The hunt for the Indian Premier League (IPL 2020) title sponsor is proving to be more difficult than what it was expected by the Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI). As VIVO-BCCI relationship was put on hold for the current season, board was expecting that brands as always will start lining up at their doors. But owing to very difficult market conditions, according to the information with the InsideSport, BCCI is not even getting one serious interested party who is ready to make an offer for the IPL 2020 title sponsorship.
It was being speculated that BCCI has approached India’s biggest telecom player Reliance Jio to bail BCCI out of the tough situation. But InsideSport has reliably learnt from its sources that company is not interested in the IPL Title partnership and is not in talks with BCCI for the same.
It has also been learnt that during the franchises call with IPL Governing Council officials on Wednesday evening, one of the franchise official had asked Mumbai Indians representative present on the call about JIO’S interest in the TITLE Sponsorship of IPL. And it was cleared there itself by the said representative that ‘they are not exploring any such association’.
It has also been learnt that BCCI has sent SOS to various other corporate houses but none of them have shown any serious interest for now.
BCCI is also reaching out to its existing partners PayTM (BCCI’s Home Series Sponsor), Byju’s (Indian Team Jersey Partners) and also some of the IPL associate partners (Tata Motors, Dream11 and others) to check if they would be interested in the IPL 2020 title partnership. But they have received less than encouraging response from most of the parties.
BCCI is facing another hitch of sorts. The board faced severe backlash owing to the Anti-China sentiment due to which they have already lost VIVO as the title sponsor of the league. The apprehension doing the rounds behind BCCI’s corridors is, will board face flak one more time courtesy anti-China wave if they get any company on board for IPL 2020 with the Chinese investments. Byju’s, PayTM and Dream11 are all Indian grown businesses but on the back of Chinese investments.
“All of these companies are BCCI’s partners. They are Indian entities but we are little concerned about very strong Anti-China undercurrent. We don’t want to speculate on how people will react if any of them come on board”, said one of the BCCI official.
Outside of these names, Amazon is the only one who has wherewithal to ride the occasion. Amazon spends very big on advertising during the festive sales – will they ride the bait ? Difficult to predict the future but what InsideSport can confirm is that the brand has shown some interest but is yet to make any definitive plans for such a huge investment. Unacademy, Coke are some of the rank outsiders whose names are also doing the rounds.
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