David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…There are a lot of fans elsewhere, so plausibly… Could have set up a league elsewhere. Totally a great question. I think the issue is just that India is such by far the center of gravity, by which I mean the other billion cricket fans in the world are too dispersed among other countries. If you’re going to set up a rival league, you got to set it up somewhere. Where are you going to choose? Are you going to do Australia? Are you going to do Pakistan? Are you going to do the UK? Are you going to do the West Indies? There are rival leagues in all of those countries, but the percentage of mind share that you’re going to be able to get of the global cricket audience caring about your league and the cornered resource that you would then have of your domestic cricket board of those players in that league, you’re not going to be able to restrict enough talent density of players relative to a fan base in any other single country in the world. It’s almost a tipping point thing where whoever was the biggest, even if they weren’t the biggest by a lot, was able to basically have a pretty large group of people who cared the most about their domestic players, and therefore start this flywheel of we are able to attract people from other areas to come and play here. And if you get someone from the West Indies, you get all the small countries. Then suddenly you build from 35% to maybe 45% or 50%. These blocks of 10% and 15% are dominoes that fall into you because now you’ve, as the biggest player, aggregated all the small ones. Now you start the flywheel and you can add in additional constraints on top, like Indian players aren’t allowed to play elsewhere. Well okay, that just creates lock-in.…

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