The joy of being a sports fan lies not in your team’s victory but in the sweet pain that comes with defeat. When you win after years of suffering, cursing, cussing, but still faithfully turning up at the stadium every weekend in hope that today might be the dawn of a new era, that is when you truly get elated.

Liverpool fans who went to Istanbul, despite 21 years of despair, for the Champions League final against AC Milan in 2004, will tell you. Boston Red Sox fans, who waited 86 seasons at Fenway Park for a World Series title, will tell you some more. They had stuck it out through the bad times; that’s why they wept on the streets in the good.

It’s on this sentiment of ecstasy in agony that club sport is based. It takes time — years, decades — to get such loyalty. And it takes as long for that devotion to translate into good business for those who own the clubs from the day of their inception.

When you support a club, you love everything about it — the players, no matter what creed or colour they belong to; a great manager in a game such as football becomes a father figure; and the stadium is a holy shrine whose mud you proudly smear on your forehead.

Any league needs this passion in order to be successful. The Indian Premier League (IPL), with its brand icons and its millions of dollars, will have to strive for that much in order to survive.

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