Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
82 published records
01 / belief
“I think, David, you are correctly reading into the BCCI is starting to say, eh, just hold tight.”
02 / belief
“Now you’ve got one of, if not the biggest sports private equity firm in the world—I think Redbird is a $10 billion assets under management firm—coming in and investing in that franchise in the IPL.”
03 / belief
“I think the specific one to IPL—we haven’t talked about this yet—in November, 2024, Viacom 18/Reliance and Star Disney merged in an $8.”
04 / belief
“The euphemism, I believe that the Indian business environment is referred to as a low trust environment; i.”
05 / belief
“Ben, you were mentioning teams running in the red in the English Premier League. This is (I think) beyond just overpaying for players.”
06 / uncertainty
“Maybe. I don’t know. They’re pretty close. You’re not going to do that anywhere else.”
07 / belief
“I would say explosive right away is an understatement, as you might expect, given the incredible architecture of it and Lalit’s force of will personality.”
08 / belief
“I think Disney wanted to also go for the streaming rights, but I think the assumptions you have to make about the growth and monetization potential of streaming are a pretty big leap to say, yeah they’re worth the same as TV now, which has a lot of hungry advertising customers standing there with cash now saying I want to advertise on this product.”
09 / commitment
“” The Supreme Court here stepping in and basically saying, we are going to backstop and fix all of this, the IPL is by far the most visible industry where India is the global leader, with the global most important business brand entity in the world.”
10 / belief
“I suspect that had the IPL not been such a huge success and Lalit were not looking to tear up the contract, he would not have caught these discrepancies, shall we say.”
11 / belief
“I guess Morris Chang and TSMC too, although Morris over time did get quite a significant stake in TSMC through equity grants, and Dee (I think) got paid quite a bit at Visa too.”
12 / belief
“I believe in fact that when they were talking about this in the locker room, he might have first offered a Rolex and then the players were like, no.”
13 / belief
“Totally all domestic. That brings us to (I think) one of the two biggest wild cards here for the IPL, and that’s the Saudis and Middle East money.”
14 / belief
“I think if you talk to anybody who invests in India, this is the number one challenge for everything.”
15 / belief
“Just to add one more great game design mechanic, the winner of the whole thing gets (I think) a $3 million grand prize in that first year.”
16 / uncertainty
“If you look at American football at the NFL in America, it’s like, I don’t know, 37% or something like that.”
17 / belief
“Just for context on that, the most recent 2025 Super Bowl was the biggest Super Bowl ever, and I think de facto that makes it the biggest broadcast TV event in US history.”
18 / uncertainty
“I don't know if it’s called an umpire or referee, but someone wearing a hat has a little camera on the top of their hat.”
19 / belief
“I believe something like less than 20 people have ever done this in history, even to this day.”
20 / commitment
“You’re setting up a question I have at the end of the episode, so we will come back to that.”
21 / belief
“To give you a sense of just how much latent value there is here, I don’t think it goes to auction. I think Sahara just says, okay.”
22 / evaluation
“You better get enough cash in just a few years of playing in some new league that it doesn’t matter if you ever need to do anything else again.”
23 / commitment
“I know this is going to capture the public’s imagination here. I will personally give you a Porsche 911.”
24 / evaluation
“I foreshadowed a little bit ago in the TV rights deal with World Sports Group and Sony that Lalit had given him his word as a gentleman that if this whole thing doesn’t work, I’ll rip up the deal and I’ll won’t carry IPL forward.”
25 / belief
“There was a news story in 2023 (I think) about them trying to invest in the IPL at a $30 billion valuation, which is 2x even the highest number I’ve seen.”
26 / uncertainty
“I don't know why I would watch one of the first three periods of an NBA game or the first three quarters of the season.”
27 / prediction
“We’re going to do a two-team franchise auction in the same model as the first one, except now we expect the prices are going to be much higher.”
28 / commitment
“I will say, given how rushed this was, it is shocking how well it has all set up.”
29 / belief
“Now, another BCCI board member, N Srinivasan, who (I think) by this time had become the chair of the board and was Lalit’s main nemesis on the BCCI board, directly owned the Chennai Super Kings through India Cements.”
30 / belief
“I think four of the six major league cricket teams in the US have IPL ownership.”
