Jay Shah's Savvy Strategy To Modernise 94-Year-Old Cricket Body BCCI

Jay Shah On BCCI: The association, Jay Shah said, wants to bolster women's games too -- a format that typically gets overlooked in the otherwise cricket-crazy nation of almost 1.4 billion people.

Indian Premier League, called the Super Bowl of cricket, is gearing up to roll out a women-only version of the game as organizers chalk out ways to make the third most-watched sporting event bigger, more profitable and diverse.

Board of Control for Cricket in India -- the sport's governing body conducts the wildly-popular men's edition of IPL whose broadcast rights will be fought over by media titans including The Walt Disney Co. and Amazon.com Inc. -- wants to auction broadcast rights of the women's games and its six league teams by early next year, BCCI head Jay Shah told Bloomberg in an interview in Mumbai.

"At the moment, there is strong interest in media rights," Mr Shah said, adding that he was hopeful the owners of men's IPL franchisees would bid for women's league teams too. The association, he said, wants to bolster women's games too -- a format that typically gets overlooked in the otherwise cricket-crazy nation of almost 1.4 billion people.

Mr Shah's game plan to bolster diversity is underpinned by pure business savvy as he looks for more niche ways to monetize the 15-year-old sports franchise. IPL, estimated to be worth $7 billion, attracted 600 million viewers last year and trails only Premier League and National Football League in terms of eyeballs, according to estimates by BCCI.