SLPL an exciting opportunity for Sri Lankan cricket: Sandeep Bhammer

Sandeep Bhammer is the CEO of the Singapore based Somerset Entertainment Ventures (SEV) and above all an avid sports enthusiast. It is this interest in sports and an astute understanding of its commercial potential which inspired SEV to acquire overall sponsorship rights to exclusively partner with Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) to launch the Sri Lankan Premier League (SLPL).

The SLPL starts next month and in an exclusive interview with PakPassion.net, Bhammer discusses why Somerset Entertainment Ventures became the marketing partners for the SLPL, speaks about his current plans for the SLPL, how he hopes that the SLPL will become an integral part of the cricketing calendar and much more

Q: Firstly, why the interest in Sri Lankan cricket and the SLPL?

A: Well the launch of the Sri Lanka Premier League came at a time when the country came out of a 30 year old civil war. The Sri Lankan Cricket Board (SLC) were looking for ways and means of identifying a greater pool of talent from the island nation.

Historically, most of Sri Lanka’s players have always come out of Colombo and the surrounding areas and it has been very difficult to get talent from other parts of the country. So it was decided that provincial teams would be setup and act as feeder for the International squad as far as Twenty20 cricket was concerned. In the past, cricket was being played at club level and clubs would effectively act as feeders for the International team.

The process was a little cumbersome as there almost 66 clubs in Sri Lanka and each club had on the average about 20-22 players who were in the reckoning from the club sides. If you take 20 players from each club and there are 66 clubs, you have more than 1,300 players from which you have to select the national squad of about 18-20 players. What happens now is that if you divide the country into 7 provinces, then each province has its best players playing in its provincial team and consequently, it becomes a lot easier to pick a national squad of 18-20 players from a pool of about 140 players.

Provincial cricket also gives an opportunity for players who have in the past, gone unnoticed due to reasons beyond their control. A platform like SLPL (organised on provincial lines) gives them that opportunity to be noticed and also creates a scenario where players who are not in the national squad can get recognised as well. By providing a global platform and allowing local and young cricketers to come and play alongside high quality international players, we are effectively creating a bench strength.

If we combine this with the fact that the country is coming out of a thirty year war, the commercial interest of various companies from around the world and near Sri Lanka has increased. The Government has provided some exciting sponsorship opportunities for companies to reach all parts of the island in a short period of time by either coming in as sponsor or a franchise owner.

Q: Is it correct that all 7 teams are sponsored by Indian companies?

A: That’s not true. In fact one of the companies is called Varun Beverages Lanka Private Limited which is a Sri Lankan company and also there is another which is based out of Hong Kong whose founders have varied interest in different industries. Then you have five companies that are from India who have bought the franchises. Its only natural that companies from the sub-continent will participate as Sri Lanka will be an immediate opportunity for them to exploit because of the geographical proximity

Q: Will this 7 team format spread across the whole of domestic cricket in Sri Lanka?

A: When you have 7 franchises playing Twenty20 cricket, because of the short timeframe available you can have each of these teams play against one another and have a round-robin format with a couple of semi-finals and finals. You can finish off the tournament in about 15 days, which is the perfect amount of time required to run a tournament like this.

If you expand the franchise-based model out to one-day and 3 or 4 day matches, the sheer logistics of managing a tournament like this would block out a very long period of time for which the international players will not available, as the window becomes very long.

If you look at 7 teams playing against each other once, with semi-finals and a final, that is a total of 24 matches. If you were to play this in four-day tournament, that would require a total of 96 days to complete. It is not feasible to play franchise based cricket in a four-day format or even a one-day format.

Q: There are a lot of Twenty20 tournaments around the world including the Big Bash, Indian Premier League, and more recently we've seen the Bangladesh Premier League. Is there going to be anything different or unique about the Sri Lankan Premier League?

A: There are a couple of unique features of the Sri Lankan Premier League. Firstly, the players are actually selected on the basis of a draft instead of an auction. In a draft-based selection mechanism, players are contracted to a central pool at a fixed price and the draw of lots determined the order in which the franchise owner got to pick a player from the pool.

In an auction process, the team with the deepest pockets end up getting the best players and price discovery for each player is done through an auction mechanism. In a draft system, you can have 7 teams that are evenly balanced where the strength of the pocket doesn't determine the quality of the team. It's a fair selection policy and depends on the luck of the draw. This is the first time in cricket that this draw-based system is being used which is different from the Bangladesh and Indian Premier Leagues where the auction system was used.

The second thing is that Sri Lanka offers a very unique composition because it is one of the three countries that plays cricket in the month of August. If you look at the month of August, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Zimbabwe are in the southern hemisphere where its winter during that time so they can't really host any cricket. On the other hand, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have monsoon season during this time, so they can't host either.

England and West Indies are outside of the subcontinent time-zones and the subcontinent has approximately 1.5 billion viewers within the sub continent. If you offer them highly competitive and high quality cricket when there is not much cricket activity going on in the rest of the world, they will step-up and watch. Given the nature and economic structure of this tournament, the franchises will benefit with the subcontinental viewership and the potential revenue that will be generated through sponsorship and broadcasting.

Also because there is not a lot of cricket being played in the month of August around the world that means that a lot of the best players in the world are available to take part in the SLPL.

Q: So just on that point, you’re obviously planning to have the SLPL as an annual fixture in the cricketing calendar?

A: Yes, so basically the way it works is that Sri Lanka cricket has committed to us, as their marketing partner, the month of August as a permanent window from their side, subject to the ICC’s FTP commitments of the Sri Lanka national team, in which case the tournament will be played in July instead of August.

Q: Is it accurate that you have signed a 3 year contract with Sri Lanka Cricket to market the event?

A: No we’ve signed a 7 year contract with Sri Lanka cricket.

 Q:   Sandeep, you’ve attracted some big names for the first tournament, the likes of Chris Gayle, Shahid Afridi and others. You must be really pleased that you’ve been able to attract some of these big names in the first year of the tournament?

A: Yes we are very pleased, and the franchises are very pleased. In fact we had a player pool of almost 130 international players, so what you see, in terms of the final 56 players that have been selected, it’s still only 40% of the international pool players that were available to us.

The reason for that is that the tournament is short, it’s only 15-20 days long and it’s a time when players typically are not representing their countries on bilateral tours because of weather conditions. So it’s a very decent wage to earn for a player from a timeframe of 15 days.

Q: The dates as you’ve mentioned clash with England’s home series. It must be a bit of an issue that English players won’t be taking part, and also none of the Indian players are taking part. Is this something you’re hoping will be resolved in future, particularly with the Indian players?

A: Rather than focusing on Indian players or English players, this is an ICC approved tournament, all the countries basically support the tournament and the reality is that as many boards that support the tournament the better the tournament becomes.

We understand that England has its own domestic tournament being played at the same time, so obviously domestic tournaments will always take precedence, or national and domestic tournaments will always take precedence over international tournaments. So the fact that English players are not available is fully understood and fully appreciated.

Q: When is the final list of players going to be reduced to 18 for each of the franchises. What is the cut-off date for that?

A: We haven’t announced that date, but given that the teams will want to market and manage the logistical arrangements of their final 18 squad. I don’t believe that it’s going to be any longer than a week from here on.

Q: What about television rights? I presume that there is a lot of fierce competition from various television broadcasters around the world, to get the rights for this? And any progress on this? Have you finalised who will have the television rights?

A: We have got a lot of interest coming in from various broadcasters all over the world. While, I am not currently in a position to disclose who they are, all I can say at this stage is that the platform will be among the best in most of countries which will be distributing cricket.

Basically, in most cricketing nations the best platform will actually have this tournament, because we want to make sure that in the process of putting together a high quality cricket tournament, you know the cricket nations actually get the opportunity to watch the best of their country’s players participating in the tournament.

Q: There have been some issues recently with regards to the Bangladesh premier league and payments not being made/delayed to coaches and players. People will say that there are some concerns with regards to some of these T20 tournaments. How would you assure those who have some concerns about such T20 tournaments around the world?

A: What we have done is that all our player contracts are being approved by FICA and also as part of our contractual obligation, each of the franchise owners are required under the respective franchise agreements to provide a bank guarantee to the cricket board, prior to the arrival of the players, reflecting the full payment due to the players.

After the players have arrived and they have played and they have been paid, those bank guarantees will then be returned and not encashed and given back to the franchise owners. However in the event that the players are not paid, the Sri Lanka cricket board will actually go ahead and cash that bank guarantee, which would have been provided to them upfront to protect against any defaults of payments to players.

The second issue is, in an auction system, as is the case with some of the other leagues out there, the players costs are very high and if the franchise doesn’t make money, it becomes an awfully expensive proposition to pay players big sums of money as the consequence of the auction. In our case, what we have done is that we have actually pre-negotiated with the players at levels which are not the type of levels that you see at an auction. So the potential for the players to get paid is significantly better. There is a bank guarantee issue and a quantum issue and both have been suitably addressed.

Q: What are the future plans for the SLPL in the coming years?

A: The fact is that there has been a dearth of live entertainment due to the civil war in Sri Lanka. One thing is that the league is likely to be a favourite with not only cricket lovers in Sri Lanka but the women and children segment as well. This is because the cricket tournament will offer live entertainment before and after the matches, some music concerts, barbeques etc which will bring the Sri Lankan public to the stadium to enjoy themselves.

Secondly this is the time of the year when a lot of Sri Lankan expatriates return to the country on vacations just like, I am sure, Pakistanis living in the UK would like to go home at a time when cricket is happening at home as its a lot of fun.

My view is that if the SLPL becomes a fantastic tournament to watch, then it will become a reason for expatriates to return home in August - in effect people will time their vacation to synchronise with the SLPL. This way when their kids are on holiday they get a chance to watch their favourite teams (and players) in action.

Finally, historically, whilst the Sri Lankan teams that have gone to play Champions League have been great teams, they haven't had the international fan following as the players were basically local. Now that when you have these teams with international players, you will see a lot of international followers and fans who will come out to support the Sri Lankan teams.

I believe that as the teams go out and play in international tournaments, the SLPL will grow nicely and get greater recognition which will effectively result in good quality sponsors coming in and with that the tournament can go to higher levels. Whether this is with a hi-tech opening ceremony with international stars or pyrotechnics or with the best brand ambassadors to come in and endorse the tournament.

The SLPL is an exciting opportunity for Sri Lankan cricket, but first and foremost though its important to have a high quality tournament in place so it positions us well going foward for future editions of the SLPL.