Is Pepsi Breaking Up With The Indian Premier League?

According to recent reports, PepsiCo will soon be withdrawing its INR396 crore ($71.77M) sponsorship from the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Scandal Soup

PepsiCo’s contract expires in 2017 but the beverage mullah is keen on walking out right now because of the “disrepute” that the IPL is bringing to the game. And by game it means cricket, not cheerleading.

The company is referring to the ever-mushrooming scandals that maligned IPL’s image – right from spot-fixing to court cases to under the table transactions.

However, BCCI has trashed PepsiCo’s reasoning by saying that the company wants to break up because of crashing foreign interests.

What Rubbish!

In a statement to The Times Of India a source said, “They have shown a willingness to move out of the deal from this season because of their own interests and not because of disrepute and stuff. So they may not continue as the main sponsor.

“Because they have the deal with them so we are not bothering them. We have a bank guarantee with us and hence can confiscate it, but we are not doing it. Whosoever will get the rights, we will help get him that guarantee, get it transferred from Pepsi,” they added.

Friendly Defrayal

While PepsiCo was unavailable for comment, IPL Chairman Rajeev Shukla believes that the whole thing is not a big issue. Of course, having handles the amount of scandals and rumors that the IPL has seen; this must seem like a cakewalk!

In a statement to TOI, Shukla disclosed that the league is in talks with other sponsors and that it looks forward to settling the matter rather amicably.

In the meanwhile, we’ll have to snap ourselves out of the practice of saying Pepsi IPL until another million-dollar enterprise fills the spot.