New Delhi, July 6 -- In June 2025, Royal Challengers Bengaluru won an Indian Premier League title for the first time in eighteen years of trying, with Virat Kohli, the only player who had stayed with the franchise since its founding, at the center of it. Thirteen months later, the company that owned the team sold it.

Rs 16,660 crore, all cash.

United Spirits picked up the franchise in 2008 as part of the UB Group empire built by Vijay Mallya, paying roughly $111.6 million, then about Rs 476 crore. Mallya's business collapsed and he left India in 2016 amid fraud allegations tied to Kingfisher Airlines, and Diageo, which had taken control of United Spirits the same year, inherited a cricket franchise as an unplanned asset sitting inside a...