31 / belief
“In IPL, even today I think players are getting 12%–15% of the revenue of the league.”
32 / belief
“I think One Day Internationals, they actually did start wearing more athletic clothing.”
33 / belief
“The best players look “tired.” I think tired is in quotes for cricketers. They can play any day of the week.”
34 / belief
“You bid $100 million, it’s $10 million over 10 years on average, but I’m only going to charge you $5 million in the first. I believe that’s how it was set up.”
35 / commitment
“I will say the ALCS—I’m from Cleveland—the Guardian’s total payroll was $106 million playing the Yankees who is $309 million.”
36 / belief
“If that current growth rate in the domestic Indian ad market of call it 6%–7% per year sustains over the next 20 years, that I believe compounded over 20 years is about a 10x growth.”
37 / observation
“The capital calls are the way to do it. It’s an incredible way to get someone to bid $50-$100 million for something that doesn’t exist yet, to say well, in the first year you’re only out $5 million.”
38 / belief
“Preity Zinta’s group gets the Kings XI Punjab for $76 million, suspiciously close in price to the $75 million Shah Rukh Khan bid, but only $1 million more. Anyway, this (I think) is known at the time.”
39 / belief
“I think that might be the story. Either way, to drive a Porsche 911 in India, period, is a big statement.”
40 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if Lalit was thinking he would actually call IPL the Indian Cricket League, but then something else launches called the Indian Cricket League.”
41 / belief
“I think that’s an interesting way to look at it, but again, nobody owns a league.”
42 / belief
“I think by our calculations—we tried to estimate a P&L for any given team—we’re looking at something today like $66 million coming from a central pool and only $4-ish million coming from tickets.”
43 / commitment
“We are going to do a parade to the stadium in Mumbai, and we’re going to have a big, huge victory celebration just like they do in Western sports after they win a World Cup.”
44 / uncertainty
“I don’t know what the likelihood of this is, but if true gambling were to become legal in India, given that $750 million of betting is already happening on foreign bookmaking markets per match, that’s a huge revenue unlock there.”
45 / commitment
“The IPL team owners are starting to own or have partnerships with the other T20 leagues that are popping up. So it’s very easy for them to be like, you guys shouldn’t allow a players’ union and we won’t allow a players’ union.”
46 / belief
“Anyway, all that to say, baseball is the obvious, and I think you have the first example with the Savannah Bananas.”
47 / evaluation
“You just want to assume that if someone knows that they’re about to launch a huge new cricket league that’s not included in your contract and you’re operating under the idea that it is included in your contract, what’s in the contract doesn’t matter as much as what you both feel like you’re agreeing to.”
48 / belief
“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.”
49 / belief
“To give you a little sense of this, Test cricket and I believe One Day Internationals as well, there are four possible outcomes of the game.”
50 / belief
“December 2017, Disney acquires all of 21st Century Fox for (I think) about $70 billion, inclusive of Star, all the operations in India, and this contract.”
51 / belief
“I think there’s a plausible argument to make on demographics alone that the Indian ad market will support 10x IPL media rights revenues, which gets it into the ballpark of the NFL today.”
52 / uncertainty
“MLB, I don’t know that it’s a this commissioner problem, but they’re farther along the decline curve.”
53 / belief
“I think if you do that and you have the media rates on par with the NFL, then you bring up the rest of the revenue streams up to on par, now you’re definitely on par with the NFL.”
54 / belief
“Armchair quarterback, armchair GM right now, I think I would diagnose the NBA as fine and in some sense doing better than ever, but some early red flags that in the long run if they don’t manage the game well.”
55 / belief
“Time zones are definitely the biggest challenge here. But if you put that aside, cricket is actually (I think) totally poised to take off in the US for a couple of reasons.”
56 / belief
“I don’t think you can bet on that, but I think you definitely can bet on 2x expansion of just simply inventory of games played, which combine that with 5x expansion in the ad market.”
57 / belief
“My carve out is an oldie but definitely goodie, at least as far as Acquired is concerned, because actually (I think) as much as anything, it was our original inspiration for doing the show.”
58 / belief
“I think if you can find a way to smartly, without risking the economics of the league, upgrade the infrastructure and the stadium infrastructure here, there is just so much low hanging fruit.”
