Dhandhanadhan Dhoni … gone for $1.5 million! Whew! Symonds (yes, that friend of Bhajji) gone for $1.35 million. Someone called Cameron White gone for a cool half a million. And fading stars, well past their best-before-dates — Jayasuriya, Warne, Muralitharan — all snapped up for multiples of hundreds of thousand dollars. The Indian Premier League (IPL) bidding of last week took hero-worship to dizzying heights of zero-worship, the greater the number of zeroes, the better!

Adding glitz and glamour to the whole tamasha was the presence of King Khan, the effervescent Preity Zinta…and corporate heavyweight Vijay Mallya. Present by proxy was the richest man (or near richest) on planet earth, Mukesh Ambani.

But in all this excitement, all these staggering sums of money where is the fan? Fan? Or are we talking of the consumer of a sports product? Now that is an important question to answer. Because, as sport becomes more and more commercialised, a conflict develops between sports as a business and sports as a game.

On the one hand, sports or sports operas like the IPL operate as billion-dollar businesses in which sports are products and fans are consumers. On the other, sports are games that are often associated with the innocence of youth, the spirit of competition and the integrity of the game. For that every one Ishant Sharma or Manoj Tewary, there is an aging Jayasuriya or Sourav who are obviously playing to top-up bank balances before they soon hang-up their bats.

The element of competition, a certain do-or-die too seems somewhat suspect when neither national honour nor national pride are really at stake. And the huge money tags on players, both local and foreign, make them out more as mercenaries than real warriors in a game of cricket.

Sure, star-power provides a clear identifiable connector for fans with the sport. It serves as a centerpiece for sales of jerseys, shoes, memorabilia…and maybe stadium seats…but star power is also volatile, temporary and often a difficult connection to institutionalise for a sports brand. Irfan Pathan in Mohali or Utthappa in Mumbai have no reason to be local darlings…and locals fans of the game know full well that a Gayle will be in Kolkata today, and gone in 44 days.

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