Lalit Modi, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Lalit Modi comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:41:20 David Rosenthal Have you met Lalit?
- ▶ 1:41:21 David Rosenthal Modi?
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:44 David Rosenthal Shall we say, named Lalit Modi.
- ▶ 6:57 David Rosenthal Lalit is the son of the renowned Indian industrialist KK Modi, who had built a fairly large conglomerate in India, you know, in the vein of Reliance or Tata or whatnot.
- ▶ 7:40 David Rosenthal So Lalit, as the heir apparent son in this family to this business, he gets sent to college in the U.S. for his education.
- ▶ 8:47 David Rosenthal So Lalit goes to the Walt Disney Company, and Disney, of course, owns 80% of ESPN at this point in time, and says, hey, my family has this JV with Philip Morris, you know, help them enter the Indian market.
- ▶ 9:37 David Rosenthal So Lalit says, hey, we can leverage this sales force and use those people to go hook up with these early Wild West proto cable operators out there in these towns and villages in India and bring them Disney content.
- ▶ 10:34 Ben Gilbert So at this point, Modi is sort of acting as a middleman between the content
- ▶ 12:57 David Rosenthal Lalit sees this, he's got the partnership with Disney, he's always been interested in sports, and he's like, well, hey guys, you have ESPN.
- ▶ 13:08 David Rosenthal So Lalit and ESPN and Disney, they go to IMG, the big international sports agency, which we didn't plan this at all.
- ▶ 13:32 David Rosenthal So Lalit and ESPN and IMG, they go to the national
- ▶ 17:51 David Rosenthal He was like the proto Lalit Modi.
- ▶ 17:54 David Rosenthal Lalit before Lalit.
- ▶ 19:53 David Rosenthal So Star and ESPN merge, and to hear Lalit tell the story,
- ▶ 19:58 David Rosenthal Rupert Murdoch is kind of a, you know, sore loser here that Lalit came in and increased the money that he had to spend for these cricket rights, ultimately had to merge with ESPN.
- ▶ 20:08 David Rosenthal He decides that he's gonna kick Lalit out of his baby, out of this company, post-merger.
- ▶ 20:18 David Rosenthal That's Lalit's side of the story.
- ▶ 20:19 David Rosenthal Um, Star Disney, the merged entity, would allege that Lalit under-reported revenues that they were collecting and was
- ▶ 20:31 David Rosenthal There's a big lawsuit about it, goes on for a couple of years, and at the end of it, Lalit gets booted out of the business, and despite his family's 50% ownership in that original ESPN Disney joint venture, he gets nothing.
- ▶ 21:15 David Rosenthal And thus begins a 10 to 15 year journey that is not just the ultimate revenge play by Lalit on Rupert, but accidentally along the way starts the biggest sports entrepreneurial story phenomenon that has ever existed.
- ▶ 21:52 Ben Gilbert In most companies we study, there kind of becomes one canonical truth, and it's mostly written by the victors, but in the history of the IPL, and especially with Lalit Modi, there's always two completely different stories representing how…
- ▶ 23:27 David Rosenthal So the net of it is, Lalit's got this blood vendetta against not just News Corp and Star, but like Rupert Murdoch personally, specifically.
- ▶ 23:46 David Rosenthal And it's what Lalit thinks is like his birthright, like he brought to India was professionalizing and televising sports.
- ▶ 24:03 David Rosenthal So Lalit figures, okay, I need to engineer getting myself installed on the BCCI board.
- ▶ 24:21 David Rosenthal So in 1999, Lalit manages to join the board of one of the smaller Indian state cricket associations.
- ▶ 25:57 David Rosenthal But most of the members are industrialists from the industrialist families, just like Modi.
- ▶ 26:23 David Rosenthal And the only reason that Lalit doesn't have this conflict of interest is because he got ousted.
- ▶ 33:37 David Rosenthal So, Lalit, here now in 2005 when he finally gets on the BCCI, first thing he does is he goes to Sahara and he says, the price is going up.
- ▶ 34:53 David Rosenthal And now, why is Lalit able to all of a sudden extract this huge record-breaking amount of value
- ▶ 35:25 David Rosenthal By the time here we are now that Lalit gets on the BCCI and is wrecking all these deals, it's 10 X that.