59 / belief
“I think if this hadn’t happened and there’d just been the forcing out of Modi, things might really have gone sideways here because they got so much worse.”
60 / belief
“Major League Cricket, for listeners out there, I’d spent a good amount of time with Soma Somasegar, who is the former Microsoft exec now at Madrona, who is a co-owner with Satya Nadella of the Seattle Major League Cricket team. It is very interesting getting his perspective on developing Major League Cricket in the US because I think the whole bet with Major League Cricket is we got to build cricket fandom domestically in a grassroots way with players here, slowly over time.”
61 / commitment
“Hey, there are 20 million hardcore cricket fans in the US today, as we will get into later in the episode.”
62 / belief
“If you want to know every time an episode drops, check out our email list. It’s the only place where we share a hint at what our next episode will be and share episode corrections, updates, and little tidbits that we learned from previous episodes.”
63 / commitment
“I will say more than any other episode that we’ve done, it seems like every element of this has two completely different sides to the story, both of which the leaders of that side dig in and maintain their side.”
64 / belief
“The maximum salary that he sets for year one is $5 million or maximum purse for the auction. Then that means the minimum purse is (I think) $3.”
65 / belief
“Now, you’re setting up something that in practice, I think the cap probably would do its job and there’s enough policing to ensure that the low trust environment thing you would do would say, oh great.”
66 / belief
“To apply this to the IPL, the question is who are the IPL’S competitors? And I think because they are so n-of-one at this point, you have to think about it as their potential competitors or potential competitors in the past that they have since vanquished.”
67 / belief
“I think that is unlikely because of the hammer that the BCCI has of, hey you Indian players, if you do that will ban you from international competition.”
68 / belief
“I think the Saudis want to get involved, or sovereign wealth funds generally want to get involved because they see this as a great long-term growth investment.”
69 / belief
“Then Facebook and Meta probably care even more because India is (I believe) the largest user base for WhatsApp.”
70 / belief
“Then because they had so much leverage and there was so much money, I think if I remember right when discussions were being bandied about about this happening, Chris was like, I’m just going to go play in the IPL and no longer play international cricket for the West Indies.”
71 / belief
“Point being you can’t police what happens outside of the artificial construct of a direct salary contract negotiation. And the way (I think) this plays out in practice in the NFL is let’s say you’re a player mid- to late-career.”
72 / belief
“I’ve been afraid of mystery box–style shows since Lost disappointed me, and I think Severance is going to give me a warm, nice embrace.”
73 / prediction
““I got the idea of the player auction because our family company had a partnership with Sotheby’s Auction House in India, where you offer the item to the highest bidder.”
74 / evaluation
“In many respects, the current structure where we have Redbird or CVC, big institutional investors in the IPL,” which we will get to in just a sec, “that wouldn’t have been possible without the new governance structures that were put in place circa 2015 by the Supreme Court.”
75 / evaluation
“What is the actual income statement look like? It’s impossible to know for sure because none of this is public and reported.”
76 / recommendation
“We talked about this a little already, but I would say until the IPL auction innovation, what was generally regarded as the most effective way to deal with this is a hard salary cap.”
77 / prediction
“They set up the Nimbus Sports Channel. It (I believe) quickly becomes the number one sports channel in India.”
78 / evaluation
“Because he is friends with Shah Rukh, he knows that Nokia, the big handset manufacturer at the time, remember we’re still slightly pre-smartphone era here; we’re in 2007.”
79 / disagreement
“Obviously, that’s not what Lalit wants because he needs the cash to have the central sponsorship guarantees, central media guarantees out to the franchises.”
80 / evaluation
“All these auctions that I keep running for all these media rights and sponsorships and everything, work really, really, really well because they collapse everything down to a super clear, one time, in the moment transaction, and I can set the guardrails for minimum, maximum.”
81 / evaluation
“Then that happened and then the knives came out. It’s interesting, quite interesting, all these very serious allegations that get brought up against Modi, and then ultimately the BCCI decides that he did do them and bans him for life in 2013, because the chairperson of the BCCI at this point in time and Lalit’s great rival who’s one of the forces behind ousting him is N Srinivasan, the owner of the Chennai Super Kings via his family’s business, India Cements.”
82 / prediction
“In this case I think we should do Bull, bear, and mega bull case because I think there is a mega bull case here.”