How did the Indian media cover the IPL?
You're right, the media does ignore your team. Well, unless you're an RCB fan.
Long-time readers of this newsletter will know that I like to take data-based looks at how the media covers major cricket tournaments. I analysed what they wrote about during the ODI World Cup, and I talked to industry insiders to understand their editorial strategies during the Women’s Premier League.
With the IPL, I wanted to see who they covered the most.
There is a clear divide between the haves and have-nots after 17 years. Mumbai & Chennai have titles and fans. Kolkata have titles, but not nearly as many fans as the they should. Bengaluru are popular and rich but have won as many IPLs as my grandmother.
Meanwhile, teams like Punjab, Rajasthan & Hyderabad seem to just exist without anyone in the mainstream media really caring.
Or, am I just making this all up in my head?
To figure it out, I looked at 2,078 articles from three different outlets; ESPNcricinfo, Cricket.com & Indian Express. They have relatively different editorial strategies that provide insight into how different newsrooms would cover the tournament.
Cricinfo tried to focus on quality over quantity (the other two published over 150 more IPL stories each). They published fewer “bad” articles, which theoretically gave their 38 IPL authors more time to focus on writing better stories.
Cricket.com wrote impressively quick original stories for every match but also needed to rely on a lot of “bad” stories to fill their pages since they only had 10 IPL writers.
Indian Express did high quality “good” stories due to their more wide-ranging journalistic expertise - but 6 out of every 10 stories were “bad” and were published purely for indiscriminate clicks.
Brief definitions of “good” & “bad” can be found in this footnote.1
Okay, time to dive into the numbers and graphs. If you want to skip ahead to a particular section, here are the sub-headings;
Which IPL teams got the most coverage?
Which IPL teams got the best coverage?
Which players were covered the most?
The entire data set can be found here. I’d love to hear about any conclusions you draw if you mess around with it!
Which IPL teams got the most coverage?
Unless you’re a fan of RCB, CSK or MI, these numbers probably don’t surprise you that much.
The Big 3 have dominated the IPL consciousness since 2008, and have more fans and more money than anyone else; unsurprisingly, that leads to more coverage. After all, more fans = more clicks.
But, what happens if we break down the coverage on a Monday-Sunday, week-by-week basis? [Week 1 includes some pre-tournament coverage from March 18-24]
RR led the table for the first half of the season, but apart from a Week 6 spike due to Yuzi Chahal becoming the IPL’s highest ever wicket-taker, they were regularly ignored.
Similarly, KKR were largely ignored until the playoffs, except for a Week 7 spike when they took the lead from RR. It didn’t last, despite fascinating storylines around Narine, Iyer, Raghuvanshi, Starc and more.
Similar trends can be seen for other teams; LSG saw a Week 2-4 spike because of the emergence, injury to, and injury speculation about Mayank Yadav (we’ll get to him in a bit!). SRH got a Week 5 spike when they started scoring 250+ scores for fun, and publicly targeted a 300+ score. DC kept getting stories about Rishabh Pant’s return, but not much else.
Meanwhile, GT saw an initial spike surrounding the Hardik Pandya defection, but that died down as they established themselves as a below average team. Meanwhile, PBKS only got a slight bump from successfully chasing 261 against KKR in Week 6!
On the other hand, the Big 3 cruised through. CSK & MI benefitted from captaincy changes to write about when there weren’t obvious storylines, while Kohli’s early season brilliance created enough headlines before RCB launched into their Cinderella run to the playoffs.
Oh, and there was a new article every time Dhoni, Kohli or Hardik took a breath, including this beauty; “MS Dhoni Mania: Andre Russell covers ears as CSK crowd creates deafening noise at 125 decibels after their star’s arrival.” That’s an entire article describing a quickly deleted (and quite blurry) social media video of a man looking a little uncomfortable for a second.
Which IPL teams got the best coverage?
More coverage doesn’t necessarily mean better coverage. Let’s take another look at that graph on the number of articles per team, but add some quality control.
This number surprised me when I first saw it, but it makes sense the more you think about it.
Rule number one of an Internet media business is clicks. If you are covering RCB, CSK & MI for clicks, it makes sense to lean into clickbait. Lots of people care about “DHONI Mania”, but not enough people care about “SHASHANK Mania”.2
That’s how you get this incredible number; there were only 56 articles on PBKS, but 46.43% of them were good. Meanwhile, there were 166 articles on RCB, but only 27.71% of them were good. Sure, there were technically more “good” RCB stories than PBKS ones - but who would you rather be a fan of after hearing those numbers?
Plus, there is a qualitative difference within “good” stories.
PBKS fans got incredible interviews with breakout stars & established ones; why Ashutosh Sharma worked as an umpire at 11 while he came up the ranks, and how Harshal Patel trained endlessly to build his confidence to bowl a perfect over.
Meanwhile, RCB fans had to settle for endless debates on whether Virat Kohli’s strike rate was good enough.
This graph touches upon something I discovered in my article for the WPL too; the most popular teams are the most stingy about providing access to their players. As such, the biggest teams often have the worst coverage.
It’s no surprise that CSK, MI & RCB rank low when you count interviews as a percentage of coverage. Even worse? CSK’s & MI’s interviews are all with foreigners, and more than half of the Big 3’s combined interviews occurred outside the IPL window (such as with Dinesh Karthik - a player that literally had to retire before he could freely talk to the media!).
At this point, it’s worth revealing something that may not be common knowledge unless you work in cricket; unlike other sports (or even other cricketing countries), IPL players are obliged to get permission from their franchises before speaking to the media.
It’s why pre- and post-tournament interviews with foreign players and coaches are more likely; they don’t need their team’s or the BCCI’s approval to talk to a reporter.
