Quotes of the Day

As He watched the English cricket team arrive in India last week for a two-month tour, Harish Thawani reflected on how the gentleman's game of clipped lawns and breaks for tea and cucumber sandwiches was changing. A few days before, Thawani stunned the sports world by paying $612 million—11 times the previous price and the biggest deal in cricket history—for the TV rights to Indian cricket for four years. "India is the new cricket superpower," says Thawani in the Bombay office of Nimbus Communications, a Singapore-based sports-production firm of which he is chairman. "India now provides between 60% and 80% of world cricket revenues. The old powers like England or Australia don't like it, and maybe that's natural, but that doesn't change what's happening. This is our game now."

Millions of fans in Australia and England would presumably beg to differ. Last summer those two traditional rivals played each other in a terrific series that captured the attention of cricket lovers around the world. But off the field, there is little doubt that the two cradles of the game are increasingly overshadowed by India. In comparison with the Nimbus deal, TV rights to three years of English cricket went for $384 million last summer, to Rupert Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting. Nimbus' record-breaking offer is indicative of unimaginable sums of money that Indian cricket, with its vast and ever more affluent fan base, is able to attract. "The passion that India has for the game is greater than any other country has for any sport," says International Cricket Council (ICC) chief executive Malcolm Speed. "Factor in the billion-plus population and an economy growing by 7 to 8%—and what that means for the value of TV rights, advertising and sponsorship—and you understand the commercial power of India."

Traditionalists may still moan that cricket and cash mix about as well as crumpets and curry. But the game began its commercial revolution three decades ago when Australian media magnate Kerry Packer, who died last December, broke away from the sports establishment and signed 50 top players to his World Series Cricket. Packer's venture was short-lived, but his innovations—white balls, colored team strips, floodlights and high player salaries—stuck. Today, a second commercial upheaval is evident in the number of companies vying for a slice of cricket's growth on the subcontinent. Nimbus was one of 15 rival bidders, according to Sharad Pawar, president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (bcci). Having won the deal, Nimbus, which has no TV channel of its own, is now in talks to resell rights to broadcast India's matches in individual countries. Interested media giants and cable-TV companies include ESPN, Sony Entertainment and the BBC. Money isn't flowing into the sport through broadcasting rights alone. In the last two months, the BCCI signed sponsorship agreements and other deals that raised the organization's revenue over the next four years to $745 million. During the previous four-year period, the take was just $80 million.

Why is a sport that American comedian Robin Williams memorably described as "baseball on valium" suddenly such big business? Because Indians don't find it dull at all. Cricket is the closest thing to a universal religion in a diverse nation that is home to a sixth of the world's population. Until the Indian TV market opened to private broadcasters in the early 1990s, however, its potential was untapped. A state-owned broadcaster, Doordashan, held a monopoly on TV rights, and "they used to give them away," groans Thawani. Today, interest in the sport is blossoming worldwide, making televised matches—along with advertising slots and sponsorship deals—more valuable. Membership of the ICC, the sport's international governing body, has expanded from 47 countries in 1997 to 96 last year. The ICC also moved its headquarters from London to Dubai and aims to grow top-level Test cricket from 10 sides today to a 20-strong second tier of cricket-playing countries that include China, the Netherlands and Canada.

Partly because of that "aggressive" international push, says Speed, the ICC chief, cricket is increasingly being viewed by broadcasters as a truly global sport, like soccer. Even in the U.S., cricket is catching on. There, pay-per-view cable subscribers forked out roughly $50 million to watch the 2005 Test series between India and Pakistan, making the U.S. the third-biggest revenue source for that tournament. (The ICC says those statistics are partly explained by 2 million ethnic South Asians living in the U.S.)

It hasn't hurt that the last few years have produced some great cricket. England's win over Australia last year drew "the highest levels of public interest in cricket in a generation," according to Deloitte's Sports Business Group, with 7.7 million viewers in Britain—40% of its total TV audience—and millions more around the world. The easing of political tension between India and Pakistan has also allowed the two great South Asian rivals to play each other three times since 2004. Technology has played a part, too. Stump-mounted mini-cameras, computer graphics to predict a ball's trajectory and touch screens that allow commentators to write their analysis across the picture have made cricket one of the flashier sports on TV. Speed says even the length of the games—Test matches between national sides can take five days and a series one month or more—is appealing to broadcasters and advertisers. "It's a lot of content," Speed says, "enough to fill a channel for days, and is a very valuable commodity for sponsors." Nike apparently agrees. Pawar tells TIME that the sneaker giant last month paid $45 million to have its logo stitched onto Indian players' sleeves.

There seems to be just one missing ingredient: a winning India side. The national team has captured only one World Cup—the tournament held every four years in the game's one-day format—and that was in 1983. It's been almost as long since India took a foreign Test series, not counting its victory against lowly Zimbabwe last autumn. "The cricket talent in India is still very much untapped," says Rahul Dravid, captain of the country's team. "The hope is that the new money can help find our future stars."

Might India's muscle lead to a situation where it is as dominant on the field as it soon will be in the game's finances? Possibly. But as he looks ahead to next year's World Cup in the West Indies, that's not something that Thawani worries about. "An Indian win is what the fans want," he says. Given what India would pay to see that, it's what cricket's new business leaders want too.

• Alex Perry | Bombay
• India's passion for a once-genteel pastime is energizing—and enriching—the international sport