IPL pays its players more than any other league. You'll never believe how much
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An IPL player is on average paid £274,624 (approximately Rs 24.7 lakh) per game. The US's NFL or National Football League, which came second, pays its players £138,354 (approximately Rs 12.46 lakh)over 16 games.
Leaving other mega sporting leagues behind, India's cash-rich domestic T20 cricket league, the Indian Premier League (IPL), has topped the charts when it comes to average money paid to players per game.
As per the latest edition of the Global Sports Salaries Survey, an IPL player is paid an average of £274,624 per game.
The National Football League (NFL), which is a professional American football league consisting of 32 teams, came in second at £138,354 paid to players over 16 games.
The English Premier League came in at third place, with its clubs paying players an average of £78,703 per match during a 38-game season.
How the IPL became so big?
Involvement of Bollywood industry and superstars have made the league glamourous and popular worldwide.
Rich businessmen and industrialists have always looked after the proper flow and channelisation of money.
However, two notable things happened with IPL wages in 2018: they got bigger, and the outlay by different teams got closer together.
The rise saw the pro-rated average annual salary rise from $3.9m in 2017 to more than $5m this year, a leap of 29.8 per cent.
Remember, Royal Challengers Bangalore paid £2m to retain India captain Virat Kohli and Ben Stokes who was purchased by Rajasthan Royals for a whopping $12.5 crore during the auctions in the last edition of IPL.
That is no doubt related to the fact that the team owners are now making more money and are passing some of it on.
A new five-year TV rights deal, concluded last year for $2.55bn (£1.96bn) for 2018-2022, has come on stream.
That guarantees the medium-term future of an event that has often struggled for certainty.
The tiny difference in average player spending this year between the best-paid team from Kolkata and the worst-paid from Chennai (with a top-to-bottom ratio of 1.12 to 1) makes IPL the 'fairest' league in this year's survey in this regard.
The ratio between the highest paid team and lowest paid is 1.12 to 1. None of the other major leagues have a ‘fairer’ spread, with a lower gap.
Uniquely, IPL salaries are pro-rated from weekly pay to annual pay because, again uniquely, IPL players typically have multiple different professional employers concurrently.
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