- ▶ 37:38 David Rosenthal So what's the next thing that Lalit does after this Sahara deal?
- ▶ 37:55 David Rosenthal Lalit goes to the three big companies, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and says, hey, I'm putting out for bid for auction, being the kit provider, the gear provider, kit being the British term for athletic gear.
- ▶ 38:26 David Rosenthal Oh, and by the way, since Lalit knows that there's going to gonna be competitive bidding between these three shoe companies, he makes a media event out of it.
- ▶ 38:46 David Rosenthal Lalit, he's two months in to his tenure on the BCCI board, and he just found a hundred and
- ▶ 42:08 David Rosenthal He sets up a personal meeting with Rupert Murdoch, and he sets the meeting for a friendly Friday afternoon tea.
- ▶ 42:25 David Rosenthal Lalit walks in, sits down, and says, Mr.
- ▶ 43:29 David Rosenthal But of course, Lollett has a plan for this.
- ▶ 43:31 David Rosenthal He's gonna do just what he did back with ESPN in the first place back in the day.
- ▶ 44:15 David Rosenthal So Lalit goes to Sony, who's the number two broadcaster in the
- ▶ 44:20 David Rosenthal He goes to Sky from the UK and says, hey, you want to enter India?
- ▶ 44:23 David Rosenthal And he ultimately goes to an Indian entertainment company called Nimbus, which was a broadcaster, but also didn't have a sports channel.
- ▶ 44:32 David Rosenthal And he says to all of them, these rights are now available.
- ▶ 45:07 Ben Gilbert Wow, so Lalit really did make the BCCI an economic powerhouse where they really didn't have material revenue before, and now suddenly they have hundreds of millions of dollars coming in, what, two hundred million a year-ish between TV and…
- ▶ 45:40 David Rosenthal I mean, he got a hundred and fifty million from two sponsorships.
- ▶ 45:46 David Rosenthal He completely commercialized the BCCI.
- ▶ 45:50 David Rosenthal You know, he would say when he later gets kicked out of the BCCI and there's tons of controversy and everything we'll get into later, people are accusing him of self-dealing, doing all these things.
- ▶ 45:58 David Rosenthal He's like, I created billions of dollars of value.
- ▶ 46:07 David Rosenthal And he's absolutely right.
- ▶ 46:11 David Rosenthal And by the way, he shut Rupert Murdoch out of all of it.
- ▶ 46:17 David Rosenthal He's won.
- ▶ 46:18 David Rosenthal He's extracted his revenge.
- ▶ 46:20 David Rosenthal He's taken over Indian cricket.
- ▶ 46:22 David Rosenthal He's created the single biggest pool of money anywhere around the globe in cricket as a sport.
- ▶ 48:20 David Rosenthal The Indian Premier League, a domestic, city-based cricket league in India that Lalit is gonna set up in the model of the very best elements of the NFL, of the English Premier League, of the NBA.
- ▶ 49:12 David Rosenthal Organization that Lalit now de facto controls.
- ▶ 49:52 David Rosenthal So besides Lalit seeing that there's a inventory opportunity to expand cricket in India here beyond the 105 or so days of competition that the international team is playing,
- ▶ 53:55 David Rosenthal Lalit sees this.
- ▶ 53:56 David Rosenthal He's thinking about starting up a domestic league in India.
- ▶ 56:20 David Rosenthal So, Lalit knows this is the perfect opportunity.
- ▶ 56:23 David Rosenthal He goes back to IMG, who remember he had initially partnered with, with Disney and ESPN way back in the day to start broadcasting cricket in India in the first place, and says, hey, I need to hire you as consultants from the BCCI.
- ▶ 56:39 David Rosenthal And Andrew Wildblood, who runs IMG's India Operations, becomes essentially Lalit's partner in setting up
- ▶ 57:39 Ben Gilbert Not only was it called the Indian Cricket League, which is just a great name, that is actually an entity name that Lalit had registered in the nineties.
- ▶ 57:49 Ben Gilbert 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.
- ▶ 57:58 David Rosenthal This opportunity for a domestic cricket league was not some, like, aha brainstorm that Lalit had once he took over BCCI.
- ▶ 58:37 Ben Gilbert He saw exactly what Lalit saw.
