Season 3 of the Global e-Cricket Premier League wrapped up in Pune on Sunday, August 9, with eight franchises, up from six last year; a record ₹ 3.1 crore prize pool; and a broadcast deal that took the tournament to American and Canadian television for the first time. Two seasons ago, GEPL was played in front of a single stadium’s worth of fans. Now, it has exploded beyond the subcontinent, and I spent the weekend at the Jairaj Sports and Convention Centre in Pune talking to the people behind that virality — franchise owners, players, and the board of JetSynthesys, the entertainment and tech company that built the league around the mobile title Real Cricket.
When drawn further, he revealed, “We want to go national, so it’s a big plan that’s being made now.
GEPL added two new franchises this year (Sonu Nigam’s Kolkata Hawks and e-sports streamer Tanmay “Scout” Singh’s Gujarat Wolves), and there is a desire to expand further. It’s not about one or two colleges here. We want this to be an entire all-India league. So we’ll decide how we start, but that’s the goal. But Navani dismissed speculation over a potential partnership with the BCCI to bring IPL franchises into the GEPL — similar to how the e-Premier League operates in the United Kingdom, with e-sport athletes representing real-world Premier League clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal.
For now, that remains wishful thinking — the International Olympic Committee’s planned 2027 e-Games in Saudi Arabia stands voided after its partnership with the Saudi Arabian Olympic Committee and the E-Sports World Cup Foundation ended last October, and the Olympics E-Sports Commission was disbanded in May this year. Navani has bigger ambitions still. He wants GEPL to be uttered in the same breath as the IPL and the Premier League. Beyond that, he sees India winning e-sports medals at future Olympic Games, and being at the forefront of the global e-sports boom in the coming decades. But none of that is stopping him from dreaming.
