Committee found co-owner Raj Kundra, husband of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, who had bought into the franchise as it doubled in value in its first year, guilty of illegal betting.
The BCCI suspended the Royals. For 2016 and 2017, there were no Rajasthan Royals in the IPL.
The franchise had been expelled, investigated, fixed, bet upon, and banned. And yet the underlying asset kept appreciating. That is perhaps the moral of the IPL’s commercial story: scandal is temporary, valuation is permanent.
The Rebuilding
The Royals returned in 2018 with a materially cleaner structure. The opacity had been unwound; Shetty and Kundra were gone; Badale’s Emerging Media was now more clearly in control. The squad was reimagined around young Indian talent. Sanju Samson, eventually, as captain; Yashasvi Jaiswal emerged through the ranks.
The Warne magic never returned. The base shifted partly to Assam. The captaincy passed on to Riyan Parag, a surprise survivor of the tumultuous ride.
The Sale
By 2025, with the IPL’s media rights and global profile at historic highs, Badale and the existing investors decided it was time to exit. An investment bank that had managed the sale of Chelsea FC and advised on Manchester United ran the process.
A consortium led by Kal Somani, an Arizona-based technology entrepreneur who had quietly held a minority stake in the franchise for years finally won the bid at a reported valuation of $1.63 billion. The transition in ownership is expected to take place after the conclusion of the IPL 2026 season.
The consortium backing the acquisition includes two globally recognised sports owners: Rob Walton of the Walmart family and Sheila Ford Hamp of the Ford Motor dynasty.
The Reckoning
The numbers are mindboggling. A $67 million investment in 2008, made through a shell company, via a Mauritius holding entity, with an IPL commissioner’s brother-in-law as majority beneficial owner yielding $1.63 billion eighteen years later. That is what the IPL became.
The money flows in multiple directions. Badale, who consolidated to 65% ownership before the sale, walks away with the largest individual windfall. RedBird Capital and Lachlan Murdoch both compounded their returns substantially. The Chellaram family, who held 44.2% through the franchise’s most controversial years will have collected a substantial sum for their initial investment, though the precise figures remain, fittingly, opaque.
And Lalit Modi? The Income Tax benaami investigation never produced a criminal conviction. The questions it raised–why the shell company, why the post-auction incorporation, why the brother-in-law majority– were never conclusively answered.
What Rajasthan Royals ultimately represents is not just a franchise story but an IPL story: the story of an institution that launched amid questions, survived scandal on a scale that would have destroyed a lesser brand, and emerged worth 24x its founding price.
The desert state nobody wanted turned out to contain a fortune.
– Ends
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
