What the pub in Bloomsbury knows that the IPL has not yet built

A passing remark outside a London pub — that the Indian Premier League has not yet forged the same communal grip as the English Premier League — lands on a tournament preparing to chase a far larger audience through a billion-dollar media rights cycle.

By Monexus Staff Writerasia5-minute read11 Jun 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On a weeknight in Bloomsbury, in the small hours after a match, a passing observation made its way into print via a Telegram excerpt from The Print: "I don't think that the IPL has fostered a similar sense of belonging and community as the EPL, though. The thought crossed my mind outside the pub in the Bloomsbury area, when the bearded bloke stand…" The remark was casual. The comparison it invited is anything but.

The Indian Premier League and the English Premier League sit at the top of two of the world's richest sports economies. The IPL's 2023–2027 media rights cycle sold for roughly $6.4 billion, the largest broadcast deal in cricket history, and the league is widely treated as a template for franchise sport in emerging markets. The EPL, by its own published accounts, is broadcast to more than 900 million homes across 200 territories, the most-watched football league on the planet. The two products compete for the same global advertising rupee and the same late-evening television slot in India. They are, in commercial terms, direct rivals.

The question raised outside the Bloomsbury pub is whether the IPL has yet built what the EPL already possesses: a fan identity thick enough to survive a bad season, a stadium culture that fills grounds by habit rather than by hype, and a calendar of fixtures that means something to people who have no commercial relationship with the league at all. The answer, on the evidence so far, is complicated.

The product, the schedule, the stand

The IPL is a six-week tournament. The EPL is a ten-month season. That single structural fact explains a great deal of the cultural gap. Football's calendar is dense enough that supporting a club becomes a way of organising the year; cricket's Indian calendar is dense in a different way, with the IPL sitting on top of Test, One Day and T20 international windows and the domestic Ranji Trophy below. The league is the jewel, but it is not the only piece of jewellery.

Stadium attendance tells a parallel story. English football grounds are routinely full, with the EPL reporting average attendances of more than 40,000 per match across the 2024–25 season, and clubs such as Manchester United, Tottenham and West Ham posting average gates in the high 50,000s and 60,000s. The IPL, by contrast, has wrestled for years with the perception of half-empty stands in its earlier seasons, and even the post-pandemic return has been uneven — a 2023 analysis in The Print noted that several franchises struggled to fill lower-bowl seating despite sell-throughs at the turnstiles of marquee matches. The economics are different. The IPL's primary product is the broadcast, not the gate. The EPL's gate is a meaningful share of club revenue, and the matchday habit is what produces the pub culture the Bloomsbury observer was gesturing at.

Community, diaspora and the away end

The EPL's community claim rests on three pillars: a deep supporter base that predates the Premier League's 1992 founding, a diaspora fan network sustained by cheap broadcast rights in markets such as India, Nigeria and the United States, and a stadium subculture — the away end, the chants, the season-ticket waiting list — that turns football into a generational inheritance. The Manchester United Supporters' Trust, the Arsenal Supporters' Trust and similar bodies now hold formal consultative status with their clubs on ticketing, board decisions and stadium moves, a governance layer the IPL has no real equivalent for.

The IPL has, in a shorter period, constructed something different. The fan parks, the team-owned social media channels, the celebrity owner economy (from Bollywood to private equity) and the regional-caste-of-city bonding have produced an audience that watches the league intensely during its window. What it has not yet produced, on most external readings, is the same transmission of habit between generations. A child in Bengaluru in 2026 grows up with Royal Challengers Bangalore as wallpaper, but the relationship is more mediated — by franchise marketing, by OTT platforms, by influencer reels — than the inherited Saturday-afternoon relationship a child in Liverpool has with Anfield.

Commercial ceiling versus cultural depth

The comparison is not symmetrical. The IPL is a younger product with a much larger domestic television market behind it. Viacom18 paid roughly $2.7 billion for the streaming rights to the 2023–2027 cycle, and Disney Star held the linear rights for a similar figure, sums that put the league's per-match media value among the highest in world sport. By that measure the IPL is closing on the EPL's commercial dominance faster than the cultural layer is closing on the EPL's. The BCCI's stated ambition, signalled in coverage around the 2025 season, is to push the next rights cycle into double-digit billions of dollars — a figure that would meaningfully outstrip what the EPL currently sells to Indian broadcasters.

What the Bloomsbury pub knows, and what the IPL's broadcast partners are still pricing in, is that the per-match media value is a function of audience attention, and audience attention is in turn a function of the communal habit. The pub in central London on a Wednesday night in January, showing a mid-table match between Brentford and Brighton, is the same kind of space as a Test-match screening in Mumbai during the 2023 World Cup final. Both are community artefacts. Only one of them has been engineered to exist all year round.

The counter-read

There is a defensible counter-argument. The IPL's value to its owners is precisely that it does not need the pub. It sells advertising against a captive primetime audience, on a defined window, with a defined start and a defined end. The community effect is manufactured for those six weeks and then allowed to dissipate, and that rhythm is what makes the rights cycle so valuable to broadcasters. If the IPL ever did succeed in producing year-round club loyalty on the English model, it would arguably weaken the scarcity premium that currently justifies the rights fees.

The Bloomsbury comparison is, in other words, not necessarily a failure mode for the IPL. It is a description of a different product, optimised for a different buyer.

Stakes

The next IPL rights cycle, expected to be negotiated across 2027 and 2028, will test which side of that argument the market believes. If broadcasters continue to pay the premium, the league can carry on building community on its own terms — through digital, through fan parks, through the social-media fabric of an Indian internet that English football cannot replicate. If the rights plateau, the question of whether the IPL can build the kind of year-round identity that turns a pub in Bloomsbury into a chapel for Brentford will become a question of survival, not of style.

This article leans on a single passing remark from a London pub, surfaced by The Print, to frame a commercial and cultural question that the next IPL rights cycle will answer with cash.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/ThePrintIndia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Premier_League