How rich will Indian cricketers be in ten years?
Cricket is growing in India at such a rate that it is not inconceivable that the top-paid sportsman in the world ten years from now will be an Indian cricketer, Rick Westhead says in Toronto's Thestar.com
Dustin Silgardo
25-Feb-2013
Cricket is growing in India at such a rate that it is not inconceivable that the top-paid sportsman in the world ten years from now will be an Indian cricketer, Rick Westhead says in Toronto's Thestar.com. He analyses what the Indian Premier League has done for the sport in terms of increasing its potential to make money and predicts that 13-year-old Armaan Jaffer, who recently broke the record for the highest individual score in Indian school cricket, could one day earn more than the $75 million a year Tiger Woods makes.
The Indian Premier League has just wrapped up its fourth season and player salaries are higher than ever. A recent survey reported the average salary on some teams, which play 14 regular-season games, approached $90,000 a week this year during the frenetic six-week schedule. Then there’s corporate cash. Seizing an opportunity for a toehold in a country whose economy has charged ahead over the past decade at a 9 per cent annual clip, sponsors are signing cricket’s top stars as so-called “brand ambassadors” to contracts worth as much as $3 million a year.
Dustin Silgardo is a former sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo