In late 2024, a private investor approached us with a thesis: India has the population, the disposable income, and the country club infrastructure to support a serious domestic golf league. The question was whether such a thing could be built — and what it would actually cost to build it.
Eighteen months later, the Indian Golf Premier League had ₹25 crore in capital, eight signed franchises, a broadcast deal, and a calendar. Here is what we learned along the way that has now become the operating template for every league-formation engagement we run.
The first ninety days are about pressure-testing the thesis, not building anything
The temptation in the first weeks of any league build is to start designing logos. Resist it. The first ninety days should be entirely spent answering one question: does this league have an actual reason to exist, or are we romanticising a hobby category?
We pressure-tested IGPL's thesis against three comparable league formations from the previous decade. The economics held in two of the three comparisons; the third comparison taught us where we would have to design differently.
The deck is the company
By month four, the investor narrative deck had been rewritten six times. Each rewrite removed a question the room would otherwise have asked. By round seven, the room was nodding instead of probing — and the ₹25 crore moved into escrow.
The deck is not a sales tool. It is the founding document of the company. Everything operational downstream — franchise pitches, broadcast negotiations, player recruitment — is a footnote to the case the deck makes.
Franchises buy a decade, not a season
The eight franchise owners we ended up with had one thing in common: they were buying a vision of what their city's team would be worth in 2034, not what it would generate in cashflow in 2025. Three other prospective owners we turned down were optimising for the inaugural season alone. They would have been bad owners.
Selling franchises is not a sales process. It is a fit process. We deliberately rejected revenue we could have closed because the buyer would have been wrong for a ten-year build.
Broadcast is a structural trap
Every new league discovers the same problem at the same point: networks will not commit without proven audience traction; audience traction is impossible without distribution. We resolved this with a structured OTT-first window in season one that let us prove the watchable product before negotiating linear.
If we had not solved this in advance — at deck stage, not at broadcast-deal stage — the league launch would have been delayed by at least nine months.
What we would do differently next time
- Earlier player engagement. We brought players into the conversation in month nine. Should have been month three. Players are not just talent — they are co-marketing assets, and the ones who feel ownership perform differently.
- City selection through a real demand signal, not a desk study. Two of our eight cities are stronger than the model predicted. One is weaker. We would now run a small physical event in each candidate city before committing the franchise.
- Press strategy a quarter earlier. Our launch quarter was strong, but the trade press infrastructure we built for season one should have been built in parallel with franchise sales, not after.
None of these would have changed the outcome materially. But they would have compressed the timeline by three to four months, which in league formation terms is a season.
The bigger lesson
League formation is not a marketing problem with an operations side. It is an operations problem with a marketing side. The work that determined whether IGPL would be a real property or an experiment was the structural work: format design, franchise selection, broadcast architecture, capital structure. The brand and press work amplified that structural work — but it could not have substituted for it.
For anyone considering a league build: spend the first nine months on structure, not on brand. The brand can be built in three months when the structure is right. The structure cannot be built in three months under any circumstances.