Kolkata Knight Riders - The IPL Kolakta Cricket Team

Kolkata Knight Riders - The IPL Kolakta Cricket Team

Kolkata Knight Riders 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. Kolkata Knight Riders 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 Kolkata cricket team, named the Kolkata Knight Riders went to Red Chillies Entertainment of Shah Rukh Khan, Juhi Chawla and Jay Mehta.

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.

Kolkata Knight Riders will get a equal percentage of revenue from the central revenue pool apart from the money earned from selling tickets, merchandise like Kolkata Knight Riders 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 Kolkata 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 Kolkata team - the Kolkata Knight Riders will have a theme song, brand ambassdors, logo and team colors. Logo will be Knight Riders Black Mask.

Saurav Ganguly will be the one of the IPL icons and captain of the Kolkata Knight Riders team.

For more details visit the Kolkata Knight Riders page