Sports viewership India 2023-2024, by sport

According to a study conducted from November 2023 to January 2024, cricket had the largest audience base among various sports in India, amounting to over 600 million viewers who watched the sport on either television or streaming services. Football followed second, with roughly half that audience size.

The growth of the Indian sports market

Over the last couple of years, India’s sports industry experienced rapid growth in its market size. While there was a dent in revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the sports industry made a swift recovery from 2021 onwards, bolstered by advertising, sponsorships, and endorsements. Overall, the sector attributes the highest amount of its spending to the media, which amounted to 75 billion Indian rupees and accounted for two-thirds of the entire sports market expenditure in India in 2023.

And the winner is…

Within the rapidly growing sports sector, cricket continues to be the most popular sport in India. One of the biggest and most lucrative tournaments in the cricketing world is the Indian Premier League (IPL). Featuring among the most popular sporting events among Indians viewers, it even surpassed the Olympic Summer Games and the ICC Cricket World Cup in 2021. Post-pandemic, the value of the IPL has skyrocketed, grossing over 10 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. While the IPL's financial success is largely attributed to high-value sponsorships and financial contributions of the franchisees, the key source of its revenue stream was broadcasting rights.