Now Tata Group Bags Title Rights Of WPL After IPL in 2023

The Tata group has been named the league’s title sponsor with just a few weeks till its debut. The change comes less than a year after the business took over Vivo’s role as the Indian Premier League’s main sponsor. “We’re certain that we can advance women’s cricket with their help”, Jay Shah, BCCI secretary, tweeted.

The Indian multinational corporation has signed a deal securing the rights for five years, according to a PTI report citing BCCI sources. Beginning on March 4, matches in the WPL will be held at the DY Patil Stadium and Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai. Five teams will compete for the championship in the Women’s Premier League’s inaugural season: Delhi Capitals, Gujarat Giants, Mumbai Indians, Royal Challengers Bangalore, and UP Warriorz.

The sale of media rights had brought the BCCI $951 million, and the five franchises were sold for a total of Rs. 4,700 crores. Smriti Mandhana of India joined Royal Challengers Bangalore for a staggering 3.40 crore, while Ashleigh Gardner of Australia and Natalie Sciver of England were sold to Gujarat Giants and Mumbai Indians for 3.20 crore each. Harmanpreet Kaur, the captain of Team India, was traded to the Mumbai Indians for 1.80 crores.

TATA Group’s Dominance

With a brand value of US$24 billion and an exceptional 12% growth in brand value, TATA Group maintains its position as the Most Valuable Brand in India and holds the top spot in the Brand Finance India 100. The TATA brand has been fueled more impressively than in past years by the bolstering of the key companies with their technology foundation and the leadership initiatives in brand growth globally. The driving reason behind the TATA brand has been significant expansion coupled with inclusive and sustainable activities.

The pioneering spirit of the Tata brand has been a key component. A steel factory, a power company, a five-star hotel, and an IT services firm were all originally established in India by the Tata family.

The Tata firms were the first to sell steel in India’s retail market, provide branded salt, and curate branded jewellery. The brand’s reputation for innovation is well-known. The Indian youth, who are much more enthusiastic about those concerns than perhaps past generations, have responded favourably to this quality of ethics and social consciousness that the Tata brand embodies. Youth volunteering for social missions, working with local communities, helping with disaster recovery, or speaking out against the establishment during the Nirbhaya rape case are all examples of this.

WPL’s Upcoming Plans

The Women’s T20 Challenge would be replaced with a women’s version of the Indian Premier League, the country’s premier men’s Twenty20 competition, starting in February 2022, according to BCCI President Sourav Ganguly. Plans were further along by August, and the BCCI declared in October that they were thinking of holding a five-team tournament in March 2023. The BCCI changed the league’s informal name to the Women’s Premier League on January 25, 2023, from the Women’s Indian Premier League. The BCCI issued a request for proposals on January 28, 2023, for the league’s title sponsorship rights through 2027.

Organization

The WPL’s league system is based on the IPL’s league system because the BCCI also oversees the organisation of the men’s Indian Premier League (IPL) competition. There will initially be five teams. The teams will compete against one another in a double round-robin style, with the three teams having the highest points at the end of the competition and moving on to the playoff rounds.

The league’s inaugural season will take place between March 4 and March 26, 2023, and will consist of 22 games contested at Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium and DY Patil Stadium. A side may have a maximum of five foreign players in each match, one of whom must be from an ICC Associate Nation.

The league is the second-highest valued women’s sports league in the globe, just behind the Women’s National Basketball Association in the United States, according to Jack Genovese of the media research company Ampere Analytics. Sania Mirza, a tennis player, was named as the team’s mentor by Royal Challengers Bangalore on February 15, 2023.

Player Enticement

On February 13, 2023, in Mumbai, the first auction to buy players for each franchise was placed. The names of about 1,500 players were registered. Six players from outside the country may be purchased by each franchise, which had a budget of 12 crores (US$1.5 million) to spend on between 15 and 18 players.

For the first auction, an uncapped player’s basic price ranged from 10 lakhs (US$13,000) to 20 lakh (US$25,000). It ranged from 30 lakh (US$38,000) to 50 lakh (US$63,000) for players with caps.

TATA also took over as the IPL’s title sponsor from VIVO

The Indian Premier League (IPL), the greatest sporting event in India, has a new title sponsor in Tata Group, which took over from Chinese phone manufacturer Vivo. Tata Group served as the IPL’s title sponsor in 2022 and will again in 2023. For the right to sponsor the BCCI, the firm gave them Rs. 670 crores.

The agreement can be considered a face-saver for the IPL. The BCCI faced a great deal of criticism for choosing a Chinese corporation as the event’s title sponsor following fighting between the Indian and Chinese soldiers in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley in 2020. As a result, Vivo cancelled its sponsorship agreement for the 2020 campaign, allowing room for the Indian company Dream11. Even though Vivo served as the season’s title sponsor once again in 2021, there have been rumours that the Chinese firm wants to cancel the agreement and transfer its sponsorship rights.

The sponsorship agreement materialised as Tata moved closer to launching its “mega app,” TataNeu. All of Tata’s consumer-facing companies, including e-commerce (TataCLiQ), consumer electronics (Croma), fashion retail (Westside), and online pharmacies BigBasket and 1Mg, were unified into one app.

Also, users of the app can reserve rooms in hotels owned by Tata, including Taj and Vivanta, as well as flights on Air India. Digital and bill payment options will also be available. The T20 cricket tournament is, without a doubt, the most alluring sporting property for advertising and sponsors, with 400 billion total viewing minutes for IPL 2020 and 10 billion for the opening match of IPL 2021. Also, it has been quite effective in raising sponsors’ brand memory.

Dream11, the IPL 2020 title sponsor, reached 100 million users during the competition and saw a 44.4% increase in traffic during the championship game compared to the previous year.

In 2020, MPL (the sponsor of the IPL teams KKR and RCB) had 40 million subscribers; by the conclusion, it had 70 million. After the 2020 IPL, even businesses unrelated to sports, such as menstrual hygiene startup Niine (the primary sponsor of the Rajasthan Royals), saw their monthly sales rise from Rs 14 crore to Rs 20 crore. Due to the sponsorship of the IPL 2021 by exchanges like CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, the usage of cryptocurrencies increased dramatically in India.

Personal factors like convenience and value for money, as well as general views of respect and trust, experienced the biggest increases across all brands, according to Sanchita Roy, Head of Strategy at Havas Media Group India. An affiliation with a high-impact broadcast property like the IPL will provide Tata with the much-needed push for the launch of its super app as it prepares to compete with e-commerce titans Amazon and Reliance.

Edited by Prakriti Arora