Cricket is said to be a gentleman’s game. Since its inception, this game has garnered enormous popularity and goodwill among fans across the globe. However, time and again, a few instances have made its credibility into question. In sports, there is a concept known as gambling.
Here, people predict the outcome of a cricket match on various parameters. Further, these predictions lead to monetary transactions. To recall, in India, gambling is illegal as per the law and attracts punishment.
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Involvement Of Cricket Stars And BCCI Officials:
In recent times, a few questions have been raised over the involvement of players and BCCI top brass with gambling companies directly or indirectly. They are either associated with these companies in the form of sponsorships or brand endorsements.
Sourav Ganguly, the BCCI president, has been associated with a gaming company, which also has an avenue that involves transactions with real money. Similarly, we have Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni, also brand ambassadors of Paytm first games.
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Last year, the Madras High Court questioned the role of Saurav Ganguly in sponsoring a gaming website that involves actual monetary transactions. The court said that since Ganguly is a public figure, whatever he endorses, people try to follow those things. If we look at the current Indian players, Shikhar Dhawan and Rishabh Pant are the brand ambassadors of Dream 11, a famous gaming company that works on predicting a team and winning prizes.
CVC Capital On Radar
Recently, two new teams were announced for IPL 2022. One among these two teams is CVC Capital Partners, who purchased the Ahmedabad team by bidding amount of 5625 crores. Lalit Modi, the person behind the advent of IPL, has made a serious allegation against BCCI for allowing betting companies to invest and purchase IPL teams. According to him, the CVC group has invested heavily in betting and gambling companies.
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The portfolio of the CVC group includes associations with betting companies such as Tipico and Sisal. It was strange that this went unnoticed during the verification stage.
BCCI officials are now looking into this aspect. The BCCI investigation department is expected to submit a report by Diwali about the involvement of betting companies with the CVC group. They said that since the final allotment has not been done yet, BCCI is well within its rights to allot the team to the second-highest bidder if they find a betting relationship of CVC group.
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Ambiguity Needs To Be Addressed
All the gaming companies associated with BCCI or the players try to wriggle out the charges of gambling by saying that their business model involves prediction by luck, not by skill. However, if we closely look at the Dream XI prediction, it pans out that the fan’s ability to think and predict the outcome of a match involves the decision rather than pure luck. But, the gaming companies overlook this aspect.
BCCI should address this issue of the involvement of gaming companies in cricket so that the gentleman’s game motto stands tall.
