What EPL has been to soccer, IPL is to cricket. IPL was always expected to take cricket world by storm, and rightly so, it did! It is now, the dream of every cricketer to play in IPL, and in some unfortunate cases, it has also been preferred over playing for the country.
Last Sunday, as I was watching the blockbuster match between 2nd placed Manchester United and 3rd placed Arsenal, a thought came to my mind: Has IPL done justice to cricket? ,Can IPL be compared to EPL?
First of all, there is little doubt that IPL is the child of EPL. Right from the nomenclature to the format, bits and pieces of EPL have been put together to conceive IPL. But IPL must be given its due credit, for it showed that professional sports leagues do have a standing in cricket.
Comparing IPL and EPL is a difficult task to do, because both have their supremacy in their own domain, and as they say, ultimately a sport is the winner.
First let us look at the similarities:
Both the leagues are based on the club format, where the player's country of origin does not matter.(I think, now it does ) Both the leagues are born in the country, where people are passionate about the game. If England is the biological mother of Cricket, then it wouldn’t be wrong to say that India is its surrogate mother.
Both the leagues often spark Country v/s Club debates and are often in the news for the ‘Burn-out’ issues regarding the players.
To start with the differences between the two leagues, I somehow feel that the professionalism in EPL is much higher than that of IPL.
In EPL the focus is only on the club. But in IPL, the attention is grabbed equally by the Club, team owners and the players.
The brand association of EPL clubs cannot be compared to that of IPL clubs. EPL fans swear by their clubs and I have seen many fights between the fans of two rival clubs.
A Manchester United Fan may have a bag, wallet, shirt, jacket, watch and even a underwear, all with MAN-U logo. The IPL is yet to see such strong brand association.
The reason I believe is that, since the clubs are based on the cities of India, they have limited global fan following. Also, the local player playing for his home team, rather than some other teams, would have made it easier for fans to connect with the team. For Punjab Kings 11, there cannot be a bigger crowd puller other than Harbhajan Singh, but he plays for Mumbai Indians.
The other reason which restricts the reach of IPL to the global audience is that, unlike Soccer, Cricket has very few countries under its wing.
Also in Soccer, we have players like Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast and Chelsea), Andrei Arshavin (Russia and Arsenal), who are superstars in their sporting arena but their country of origin may be unknown to many. In cricket, Such situation is yet to see the light of the day.
But IPL has revolutionized cricket in it’s own way, and though it may not reach a stature as high as EPL, it certainly has taken Cricket to the next level!

Please do share your views.