The farce of Lalit Modi’s obsession with the IPL

That’s rich coming from a man whose own record with the league ended in suspension, investigation and sacking. Goenka, to his credit, chose silence, which is an unfamiliar discipline in Modi’s world.

The outburst was entirely in character. Last December, Modi shared a video from a London party featuring another fugitive, Vijay Mallya. In it, the pair, grinning with the self-satisfied air of men who believe they’ve outsmarted history, serenaded guests with a lusty, off-key rendition of Sinatra’s My Way and joked about being “the two biggest fugitives of India”. After the inevitable backlash, Modi deleted the video and issued a rare apology.

As vice-president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India and president of the Rajasthan Cricket Association, he renovated stadiums, built academies, and grew revenues dramatically. But all that was just the aperitif. The main course came with the IPL. As its first chairman and commissioner (no less), he introduced franchise auctions, celebrity owners, player bidding wars, and massive TV deals. The league, a kitchy blend of hit-and-miss cricket, Bollywood glamour, and imported cheerleaders, exploded overnight.

At the top of this glittering circus stood Modi, its undisputed ringmaster, riding between venues on a private jet with gold-plated fittings, a BlackBerry perpetually in hand, micromanaging every brand placement, and barking clipped instructions with the intensity of a man who believed that the whole edifice was held together by his ego alone.

Indeed, to hear Modi tell it, the IPL is his singular stroke of individual genius. That version requires modification. Two years before the IPL was launched in 2008, Subhash Chandra and Kapil Dev had introduced a similar franchise-based T20 competition, the Indian Cricket League. Lacking sanction from the BCCI and facing pressure on players to avoid it, the league struggled to survive and ultimately folded, paving the way for the officially backed IPL.

To his credit, Modi turned IPL into a commercial juggernaut by blending cricket, entertainment and television into a highly saleable product.

In 2010, following the Kochi Tuskers Kerala controversy, the BCCI suspended him. A 2013 disciplinary committee recommended a life ban, which the board promptly imposed.

Modi then took the time-honoured route of many a businessman facing scrutiny: he fled from India. From his London mansion, he issued regular salvos pleading his innocence and his greatness, often in the same tweet. He attempted to bulletproof his exile by acquiring citizenship in Vanuatu. That tactic unravelled spectacularly in March 2025, when Vanuatu’s Prime Minister revoked his passport.

His problems did not end with the IPL. Since 2019, a bitter inheritance war engulfed the Modi family, complete with lawsuits, a 2024 assault allegation involving his brother Samir, and social-media broadsides painting the family empire as a battlefield of greed.

Today, Modi remains the errant boy who cannot let go of the sandcastle he built and broke. Banned for life, he is more vocal on IPL matters than most insiders, positioning himself as the wise elder who knows it all. In fact, he remains the almost farcical archetype of unchecked ambition: a man of real commercial vision whose bottomless need for money, control, and attention ultimately led to his banishment from the grand tamasha he built, while the league itself moved on without him.