Which players were covered the most?
The IPL is still a star-driven league. Or, at least, that’s what the media outlets seem to believe. Kohli, Dhoni & Hardik were the go-to candidates to drive clicks this season.
There’s a couple of angles at work here. Being Indian is a big boost in the IPL, as is being captain of a team without other high-performing Indian stars. Ruturaj Gaikwad (36 articles), Pant & Gill all benefit from both advantages, while Pat Cummins’ (19) leadership skills definitely boosted his profile.
But, there is also some meritocracy among the non-captains that were covered this season. Riyan Parag (19 articles), Abhishek Sharma (21) and Travis Head (22) were all excellent for extended periods this season, and have understandably been rewarded with extended coverage.
What I found more interesting is the lost opportunities in the media coverage. If we take social media following (and in this particular case, Instagram following) as a metric of popularity, 7 players had “breakout” seasons where their follower count at least doubled since early April - and none of them were covered extensively.
Six of them were primarily batters; RCB’s late season saviour Will Jacks (10x increase in followers), SRH’s big-hitting Abhishek Sharma (4x), PBKS’ surprise stars Ashutosh Sharma (2.3x) & Shashank Singh (3x), and perhaps the find of the season in DC’s Jake Fraser-McGurk (2.5x).
The last player was Mohammad Nabi, who managed to triple his follower count. I don’t have an explanation for it. Maybe it’s a bunch of Afghani fans? I’ve got nothing.
Oh, also, there was a kid who played four games for LSG.
Most of the players I just listed were largely ignored by the media, at least compared to how popular they were among fans. Not Mayank Yadav.
Yadav’s emergence this season is a victory for everyone involved. Obviously, LSG and the IPL. Definitely the BCCI, who’ve already earmarked him for an international debut in Australia later this year. Indian fans who haven’t been able to dream of an elite 160 km/h pacer before.
The media won’t be too sad about another potential star to cover either.
Yadav was the subject of 25 stories this year. That’s 27.17% of all LSG stories - a higher percentage of team stories than everybody in the IPL but four captains (and two popular former captains); Kohli, Dhoni, Hardik, Rahul, Gill & Pant.
This popularity has been reflected among fans as well. Before the IPL started, Yadav had 4,000 Instagram followers. Today, he has 527,000. That’s a jump of over 13,000%!
Again, he’s played a grand total of four IPL games in his life. He only bowled 12.1 overs this season.
I don’t know if we’ve seen an instant Indian star like this since Sachin Tendulkar. No pressure kid.
Who were the biggest winners?
The Big 3 & KKR all saw significant increases in their follower count. SRH & RR also saw a boost thanks to their fairly entertaining runs to the playoffs.
PBKS & DC seem stuck in limbo. Unable to grow their fandoms despite being franchises for 17 years. Unless Mayank Yadav becomes a Kohli-level star (and stays in Lucknow), LSG are going to struggle to break out of the losers’ circle too. It looked like GT would be able to broach the gap after two incredibly successful years, but their first average year has come with below average fandom gains.
As I mentioned above, the IPL is a player-driven league. So, how are the players doing?
57 players saw a boost of at least 100,000 new followers this season. SRH (7) & RR (8) both saw a large number of individuals make their name, but so did the traditional trio of RCB (8)3, MI (7) & CSK (7) in relatively down-beat seasons.
Despite their star-driven success, KKR only had 5 players whose follower count increased by six figures. Sunil Narine - the league’s only 3x MVP - still only has 574,000 Instagram followers. That’s only a few thousand more than Mayank Yadav.
A interesting number to come out of this exercise was not how the IPL affected players’ online fandoms - but how selection to the Indian team (and speculation around it) brought the highest profiles.
14 of the 15 Indian players selected for the T20 World Cup saw an increase of at least 100,000 Instagram followers (Axar Patel was the odd man out). Additionally, five players who were in the conversation for the team (Gill, Iyer, Rahul, Karthik & Dhoni) all saw increases of at least 800,000 followers each during the season.
So, who were the winners? The Indian team, the three biggest IPL franchises & the biggest names in the game. KKR (sort of), but definitely not KKR’s players. Mayank Yadav - if we don’t cripple him with the expectations of 1.7 billion people.
The IPL teams who struggle to grow their fan base, but are still reluctant about letting their players interact with the media? Definitely losers. *cough*LSG*DC*cough*
The media? Maybe. They’ve got a potential new star to cover in Yadav. But, even by the metric of clicks, it feels like they left a lot on the table - players like Will Jacks, Ashutosh Sharma & others proved their worth in the Wild West of online fandoms, but not with decision makers in Indian newsrooms.
I’m not sure if the cricketers or the media are the bigger losers there.
“Bad” stories are written for clicks and advertisers, not for the audience. Think articles like “SRK congratulates KKR on Instagram”. Pro-gambling articles are also “bad” in this algorithm. “Good” stories involve in-depth research and/or interviews that bring new information to the public domain. Think stories like “How Dhoni broke the CSK captaincy change to the franchise”. Other pieces are neither good nor bad, such as an interactive quiz on IPL history or a match report - they’re clearly published for clicks, but the stories do also provide value to the audience.
Have you figured out which Shashank I’m talking about yet?
You can almost ignore RCB’s numbers here. They seem to be the one team that’s figured out a flywheel of getting high profile players, which drives more coverage of their team, which increases the chances of their high performing role players gaining prominence, which increases their fandom - and therefore increase the profile of their best players, continuing the cycle. However, this strategy requires hoarding high profile names, often at the expense of actual team cohesion and potential victory. If you believe RCB is a business first, it’s a smart strategy. If you think RCB is a team first, it’s an incredibly frustrating experience.