Indian Premier League franchise valuations are projected to reach an average of $15 billion by 2032, according to a Fanatic Sports-Hurun India report released this week that marks the first institutional attempt to price the country's cricket-club marketplace. The current average sits at $1.2 billion across ten teams, with Kolkata Knight Riders valued highest at $1.3 billion, ahead of Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings.
The Fanatic Sports-Hurun study valued 55-plus franchises and 1,300-plus athletes across six Indian sports competitions, establishing baseline comps for institutional buyers who have been pricing cricket clubs in multiples of media-rights projections and nothing else. The report arrives as family offices and private-equity funds circle IPL ownership stakes with the same vocabulary they used for European football five years ago: content moats, merchandising upside, secondary-market liquidity. The ten-year valuation trajectory implies a 12.5x multiple expansion from current levels, which prices in assumptions around India's rising per-capita sports spend, the BCCI's next media cycle starting in 2028, and franchise owners diversifying into kabaddi, football, and women's cricket with the same logo.
The immediate effect is not on the IPL clubs themselves—those ten chairs are occupied and unlikely to turn over—but on the 40-plus franchises in lower-tier competitions now carrying pitch decks with Hurun comps. Promoters in the Pro Kabaddi League, Indian Super League, and Women's Premier League are using the report's methodology to justify $80 million to $150 million asks in Series A rounds, pitching investors on franchise templates rather than league fundamentals. The argument works when the buyer believes cricket's capital stack will eventually fund every other sport, which several Dubai-based family offices now do. The report's athlete valuations—1,300 names across six leagues—also create a secondary market for NIL-style endorsement deals, letting brands price cricketers against kabaddi players in the same portfolio conversation.
The risk is that $15 billion becomes the valuation floor rather than the median, leaving franchise operators building toward a number that assumes India's sports economy grows at rates only seen during the IPL's first decade. The 2028 media-rights auction is the actual milestone; if Disney-Star's $6.2 billion five-year deal signed in 2022 does not double, the 2032 projections compress immediately. Sponsors watching this care less about franchise valuations than about CPM trajectories: if IPL viewership stays flat while rights fees climb, the cost per impression rises and activation budgets shrink. The franchise model only works if the audience grows faster than the capital.
What to watch: BCCI's announcement on the 2028 media-rights tender structure, expected by mid-2027. Any marquee franchise stake sales in the next 18 months will test whether institutional buyers pay Hurun multiples or force down valuations with actual diligence. The Women's Premier League's next team-expansion round, likely in late 2025, will show whether buyers treat women's cricket as a hedge or a discount. Private-equity funds already holding minority stakes—CVC in multiple franchises, RedBird in others—will begin marking to the Hurun model in their next LP reports, which pushes the $15 billion number into the allocator conversation whether the math works or not.
KKR's $1.3 billion valuation sits 8% above Mumbai Indians, a reversal driven by Shah Rukh Khan's personal brand and the team's three titles in four years. The gap narrows if MI wins again.