Most Fan Following Team In Ipl – Ask an observer to name the most popular cricket league in the world and almost all of them, even the critics, will say the Indian premier league. Ask about the most popular team in the IPL and you’ll likely get a variety of answers.
Let’s consider the main factors that contribute to the popularity of the team. Some of them are: team performance, home market size, and its marketing and advertising muscle. None of these factors are sufficient on their own, nor is the absence of any one an indication that a team will not be popular.
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“Surprising wins are not always essential for popularity,” Jasal Shah, head of Velocity MR, which published a consumer report on the IPL last year, told Cricket Monthly. “If you look at some teams, especially Royal Challengers Bangalore, they lose regularly but remain at the top of the popularity charts. Other teams have won the IPL, but they are not as popular.”
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The location of the franchise clearly determines the size of the market, which gives teams a huge advantage in the metro. “Punjab and Rajasthan will still be small advertising markets and will always struggle to get bigger sponsorship deals when compared to the big four teams [Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore, which are also the capital cities of the big states],” Indranil Das Blah, founding partner of Kwan Entertainment, said in the IPL 2018 report produced by Duff & Phelps, a multinational consulting firm.
How will the Chennai Super Kings brand be affected after MS Dhoni’s retirement? Dibyangshu Sarkar / © AFP/Getty Images
Duff & Phelps estimates that franchisees spend between 5% and 15% of their revenue on marketing and promotion. Obviously, some teams are better at this than others. “CSK has invested in all aspects of branding,” Harish Bijoor, brand strategy specialist, told Cricket Monthly. “They have a big name; they have MS Dhoni, who is an iconic brand for them; the ‘whistle podu’ campaign is great and they are taking the brand deep into the interior of Tamil Nadu. It was building the brand bottom-up, which was not easy.”
Then there are some popularity factors that are specific to India. “What is important in India’s uniqueness is a kind of celebrity point of view,” N Santosh, partner at Duff & Phelps India, told Cricket Monthly. “Celebrity engagement keeps the team in touch with its fan base and helps retain them, be it Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta or Shilpa Shetty.” Obviously, the bigger the star, the more influence, although star power also has a downside: if the popularity of a celebrity drops, so does the team.
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Another factor is the presence of Indian star players like Sachin Tendulkar or Dhoni. Chris Gayle or AB de Villiers may have cachet, but they are still seen as international players. This is different from other major leagues. Frenchman Eric Cantona was the face of Manchester United in their early years in the English Premier League, while Egyptian Mo Salah is Liverpool’s most popular player at the moment. “If Virat [Kohli] moves to Rajasthan Royals, there will be a shift in loyalty,” says Shah.
To answer our question, we’ll look at TV audiences (and ultimately, streaming numbers), brand ratings, social media following, and anecdotal information about sponsors and advertisers. For our purposes, the 12 seasons of IPL can naturally be checked in two blocks every four years, followed by two blocks every two years (Super Kings and Royals were suspended for the 2016 and 2017 editions).
Television ratings are a short instrument for measuring popularity, but they provide a relative picture of the interest of each team. They were also the only metric we had for the first four years (data access was limited due to the lockdown), and by that measure, Kolkata Knight Riders and Royals were the two most popular teams.
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The Knight Riders had the highest Television Audience Rating (TVR) in three of the four years, while the Royals took the top spot in IPL 2009, in South Africa, according to data provided by TAM Media Research. (TVR is a time-weighted number that takes into account time spent watching with viewers.) The Knight Riders have Eden Gardens, Sourav Ganguly and Shah Rukh, while the Royals have Shane Warne, a charismatic cricketer with Bollywood flair. and current Bollywood. fame in the form of joint ownership with Shilpa Shetty, who bought shares in the team in 2009. Moreover, the Royals were the underdogs to win the first year.
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The Knight Riders are the only team with an average TVR higher than the overall average rating for the league in each of its four years.
“They are the first team to make a profit based on the information we have,” said Santosh. “It’s because of Shah Rukh. He is the brand guru. He ran the team better than anyone and made them one of the top three teams even before IPL started. They also had a monopoly in the eastern country. India with a big stadium in Eden Gardens. For this reason, they benefit.”
Knight Riders continue to be the most popular team in the league, even after dropping Ganguly. They were the most watched team in the 2013 and 2015 editions, according to TAM data, and are starting to show both on and off the field. Led by Gautam Gambhir, they won the title in 2012 and 2014.
Mumbai Indians topped the rankings in the 2012 IPL, while Kings XI Punjab, led by Virender Sehwag and Glenn Maxwell, both attacking batsmen, topped the rankings in the 2014 edition, as the team reached the final .
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The Super Kings made three finals in that period, and it was clear that they took a big hit when they picked Dhoni as their captain in 2008. Today, Dhoni is a huge national star and has become closely associated with the franchise even though it is not a local. . Still, despite two titles and four finals in his first eight years, the Super Kings were not the most watched team in those seasons.
It was Mumbai that rose to challenge the popularity of Knight Riders. Rohit Sharma replaced Tendulkar, not with the same level of adoration from the fans, but with even more success on the field. They alternated with the Knight Riders for the title, winning in 2013 and 2015.
At the end of the first eight IPLs, Knight Riders had the highest brand value in the league with $86 million, according to Duff & Phelps, followed by Mumbai with $72 million and Super Kings with $67 million.

While the Super Kings and Royals served two-year bans for their roles in the match-fixing and betting scandal, Mumbai and Royal Challengers rose to the top of the viewership table, replacing the Knight Riders.
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According to India’s Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) data, Mumbai attracted an average of 18.5 million views per league match in 2016, just ahead of Royal Challengers with 18.3 million, while Knight Riders attracted 16.5 million. . (Impressions are the number of people from the target audience who saw an “event”, averaged over minutes; BARC’s numbers do not include impressions for knockout stages.)
The Royal Challengers’ climb has been heavily supported by Kohli, who has been the Test captain for over a year now and has established himself as one of the best batsmen in the world. And he has dated Bollywood celebrities. This led him to watch TV, and was the most talked about player on Facebook in 2016, according to a report by Duff & Phelps. Royal Challengers also reached their third final this year, where they lost to Sunrisers Hyderabad. Winning the title did little for the Sunrisers’ popularity: the team attracted the least number of viewers per game, with 14.8 million views, the same as the Kings XI, who finished last.
In 2017, Mumbai won the title for the third time, and again became the most watched team. Royal Challengers went to the dungeons, winning only three games and finishing last. But their fans remain loyal: they have the second largest TV audience, and their brand value rose 31% over the previous year to $88 million.
Sridhar Ramanujam, a Bangalore resident and head of consultancy firm Brand-Comm, told Cricket Monthly that Bangaloreans are very proud of their city. “Even when the game is of no consequence and the team will be seventh or eighth, the matches will be sold out. The cricket heritage here is strong. Many RCB fans play league cricket as well and maybe play with some of the team.”
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According to Duff & Phelps, 2017 was also the year social media activity around the IPL began. Knight Riders lead here with a combined 19 million followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, well ahead of Mumbai and Super Kings.
Broadcast rights came from Sony and Star Sports, which bombarded the IPL across multiple channels and in multiple languages. It also attracts millions of viewers on Hotstar, its digital platform.
In a fairytale return to the league, Super Kings won IPL 2018.

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