- ▶ 59:01 David Rosenthal So this must have been right before Lalit joined the board and then restructured the whole thing.
- ▶ 1:04:11 David Rosenthal So, Lalit and Andrew Wildblood and IMG are like, okay, we gotta accelerate this.
- ▶ 1:06:43 David Rosenthal Lalit has come over, of course, to South Africa to watch the World Cup.
- ▶ 1:07:48 David Rosenthal So Lalit tells these kids, remember they're kids from India, not from wealthy families here.
- ▶ 1:09:18 David Rosenthal And so he comes running over to Lalit, who Lalit's there, the
- ▶ 1:09:31 David Rosenthal And Lalit would tell you that he paid for it out of his own money.
- ▶ 1:09:35 David Rosenthal Lalit's quote on this is, that lit up the Indian television screen.
- ▶ 1:10:42 David Rosenthal Lala calls up Nike before they leave South Africa, and he's like, I need open air tour buses for the team, for the whole retinue.
- ▶ 1:19:42 David Rosenthal So, first thing that Lalit and Angie Wildblood and IMG decide as they're setting up the league,
- ▶ 1:21:05 David Rosenthal The BCCI and Lalit are already in position to run this as a central model because they already do that for the international cricket rights at the BCCI that Lalit has just hugely successfully done this six hundred and twenty million dollar…
- ▶ 1:21:30 David Rosenthal But, as Lalit and IMG are thinking about how are we gonna maximize the TV rights deal that we'll do for this new IPL, this new domestic cricket league, they kind of have a problem from the success that they just had selling the…
- ▶ 1:23:45 Ben Gilbert So this creates, to your point, this new problem for Lalit and the gang creating the IPL.
- ▶ 1:24:00 David Rosenthal So Lalit actually has a great, amazing quote about this dynamic in the way only Lalit can speak.
- ▶ 1:24:43 Ben Gilbert God, it sounds diabolical in his words.
- ▶ 1:24:46 David Rosenthal He's spot on.
- ▶ 1:25:33 David Rosenthal Uh, this is where Lalit and IMG's just incredible entrepreneurial genius comes in.
- ▶ 1:26:24 David Rosenthal So, I'm gonna read a quote here from Andrew Wildwood at IMG, who was Lala's partner.
- ▶ 1:27:01 David Rosenthal Apart from Bollywood, Lalit and I agreed that we didn't want to compete with other cricket, we wanted to compete with the soap operas.
- ▶ 1:28:34 David Rosenthal Turns out, he and Lalit had known each other since childhood, and there were few others within Indian cricket
- ▶ 1:28:51 David Rosenthal So Lalit knows Shah Rukh Khan, biggest star in India.
- ▶ 1:29:02 David Rosenthal So Lalit goes to him and is like, I need you to be part of the ownership group.
- ▶ 1:29:24 David Rosenthal We should say, all the quotes from Lalit and the direct first-hand information from Lalit comes from a great series of interviews that he did on the Sports Entrepreneurs podcast that we'll link to in the sources.
- ▶ 1:29:33 David Rosenthal So Lalit obviously knows Shah Rukh.
- ▶ 1:29:52 David Rosenthal So Lalit tells the story.
- ▶ 1:29:54 David Rosenthal Shah Rukh said, Lalit, I don't know how to do this.
- ▶ 1:30:01 David Rosenthal I being Lalit.
- ▶ 1:30:21 David Rosenthal So here's what Lala did.
- ▶ 1:30:50 David Rosenthal So Lala says, Shah Rukh, just trust me.
- ▶ 1:30:58 David Rosenthal Lala turns around, and he goes to Nokia, and he says, I know you want Shah Rukh.
- ▶ 1:32:36 Ben Gilbert And Lalit.
- ▶ 1:32:37 David Rosenthal And Lalit.
- ▶ 1:32:40 David Rosenthal So Lalit goes back to Shah Rukh and he's like, all right, I got you your team.
- ▶ 1:33:31 Ben Gilbert But Lalit is a genius at structuring your own out of pocket money.
- ▶ 1:34:47 David Rosenthal Lalit can now go around to everybody and say, Shaaruk is in.
- ▶ 1:36:11 David Rosenthal So Lollett says,
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