In January 2008, someone or several people made one of the smartest and darkest investments in sports history. For $67 million, they acquired the rights to a cricket franchise in Rajasthan, a desert state with no great cricketing tradition, no glamorous downtown, and no obvious commercial appeal. It was the cheapest of the eight original IPL franchises. No one else wanted it at that price.
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Eighteen years later, the same franchise sold for $1.63 billion. That’s a return of over 2,300%. But the story of how that money was made, and more importantly, who it was made for and how the ownership was structured, is one of the most convoluted, scandal-ridden and legally contested stories in cricket history.
IPL 2026: COMPLETE COVERAGE
This is the complete story of Rajasthan Royals.
A grim start
In January 2008, the BCCI auctioned eight brand new IPL franchises to the highest bidder. Mumbai grossed $111 million. Chennai grossed $91 million. Kolkata, Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Punjab dominated premiums. The auction rooms were bursting with Bollywood money, industrial dynasties and an atmosphere that Indian cricket was becoming something completely different.
And then there was Rajasthan.
The winning bid came in at $67 million, the bottom of the market. The winning entity was Emerging Media, a subsidiary of British technology group Blenheim Chalcot, led by a British-Indian entrepreneur named Manoj Badale.
Labyrinth in the desert
From the very beginning, nothing about the ownership of Rajasthan Royals was straightforward. The franchise agreement was not signed by Emerging Media.
The official franchise agreement with the BCCI was signed on 14 April, almost three months after the auction, by Jaipur IPL Cricket Pvt Ltd. This entity was registered after winning the auction.
At that precise moment, JICPL’s share register listed only two names: Ranjit Barthakur and Fraser Castellino, each holding 5,000 shares. Shortly after the signing, the stock reversed: Castellino transferred his shares by October 2008, Barthakur by January 2009. The real power resided in EM Sporting Holdings Ltd, a Mauritian vehicle designed for opacity.
Here the plot thickened into a labyrinth. EM Sporting had many partners. Tresco International Ltd, controlled by Suresh Chellaram, Lalit Modi’s own brother-in-law, held a whopping 44.2% stake, making it the single largest shareholder. Badale’s Emerging Media IPL Ltd held 32.4%. Blue Water Estate, associated with Lachlan Murdoch (son of media mogul Rupert), acquired 11.7%. Kuki Investments, associated with Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty and her husband Raj Kundra, rounded out the list, also with 11.7%. On paper, Badale was a public face, a trusted technology investor with a cricket academy past. In fact, Modi’s family loomed large, fueling whispers of conflict: the IPL commissioner reportedly locked his relatives into the franchise he oversaw.
Modi personally designed the tournament, conducted the auction and hired the franchise owner. Investigators later alleged that he also arranged for his family to have a majority stake in one of the eight teams he oversaw. Rajasthan Royals was not just cheap. They were controversial from day one.
Probe
When the Foreign Investment Promotion Board tried to investigate the ownership in 2009, it asked one question that no one could clearly answer: how did Badale pay $5 million in real money on behalf of a company that did not yet exist? When the BCCI investigated further in 2010 and discovered shareholders whose names reportedly did not appear anywhere in the franchise’s published ownership, it banned the team entirely. The Rajasthan High Court granted reinstatement, but the damage was done. Rajasthan Royals was now a franchise with something to hide.
But something close to magic happened on the field.
Warne’s team
Shane Warne was 38 when he took over as Rajasthan captain in 2008. He retired from international cricket. He was a legend playing in a new format with a team of cheap buys and unknowns. Shane Watson, Sohail Tanvir, Yusuf Pathan. The Royals had no stars, no budget, no magic.
They won the tournament. Almost immediately they became cricket’s great romantic story: the cheapest team, the forgotten franchise, the trophy lifter.
Warne’s association with the franchise would endure as captain. When the team was rebuilt in 2018 after its darkest years, he returned as a stakeholder and received capital in recognition of all he had meant to the club.
Scandals
The Chellaram-Modi shadow never fully lifted, but more recent disasters have added to it. In 2013, three Rajasthan Royals players – Sreesanth, Ankeet Chavan and Ajit Chandila – were arrested by the Delhi Police for spot-fixing.
That same year, the Income Tax department launched a formal benaami investigation into the franchise’s founding ownership structure and sent detailed questionnaires to the BCCI regarding the Modi-Chellaram connection and the post-auction shell labyrinth.
Then in 2015, a Supreme Court-appointed Mudgal committee found co-owner Raj Kundra, husband of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, who bought the franchise when it doubled in value in its first year, guilty of illegal betting.
BCCI suspended Royals. There were no Rajasthan Royals in the IPL for 2016 and 2017.
This franchise has been excluded, investigated, fixed, staked and banned. And yet the underlying asset was appreciating. This is perhaps the moral of the IPL commercial story: scandal is temporary, appreciation is permanent.
Reconstruction
The Royals returned in 2018 with a materially cleaner structure. Opacity has been removed; Shetty and Kundra were gone; Badale’s Emerging Media was now more clearly in control. The team was redesigned around young Indian talent. Sanju Samson, eventually as captain; Yashasvi Jaiswal appeared in the ranks.
Warne’s magic never returned. The base has partially shifted to Assam. The skipper handed over to Riyan Parag, who surprisingly survived the stormy ride.
Sale
By 2025, with the IPL’s media rights and global profile reaching all-time highs, Badale and existing investors decided it was time to walk away. The process was managed by the investment bank that handled the sale of Chelsea FC and advised Manchester United.
A consortium led by Kale Somani, an Arizona-based technology entrepreneur who had quietly held a minority stake in the franchise for years, eventually won the bid, with a reported value of $1.63 billion. The transfer of ownership is expected to take place after the 2026 IPL season ends.
The consortium backing the acquisition includes two world-renowned sports owners: Rob Walton of the Walmart family and Sheila Ford Hamp of the Ford Motor dynasty.
Settlement
The numbers are staggering. A $67 million investment in 2008, made through a shell company, through a Mauritian holding company, with the IPL commissioner’s brother-in-law as the majority beneficial owner, netted $1.63 billion eighteen years later. This became the IPL.
Money flows in several directions. Badale, who consolidated to 65% ownership before the sale, walks away with the biggest individual gain. RedBird Capital and Lachlan Murdoch both substantially increased their returns. The Chellaram family, who held 44.2% during the franchise’s most controversial years, cashed in a hefty sum for their initial investment, though the exact numbers remain, conveniently, opaque.
And Lalit Modi? Benaami’s income tax investigation never resulted in a criminal conviction. The questions it raised—why the shell company, why the post-auction incorporation, why the brother-in-law majority—were never conclusively answered.
What Rajasthan Royals ultimately represent is not just a franchise story, but an IPL story: that of an institution that launched amid questions, survived scandal on a scale that would have destroyed a lesser brand, and emerged worth 24 times its base price.
The desert state nobody wanted turns out to contain a fortune.
– The end
Published on:
March 25, 2026 10:01 AM IST
