T20 World Cup: The receptive Indian cricket fan and fallacy of the Tebbit Test
The growing marketability of Indian cricket across the globe tells us much about modern fandom and buries a crude argument from the past.
As I write this, the Indian cricket team are playing against Zimbabwe in the final group game of the T20 World Cup in front of a sell-out crowd at the MCG.
That’s Australia’s largest sporting stadium, with a capacity of 100,024.
Each time India have played at this tournament they have done so in front of a raucous crowd, readily supplied by an Indian-Australian community numbering more than 780,000 and on track to overtake Britons as the largest migrant group Down Under.
India’s T20 match against Pakistan at the MCG last month drew the venue’s third largest ever crowd and such is the appeal of the Men in Blue in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Chief Cricket Writer Malcom Conn commented that the departure of the host nation from the tournament will have little impact on its spectacle.
Conn wrote: “For all it’s great and glorious Ashes heritage as an Anglo-Australian pastime, cricket is now overwhelmingly a South Asian game, and the sport has become far more vibrant as a result.”
From a sponsorship perspective, the opportunity provided by Indian cricket fans is significant.
At MKTG Sports + Entertainment, the data-driven marketing and partnerships agency where I work, we use a measure called ‘Receptivity’ to identify partnership opportunities for our clients.
Receptivity is a measure of the frequency and level of engagement fans have towards sponsor activity in their passions.
In a study we conducted assessing the behaviours and attitudes of 25,000 fans across the world we found that Indian cricket fans are particularly willing to absorb commercial activity and engage with sponsors.
In fact almost two thirds of Indian cricket fans (60%) were classified as Receptive compared to just a quarter (25%) of their UK counterparts. This is almost double than the global average of 34%.
To be Receptive means you react positively to brands sponsoring the sports events you love and will therefore, likely engage with those activations deployed by the sponsor on various channels.
Furthermore 38 per cent were deemed Selective - fans that engage but less frequently or consistently, compared with more than half of cricket fans (53 per cent) in the UK.
This means that a minuscule two per cent of Indian cricket fans, are Non-Receptive - an audience who are resistant to the role that sponsors play in events (the global average here is 14 per cent).
The data goes some way to explaining the huge investment that sponsors have poured into Indian cricket in recent years, with the Indian Premier League (IPL) becoming the sixth most valuable sports league in the world.
IPL sponsorship revenue rose to US $105 Million last year and sponsors include Indian multinational conglomerate TATA, education tech-giant Unacademy, FinTech network RuPay and the phenomenally-popular fantasy sports platform Dream 11.
With more than 120 million registered users, it’s the biggest fantasy sports platform on the planet.
To put that into perspective, the Premier League’s own fantasy game (Fantasy Premier League) has around nine million users.
As Vikrant Mudaliar, Chief Marketing Officer of Dream Sports (Dream11) told Asia Sports Tech:
“When people participate in fantasy sports, they tend to watch more sports matches across categories to track the performance of the players they picked in their fantasy sports team/s; which not only makes their experience far more interactive than before but also helps grow the entire sports ecosystem”
That’s Receptivity in action.
Today, the lure of the IPL is so strong, that the world’s leading cricketers build their calendar around their two months with their IPL franchise, often to the detriment of their international careers.
Sponsors keep pouring the cash into Indian cricket because they are seeing a return on their investment.
But for Indian cricket, and its governing body the BCCI, the IPL is not just a money making machine.
It also fast tracks the development of T20 talent ensuring the national team have a production line of stars, which keep the national team at the pinnacle of the game.
Take for example the ICC’s highest ranked T20 batter and one of India’s stars of the tournament, Suryakumar Yadav - a cricketer who didn’t make his international debut until he was 30.
Yadav forged his explosive batting style over ten seasons in the cauldron of the IPL facing the world’s leading bowlers and learning from the best batsmen in the game, including his coaches at Mumbai Indians: Mahela Jawardene and Sachin Tendulkar.
The IPL powers the national game with talent, feeds global fandom and puts the BCCI in an enviable position as the biggest shot-calling organisation in cricket.
Why the Tebbit Test failed
The Indian-Australian community are being lauded for helping to make the T20 World Cup the atmospheric spectacle it is.
But the Indian diaspora have not always been praised for carrying their love and passion for the national team.
The Conservative Party can lay claim today to delivering us our first ethnic-minority Prime Minister but too often they have turned their backs on voters drawn from migrant communities, preferring instead to pander to xenophobia - a tradition continued today by the Home Secretary.
From Enoch Powell’s incendiary Rivers of Blood speech to the acrimonious 1964 Smethwick by-election, when Tory MP Peter Griffiths successfully exploited racist sentiment, there are plenty of shameful chapters in the history of the Conservatives.
One of the most inflammatory moments, came in 1990, when Tory grandee Norman Tebbit suggested British Asians were not assimilated into British society if they did not support the England cricket team and proposed a test for first and second generation immigrants to understand where loyalties lie.
“Are you still harking back to where you came from, or where you are,” Tebbit told the Los Angeles Times.
Unfortunately for Tebbit, time has exposed the fallacy and crudeness of his argument.
Today, The ECB (English Cricket Board) estimates that there are at least one million South Asian cricket fans across England and Wales, whilst South Asians make up a third of the recreational playing base.
You might call it assimilation into British society or you might say that South Asian fans and players have enriched the UK cricket scene to the point that it would collapse without us.
When India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh play on these shores they do so in front of sizeable crowds drawn from second and third generation British Indians, British Pakistanis, British Sri Lankans and British Bangladeshis.
We also know that modern fandom is complex and not simply related to your bloodline or patriotism.
Gen Z fans adopt passions and interests through new avenues and for increasingly complex reasons.
Furthermore, and with Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister, a man whose wedding guests included legendary Indian spinner Anil Kumble, the family of India coach Rahul Dravid and with a father-in-law who is so passionate about Indian cricket that he once penned a tribute to the former captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, you might feel that Tebbit’s views have never felt more irrelevant and obsolete.
A self-confessed cricket fan, Sunak might claim to have always supported England over India (to appease the Tebbit acolytes on the right of his party) but I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 Downing St had more India fans living there than England ones these days.
As I finish writing this, India have booked their place in a T20 World Cup semi-final against England, in what promises to be a thrilling encounter.
So far from being the fifth columnists implied by Tebbit, British Indian cricket fans, like myself, will enjoy the game sharing banter on whats app groups with their mates who support England, and continue to contribute to British society, paying our taxes and hopefully making this multi-ethnic, supposedly liberal nation we live in all the more tolerable.
How brands should be approaching the FIFA World Cup
It was great to join John McCarthy, Media Editor for The Drum, Monica Majumdar, Head of Strategy for Wavemaker and Arsenal Fan TV founder Robbie Lyle, to discuss brand considerations as we approach the FIFA World Cup.
You can watch the panel discussion on The Drum’s LinkedIn page here.
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