Delhi: In one of the biggest deals in the history of IPL, a consortium bought the Rajasthan Royals team for $1.63 billion (approximately Rs 16290 crore). The head of this consortium is Kal Somani.

Who is Kaal Somani?

The consortium, led by US-based investor Kal Somani, bought the entire 100 per cent stake, sealing the league’s rapidly rising valuation.

Global investors like Walmart are also included in this group. Well, this deal was less than the sale of Royal Challengers Bangalore for $ 1.78 billion, yet the price of this franchise, bought for just $ 67 million in 2008, has increased more than 20 times. With this sale, Rajasthan Royals became the first IPL team to be sold for more than $1 billion.
Kal Somani lives in Scottsdale, Arizona and is a businessman. His business is in many different sectors and sports. Apart from cricket, he also has a deep connection with golf. He is also associated with the ‘Motor City Golf Club’, which also has ties to Tiger Woods. His son, Arjun Somani is himself a golfer making a name for himself in the US junior circuit.

By the way, let us tell you that yesterday Somani became especially interested in Rajasthan Royals because he was already a shareholder in it (since 2021). He had already said that he wants to remain associated with this team for a long time and if there is a possibility in the future, he will invest more. Now he has become the main owner of the team.

As soon as he learned that RedBird Capital Partners, one of the existing shareholders, wanted to exit the ownership rights, he started working on the takeover.

The two biggest names included in this consortium led by Kal Somani include Rob Walton of Walmart family and Hamp family (Ford).

Kal Somani has been working on projects to ed-tech, data privacy, AI governance and sports tech for the last 15 years. He is the founder of global services firm IntraEdge, privacy compliance platform Truyo, AI governance firm Truyo.AI and ed-tech services provider Academian and are all big names.

The current Rajasthan Royals think tank accepted Kal Somani’s offer instead of accepting the offer of more than Rs 700 crore and the biggest reason for this is the sports management knowledge of Kal Somani’s consortium. The current owners did not want the team to become just a business and become infamous. The Hamp family owns a majority stake in the NFL’s Detroit Lions. Talking about Kal Somani himself, he is one of the owners of Motor City Golf Club, TMRW Sports and one of the investors who started TGL Golf League. The biggest offer was received from Columbia Pacific Capital Partners and it was worth $1.7 billion.

Let us tell you that Rajasthan Royals is the first team to win the IPL trophy. Apart from this, there are some other special achievements in the name of this team such as: the first team to have a foreign captain and coach, the first team to play matches in more than one ‘home ground’, the first team to play two exhibition matches abroad, and the first team to play home and away matches in different kits. This group also has a team outside IPL. In 2021, to expand their global presence, the owners of Rajasthan Royals purchased a majority stake in Caribbean Premier League franchise Barbados Tridents (later renamed Barbados Royals). This is the first IPL team which created an academy outside India.

According to a report, Kal Somani’s net worth is more than $110 billion and he is one of the richest sports owners in America. Now Kal Somani will try to give a new identity to Rajasthan Royals and the most special thing in this will be that the team tries to win the IPL title again.

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