Salman Khan, the macho man of tinsel town who is (in) famous for never forgetting or forgiving anyone who misbehaved with him, has decided to take his cold war with Shah Rukh Khan to another level by buying Ahmedabad team of Indian Premier League (IPL). Sources say that Salman Khan does want to give a free reign to Shah Rukh Khan in the cricket field of IPL and hence will be buying a team of his own to face (SRK’s team) in the upcoming season of IPL in 2011. In this regard, Salman Khan has already met IPL commissioner Lalit Mody to discuss the nitty gritty of the whole acquisition procedure.
Sources say that Salman Khan is likely to buy Ahmedabad team of IPL in association with a big business house of the country. The tender process for the IPL is likely to star in December this year and team acquisition will be completed by January 2010.
In fact, Salman Khan’s desire to own an IPL team comes from the fact that Shah Rukh Khan got huge media coverage in the last season of IPL due to affairs of his IPL team, Kolkata Knight Riders. It was beyond Salman Khan’s expectations and now he does not want to leave such an important arena to his most fierce competitor.
Sources close to Salman Khan say that he was amazed by the fact that Shah Rukh Khan got such a huge publicity and earned handsome moolah despite of the fact that his IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders was the worst performer on the field. But the ownership had given Shah Rukh undue advantage over Salman Khan and other bollywood biggies in the matter of publicity of their upcoming flicks.
While Salman and others had to spend crores to get their films publicized, Shah Rukh Khan did it effortlessly by owning the IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders. In fact, media went hounding for Shah Rukh for his comments about Coach John Buchanan, Sourav Ganguly etc of IPL. All this publicity helped his films and even his ordinary flicks became super hits.
Another theory doing the rounds in the industry is that Salman Khan wants to buy an IPL team for his sister Arpita, who is a huge cricket lover. By doing this he intends to fulfill Arpita’s wish as well as become equal to Shah Rukh Khan, as only this cricket tag is lacking in Salman’s armory for the time being.
However, buying an IPL team will not be easy this time and Salman Khan will have to spend at least Rs 1000 crore for it, which is said to be the base price ($250 million) this time. In fact, this price is double of even Mukesh Ambani’s Mumbai Indians team, which was the costliest at$111 million in the last season. Shah Rukh Khan had bought Kolkata team for a meager $76 million to be paid over ten years. Besides Shah Rukh Khan’s Kolkata Knight Riders, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty are also associated with IPL teams of Punjab and Rajasthan respectively.
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