… Company still operating in the red

By Stephan Sookram
THIS year’s Hero Caribbean Premier League (CPL) will cost US$22M with the company still running in the red. According to the Chief Operations Officer (COO) of the Caribbean Premier League Pete Russel, this edition will see investors pumping a total over $4.5B Guyana dollars into the tournament which will run for six weeks.
“It’s still slightly in the red; It’s a very expensive tournament to run,” the COO confirmed during a press briefing yesterday with members of the media.
“If you look at our investment this year it’s going to be another US$22M that we pump into the tournament; that’s a huge amount of money and therefore yes, commercially we have to try to make that work,” the COO said.
But, the general idea behind the tournament is to break even, the CPL COO said, adding that “there is a gap but it’s closing every year and our aim is to get it to break even certainly by next year and let’s see where it goes from there.”
“What’s great (about the CPL) is the quality of cricket. This tournament is now being known around the world so it makes the commercial deals that much easier, “When we can do deals like have Facebook come to us and say ‘we want to put your product on Facebook live to over 40 countries’ that’s exciting, and that tells you something about what people want to watch.”

CPL WANTS TO GIVE BACK
Nonetheless, the CPL still has a plan to invest in the region with Russel saying, “We want to be seen in the region, to be in each of the CPL countries 12 months of every year. We want to be a part of the solution for West Indies Cricket.
“We feel we played our part for what happened in India and we want to continue to be there.”
While he did say that he cannot control how the investment is utilised, he opined, “Even if it’s a small thing like adopting a cricket club, making it a CPL cricket club where we improve the facility, make it a centre of excellence for younger players, whatever the structure is, we want to be a part of it.”
“One of the parts of the proposal we put to the government here was along those lines,” the COO said.