IPL 2016: Just how many miles are flown?

Idle musings on a Sunday morning.

The annual carnival that is the Indian Premier League just got started yesterday. In some of the earlier editions, each of the 8 teams had one home ground, and would play every other team twice - one at home and one away (opponent's home ground) - making a total of 14 matches per team in the league stage. Then came the eliminator, two qualifiers, and the final. However, things have changed since then, with some teams having more than one home ground. 

In IPL 2016, there are 10 different venues for the 8 participating teams. And that got me thinking about what a logistical nightmare it might be, just planning teams' travel. Of course, folks like us don't think about things like that without looking through the lens of airline miles! So here goes...

So, here's the schedule of matches for IPL 2016. As I mentioned earlier, there are 8 teams, that play matches at 10 different venues. Now, some of these venues are so near each other (BOM-PNQ: 77 miles; DEL-IXC: 146 miles) that driving is more efficient compared to flying, whereas some other locations do not have direct flights from some cities (eg, for BOM-RPR, one has to necessarily connect at a third airport). For the purpose of this post, I've disregarded such quirks, and assumed that there will be direct flights from and to all cities that teams need to travel between. 

There are also two matches (on 19 and 21 May 2016, towards the end of the league stage) where the location is yet to be confirmed. I've not considered these two matches for my calculations.

Finally, there are some games that are spaced so far apart that some of the teams (or individual team members) may travel to another city (say, their home base) before moving on to their next game. Because such travel will be inefficient, I've assumed that teams will move directly to the city of their next match.

So how much does each team fly?

Teams fly, on average, about 5,700 miles each. However, there's quite a range of flying involved! On top are the team from Pune, who fly 6,746 miles total, in the league stage. At the other end of the spectrum are the Sun Risers Hyderabad, who fly just over half of what Pune does - at 3,438 miles. 

Here's a summary.

Interestingly, the Sun Risers Hyderabad team flies 10 times, but still clocks up only 3,438 miles, or an average flight distance of about 344 miles. That can be largely attributed to Hyderabad's geographical location. Being centrally located in India, distances to other venues are short, which is quite the opposite in Delhi's case.

And how many miles are flown, all in?

Assuming a squad of 25 players plus 10 staff (coaches, support, administrative, etc), that alone works out to a whopping 1,597,785 miles, or about 36,313 miles per day of the league phase of 44 days!

There are a number of other people that travel, such as umpires and match officials, board officials, commentators, the media teams, sponsors, etc, and of course, fans themselves. And not all of these people travel in the same pattern as the playing squads. Finally, the squads of the top 4 teams will also travel to some extent, to play the eliminator, qualifers and the finals. 

So it is very difficult to account for all the miles flown for the tournament. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say another million miles for these others, taking the total to over 2.5 million miles!

Now that's something, isn't it! 

I wonder if the players get to keep the miles earned...