The Indian Premier League for Cricket is still in its infancy, but it has already taken the world of sports by storm. Though it is premature to compare IPL with big brother English Premier League a.k.a. EPL, we know that the growth of the Brand has been spectacular. Now in its third year, news about IPL has not only touched Indians in different parts of the world, but managed to attract loyal following from diverse communities around the world, who just love Cricket.

As an agency, responsible for managing the digital assets and presence online for Club Royal Challengers, we have been intrigued with the issue of “Fan Identity” from Day 1. Before IPL, all cricket lovers were either fans of Team India, or iconic cricket masters from around the world. With IPL, loyalties became divided between community/state of origin, city of residence, iconic players and glamorous owners - to a point where this author (as an example) was not sure if he should support Kolkata Knight Riders (from native city Kolkata), or Mumbai Indians (from his current home town Mumbai) or Royal Challengers Bangalore (in which he could come close to iconic Anil Kumble), or even Kings XI Punjab (for glam owner Preity Zinta). I think lot of people were facing the same predicament, and gleefully switching their support for teams, as the tournament progressed. It was obvious from Day one that IPL teams were not going to be just about “local fans” from a city, but a lot more.

I wondered about EPL and how teams from seemingly small cities in England had managed to grow so large in stature and not just whip up passions of fans from one country, but managed to flame the passions of soccer fans around the world. So I turned to the web for some supporting data on EPL Fan Base and stumbled upon a report published in 2007 here. To quote a section of the PR for the report, it seems

Manchester United attracted 2.2 million unique visitors to its Web site during March 2007, making it the world’s most popular football club online. The study also shows that roughly 60 percent, or 1.3 million, of Manchester United’s 2.2 million monthly visitors do not reside in the U.K. – quantifying the global reach and appeal of the Manchester United brand franchise.

That piece of data, led to digging into our own insights on Club RCB Fan Base from Facebook, and we were pleasantly surprised. The total fan-base for Club RCB (which exceeds 100K as on date, with over 62K unique active users every month) was not lop-sided towards its city-of-origin Bengaluru at all; the largest blocks of fans (online) actually came from Delhi and Mumbai.




Another interesting fact was that cities such as Houston, Riyadh, Dallas, and London were already in the TOP 20 cities where the facebook fan base was spread. In small percentages yes, but these locations had already lit up on the world map, and that was important to know.

We have already heard about the IPL dreams of taking the tournament in different formats around the world, to garner more fan support from around the world. Also we know for a fact that all the clubs are vying to be a national brand and not content to stay local. Though slightly dated, an excellent comparison (in terms of Brand Vision and Value) was made by the author of this blog between IPL and EPL.

Reading that post and sensing the fanatic participation of fans from around the world on RCB online, we are convinced that Globalization of IPL is not just a possibility, but an absolute certainty.