
RCB’s game plan: How a title-starved team is reshaping the sports business
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On a Monday evening in late February, the Women’s Premier League featured its first-ever ‘super over’—an additional over following a regulation tie to determine the winner. UP Warriorz won that match, defeating the defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru in their home turf by 4 runs.
The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium was nearly packed, with 30,000 people watching the RCB versus UPW match, according to media reports. The WPL, started in 2023, isn’t as popular as the men’s version, the quick-format T20 Indian Premier League that has dominated Indian cricket since 2008.
Women’s cricket in India has been gaining momentum the past few years but doesn’t enjoy the frenzied loyalty men’s cricket does. And yet RCB was able to draw a massive crowd to the stadium for a league women’s cricket match on a workday evening, braving Bengaluru’s notorious traffic. In sports business parlance, RCB was able to park enough “bums on seats" to fetch a handsome ticketing revenue.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru has consistently topped the charts in terms of ticketing income in recent years, industry insiders told Mint, despite the franchise winning only one championship—the 2024 WPL title—in more than 15 years. In the 2023 season, the latest for which data was available, RCB’s ticketing revenue jumped sixfold to ₹47.39 crore, significantly ahead of its IPL franchise peers Mumbai Indians ( ₹42 crore), Chennai Super Kings ( ₹36.8 crore), and Kolkata Knight Riders ( ₹36.8 crore), according to the industry insiders who shared the data but requested not to be identified. Its overall revenue jumped to ₹650 crore from ₹247 crore the previous year.
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