Field of Schemes?

In professional sports, the off-season isn’t supposed to make headlines. When India’s fledgling professional cricket league, the Indian Premier League (IPL), ended its season in late April, however, the championship match won by the Chennai Super Kings felt more like a prelude than a grand finale. Sensational tales of corruption among the country’s wealthiest and most powerful — the very franchise owners who had made the IPL “the world’s hottest sports league” — had shifted the focus from the field to a looming boardroom war over the league’s survival.

The intrigue is wrapped up in the fate of the league’s founder and chief architect, Lalit Modi. Throughout India, Modi, a member of a powerful Indian family, is both a revered and a reviled figure. The brash businessman’s ambition hoisted the IPL into existence, but his impatient bravado has run afoul of India’s most entrenched hierarchical reflexes, making him many powerful enemies.

(Watch TIME’s video “India’s Passion for Cricket.”)

In April, Modi was suspended as head of the IPL by the Board of Control for Cricket in India following accusations of financial irregularities. He went into immediate exile to build his defense, leaving behind a whirlwind of mystery. Accusations ranged from the serious, like the rigged sale of franchises, to the surreal and implicated every corner of the country’s elite. Allegations of political meddling have already forced the resignation of the Deputy Foreign Minister. Stories of league owners’ using political clout to bump passengers off commercial flights in order to ferry the wealthy and well connected to IPL matches touched a nerve and sent India’s politicians running for cover.

Until the scandal, the IPL had struck gold with its alluring mix of India’s two greatest passions — cricket on the pitch and Bollywood intrigue in the owner’s box. Modi assembled the league in just over six months, selling eight franchises for almost $725 million and inking a billion-dollar TV deal along the way. That’s a startling achievement in India, given that country’s famously inert bureaucracy.

In its inaugural season, the IPL proved to be not only wildly popular but also big business, generating some $300 million in revenue. To make the game attractive to the casual fan — particularly women and families — and more TV-friendly, the IPL adopted a new, abbreviated form of the sport, in which matches lasted just three hours and were moved from the afternoon to a nightly prime-time slot to entice advertisers looking to court India’s growing middle class. Modi beamed the games live to movie theaters around the country, charging a fraction of the cost of a match ticket. The IPL also extended its distribution to the Net, signing a landmark deal with Google earlier this year to broadcast IPL games on YouTube, the first sporting event to be streamed live by Google. The IPL channel soon became the most viewed sports channel on YouTube, with almost 55 million hits.

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The problems erupted when the IPL awarded the state of Kerala one of two expansion franchises for just over $333 million, a relatively astonishing sum given the league’s age. India’s Deputy Foreign Minister — who had served as an adviser to the winning investment team — quit after it was revealed that his frequent companion had received a “sweat equity” share of the new club valued at more than $15 million.

Modi’s freewheeling, at times autocratic style also led some to wonder just how the deals got done. The BCCI has charged Modi with abusing his power when selling the league’s online rights to a company in which his son-in-law is an investor and unilaterally renegotiating the IPL’s broadcasting contract. Despite wide-ranging valuations of the IPL — some of which reach $4 billion — it remains unclear just how profitable the teams are.

See the top 10 sports moments of 2009.

See the top 10 sports moments of 2008.

The uproar awakened the public to the fact that, beyond some famous Bollywood investors, little was known about the ownership structure of the teams, particularly the minority stakeholders. That ownership groups of two teams, the Rajasthan Royals and the Kings of Punjab, include Modi’s family members and the fact that powerful political families and India’s leading businesses also have stakes in IPL clubs add fuel to the gossip columns.

Modi says history is being rewritten, and he will say so in his rebuttal. He has steadfastly refused to resign, claiming the BCCI knew everything. “The rebuttal is based upon ‘You signed it, you’ve been part of this from Day One,'” says Modi, referring to the BCCI’s knowledge of IPL’s deals.

India is bonkers over cricket, but until Modi, no one had been able to capitalize on it in a league format. Modi began recruiting his well-connected friends and relatives to invest in his vision. His first call was to a childhood friend, Shahrukh Khan, who happens to be India’s biggest movie star. “I said to Shahrukh, ‘You’ve got to believe in me,'” Modi says.

(See TIME’s photo-essay “Cricket 2.0.”)

With the inclusion of Bollywood A listers like Khan, who owns the Kolkata Knight Riders franchise, the matches became important events for India’s Bollywood glamour set, who snapped up ownership stakes and endorsement contracts, looking to stay in front of the cameras and in the headlines.

In the IPL’s first season, the mix of Bollywood and cricket yielded immediate results and knocked Indian soap operas from the top of the ratings charts. “The whole concept of the games was more entertainment because it was going to have more glamour of Bollywood,” says Man Jit Singh, the CEO of Multi Screen Media, who paid more than $1 billion for the broadcasting rights. “So we could clearly see a revenue model for ourselves that made a lot of sense.”

So did the league’s operating plan. The IPL borrowed from the NFL to maintain competitive and economic parity. It capped players’ salaries and auctioned the rights to their services — to curb wealthy owners from wooing players with lucrative endorsement deals on the side. Broadcast and sponsorship money is evenly distributed among the franchises after IPL’s 20% cut. “If you get the sporting model right, then the commercial model will follow,” says Andrew Wildblood, executive vice president of IMG/IMG Media, the U.S. management firm that handles the league’s operations. “And if you get the commercial model right, you can create revenue and have an opportunity to sell investments.”

The IPL’s closed books aren’t out of the ordinary, says Stefan Szymanski, a sports specialist at the Cass Business School in London. “If you asked the NBA, ‘Are all of your contracts clear and aboveboard?’ they would say, ‘Of course,'” he says. “If you asked, ‘Can we take a look at the books?’ they would say, ‘Of course you can’t.'”

With the third season in the books, Modi finds himself defending the sporting behemoth he almost single-handedly created. Whatever his methods, in just three years, Modi has revolutionized the business of cricket in India. But whether in politics or sports, revolutionaries seldom get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

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