On April 18, with the ka-ching of cash registers drowning out all other sound or sense, Indian cricket will greet its own reincarnation. A first-ever privatised, professional club league to turn domestic cricket into a marketable, profitable, tradeable commodity.

BCCI’s Indian Premier League (IPL) has followed big promises with big statements, mostly financial. As a startled cricket world absorbed a 10-year $1billion (Rs 4,000 crore) media rights deal with World Sports Group (WSG) and Sony, came the team franchise bids totalling Rs 2,894 crore (US$723.59).

The successful franchise owners included blue chip names from business and Bollywood. In a sign that IPL may be onto something, the Murdoch empire came shopping too—Lachlan Murdoch’s company Illyria bought into Jaipur franchise with UK-based Emerging Media.

Cricket has seen nothing like this. The habitually India-phobic ex-England captain Mike Atherton wrote, “The consequences (of IPL), in terms of the finances and structure of the world game, are likely to be far-reaching.”

Former India Test opener Arun Lal, one of a team that had proposed a similar league to BCCI in 1997, says, “This is the future of Indian cricket. You can’t stop it… The market demands and the market decides. It’s all economics.”