Rajasthan Royals is one of the eight teams that will be part of the inaugural IPL tournament. The eight teams will represent eight cities in India - Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Jaipur, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mohali. Rajasthan Royals will play 14 league stage home and away matches against the seven other teams in the tournament.
The IPL is a brain child of Lalit Modi and Bindra office bearers of BCCI and was launched in September 2007. A closed bidding process revealed the 8 winners. All the winners combined had paid nearly 800 million dollars to own the rights to their teams for the next 10 years. The rights to own the IPL Jaipur cricket team, named the Rajasthan Royals went to Emerging Media, partly owned by Lachlan Murdoch.
The media rights to the IPL tournament matches were bagged by the Sony Entertainment Television and deal was worth over $1 billion dollars for a period of 10 years. DLF will be the title sponsor for the IPL. Other partners include Hero Honda, Kingfisher Airlines and ITC Welcome Group of Hotels. The money from these deals goes into the central revenue pool of the IPL.
Rajasthan Royals will get a equal percentage of revenue from the central revenue pool apart from the money earned from selling tickets, merchandise like Rajasthan Royals branded T-shirts, caps, ball, bats and much more.
The franchise owners for the 8 IPL teams are all are big businesses - like Reliance Retail, United Breweries, India Cements, GMR Holdings, Emerging Media, Red Chillies Entertainment, Deccan Chronicle Group and Bombay Dyeing, Dabur and Apeejay Surendra groups. The high profile buyers include Vijay Mallaya, Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta.
The IPL had contracted over 80 international cricket stars from the different cricket playing countries around the world. These players were assured a basic fee over and above which the franchisees had to bid to secure a particular player from the auction pool. After a hot bidding process that lasted over 10 hours Mahendra Singh Dhoni emerged as the highest paid player and was bagged by the Chennai Super Kings. Andrew Symonds the second highest paid player went to the Hyderabad Deccan Chargers.
The eight teams IPL Jaipur team have been allowed to make up the rest of their teams by buying players from their local areas called the catchement areas and the under-22 players. Hot competition emerged for the newly crowned under-19 world cup winners. But the BCCI stepped in to protect the colts from too much money corrupting their young minds. A cap of $30,000 dollars per player for under-22 players was put in place.
IPL Jaipur team - the Rajasthan Royals will have a theme song, brand ambassdors, logo and team colors.
Shane Warne will be coach and captain of the Rajasthan Royals team.
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