The Ranji Trophy Crisis: What the Board's Priorities and Domestic Cricket Neglect Actually Cost

A small foam board hangs on the outer wall of the Gymkhana ground in Hyderabad — 'Ranji Trophy match, entry free'. For the last three seasons I have stood at the tea stall adjoining that wall, counting gate scans. In the first domestic round this year, the afternoon session count was 214 — and more than 190 of those people were first-timers who did not come back. This is no protest, no fan movement. It is the familiar act of walking away — the currency of domestic cricket quietly losing the reason why anyone should stand at the gate at all.

Last week my WhatsApp panel — 120 season-ticket holders and domestic followers in Hyderabad — told me they had not even seen the Ranji season schedule. My count was clear: 74 of 120 said they didn't know the season was back home. This is no national survey — it is a leading indicator from my panel; put the number beside it and treat it as direction, not finding.

Note this is not about a single match.

Indian cricket's economic structure runs on a very clean linear line: national team at the top, the IPL in the middle, and domestic cricket below. Against the 2026-24 broadcast rights deal, the Ranji Trophy's distribution arrangement is close to a silent room — some matches are streamed, but cost, production and viewership remain as uncertain as on day one. The BCCI has signed annual sponsorship deals worth crores for the Ranji, but the domestic player does not get the premium that a 140-kph ball earns in the IPL. Ranji matches are still played from nine in the morning to the middle of the afternoon, exactly when IPL fandom is being built. This is not a question of morality — it is a question of product placement.

When you treat domestic cricket as a product, an uncomfortable truth emerges: the BCCI has no domestic cricket brand because it never built one. In building the Premier League model it learned from the IPL — franchise, home city, prime time for television. But no such experiment was ever run for the Ranji Trophy. The requirement to play Ranji matches in stadiums, on working days, is a system designed to choke attendance. Last week a tournament official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that the number of people inside the stadium only watching the scoreboard has fallen 32 per cent over five years, while media coverage of domestic matches runs mostly off press releases, not reporting. I kept that claim because it leads me in the same direction I suspected — the ratio of people actually present is worsening.

I go back to the seventeen public screenings in Hyderabad where the 2026 World Cup was watched. What I understood then was that the Ranji Trophy had no organised fan-sink. The World Cup fan desk built forums; the Ranji did not — and the real test of any product is whether a collective event forms around it.

Now to a hard question.

The BCCI is now planning to change the Ranji Trophy calendar more than before — with IPL expansion and a packed national schedule, thinning the domestic calendar looks almost inevitable. The contemporary argument is that if no one is coming to Ranji matches, cut that calendar efficiently. That argument is very clean, very financial, and very wrong. Because it takes the absence of a crowd as a cause rather than a result, and therefore never searches for its solution in demand.

I believe the Ranji Trophy's problem is not in the structure available, but in its format. There is no need to bring the franchise model here — doing so could put a premium on broadcast rights like the ISL — rather, small, localised things are needed. For instance, Friday-to-Sunday matches, nominations from outside the big cities, gate ticket-tracking systems with the local municipal corporation, and at least one free live-stream on a national broadcast app. This is the package of things the IPL started doing from 2026 — but the board kept it limited to the IPL.

In five years of reporting my fastest conclusion is this: I no longer expect the board to make a big marketing investment in domestic cricket. The reason is that in the BCCI's own eyes the Ranji Trophy is a development product that tests player selection, not one for fandom. There is an inherent weakness in this dual role. There is a gap between the bowling and selection committee needed to create a tournament's 'fan face'. When a local hero's domestic hundred doesn't create a social media media circuit, how will a new viewer's entry path be built?

Perhaps the biggest thing any fan desk taught me — 60 matches in the 2026 bio-bubble, empty stadiums, and a 120-strong Virtual Fan Press Box — was the first close look at fan-copying structures. During that time 68 per cent of fans said they watched alone, but group calls reduced the loneliness. This means fandom is built from the social fabric, on any platform. Has a similar social fabric been built for domestic cricket, or has the Ranji Trophy become a silent space between state association administrative duty and player wages?

Stop and think here: we absorb crores from broadcast rights bids, discuss IPL franchise valuations all year, but we don't even think it necessary to look at the lock on the Ranji Trophy ticket counter. The greatest tragedy of economic logic is that when no account is kept of something, it automatically moves outside economic definition — and domestic cricket is exactly in that position. The number you never count was never there for you. The BCCI must decide which category the Ranji Trophy sits in its books — brand, or liability. Because if its place is as a liability, why not cut the season by 20 days every year? And if it is to be a brand, it must spend what is necessary to build a brand. It must choose one.