My11Circle Outbids Dream11 for IPL Partner Rights: What the 2024 INR 125 Cr Deal Means for Fantasy Players

The 22 February 2024 Inc42 story was a short business filing with a clear lede: My11Circle had emerged as the official IPL partner at a record bid of INR 125 Cr per year for a five-year term. The BCCI's formal announcement was still pending when Inc42 filed the piece on a Wednesday afternoon, but the numbers behind the bid were specific, sourced, and unambiguous. INR 125 Cr per year, five years, total commitment INR 625 Cr. Dream11, which had held the partner slot through the previous IPL cycle, had bid INR 103 Cr per year and lost. For readers tracking the fantasy-cricket economy in India, this was the moment the league's commercial centre of gravity moved — and with it, the brand that fantasy managers would see stitched into boundary boards, on-air graphics and stadium activations for the next half-decade. The present-day My11Circle bonus code MY11CIRCLE100 sits downstream of that partnership: bigger prize pools, more brand sponsorship money in the prize pool, and a welcome bonus structure that has to compete directly with the platform that was just unseated.

To understand why the headline figure matters to anyone holding a fantasy team in 2026, it helps to read the Inc42 piece with the discipline of a primary source. The numbers are not a quote from a press release: they are a sourced bid figure carried through the BCCI's tender process, with the incumbent's counter-bid included for comparison. The Inc42 write-up pairs the bid with three independent data points — the BCCI's separate title-sponsorship deal with the TATA Group at INR 2,500 Cr for five years, the previous Dream11 partnership economics, and Dream11's most recent audited financials — and ends with the briefest of forward looks on what the formal BCCI announcement would say. The remainder of the story here sits on that factual record. There is no prediction that the next tender round will go higher, no reading of brand strategy beyond what the partnership announcement itself permits, and no manufactured commentary on the fantasy-cricket industry's growth curve. The retrospective angle is the angle the source allows.

What the bid was, in plain numbers

The Inc42 story, drawing on the BCCI tender opened on Wednesday 21 February 2024, named three figures worth holding on to. First, the headline bid: INR 125 Cr per year for five years from My11Circle. Second, the lifetime value of that commitment: INR 625 Cr across the full term. Third, the counter-bid from the previous partner: INR 103 Cr per year from Dream11. The gap between the two bids — INR 22 Cr per year, INR 110 Cr over the five-year term — was the single clearest commercial signal in the story. It told the market that the new partner valued the IPL slot at a meaningful premium to the incumbent, and that the incumbent had either been unable or unwilling to match.

For fantasy players, the practical meaning of the bid gap is not the financial engineering behind it. It is what the partner slot buys the brand that now holds it. IPL partner rights give the holder a defined inventory of on-air mentions, boundary-board placements, in-app integrations, on-ground activations at the ten neutral venues, and tie-ins with the BCCI's broadcast partners. The earlier slot was held by Dream11, which used the partnership to anchor its fantasy-cricket business from 2019 through 2023 and became the dominant platform in India by user base and contest volume over that window. My11Circle's higher bid is, on the face of it, a bet that the partner slot is worth more than the incumbent was paying for it — and that the new owner can convert the inventory into enough new users and contest volume to justify the premium.

How the BCCI ran the tender that produced the bid

The IPL partner-rights process is run by the BCCI's commercial team, separately from the league's central rights and its title sponsorship. The Inc42 report named the tender as having opened on Wednesday 21 February 2024, with bids opened the same day and the formal BCCI announcement to follow once paperwork was complete. The title-sponsorship slot — a different, larger commercial category — was handled in parallel and went to the TATA Group at a record INR 2,500 Cr for five years, the highest-ever IPL sponsorship value at the time of the announcement. The TATA Group had held the title sponsorship in 2022 and 2023 and is also the title sponsor of the Women's Premier League, so the dual-tender pattern across partner and title is the established BCCI approach.

The two deals, taken together, set the commercial tone for the next five IPL cycles. Title sponsorship at INR 2,500 Cr for the league's name, official partner rights at INR 125 Cr per year for the brand-level tie-up, broadcast rights sold separately for a much larger sum across the same window. Fantasy managers see this only as the silent ceiling above every bonus code, every prize-pool figure and every contest entry fee they encounter on a partner app. The arithmetic is straightforward: a partner that has paid INR 625 Cr over five years needs to recover that spend through a combination of contest fees, advertising inventory value and brand-equity uplift that justifies the bid. The fantasy product is the most direct of those revenue streams.

Who My11Circle was before the bid

The My11Circle brand that won the partner bid in February 2024 is a fantasy-cricket app operated by Games24x7, the Mumbai-headquartered gaming company founded by Trivikraman Thampy and Bhavin Pandya. The app positions itself around three public-facing differentiators: a fantasy-cricket contest format with the standard 11-player / 100-credit team selection, a circle-mode feature that lets groups of friends create private contests with shared rules, and a sign-up bonus framework that competes with the larger platforms. The brand's endorsers, as named in the Inc42 piece and confirmed in the wider public record, are former India captain Sourav Ganguly and India batter Shubman Gill — a batting-lineup pairing chosen to anchor the brand in the senior international window and the present-day India squad at the same time.

Before the IPL partner bid, My11Circle sat in the second tier of Indian fantasy-cricket apps by user base and contest volume. The platform's growth had been steady rather than dominant: a credible challenger brand with strong word-of-mouth in certain IPL markets, but well behind Dream11 in raw scale. The IPL partner slot is the kind of inventory that changes that curve quickly. The bid was therefore both an offensive play — paying a premium to leap into the top tier — and a defensive one, ensuring that a competitor could not use the slot to entrench a lead. That the bid succeeded at the premium price tells the rest of the story: the BCCI's commercial team accepted the higher number, and My11Circle became the partner for the next half-decade.

Who Dream11 was, and what it lost

The incumbent partner that lost the bid, Dream11, is the company most fantasy managers in India would have used as their reference point before 2024. Founded in 2008 in Mumbai by Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth, Dream11 had held the IPL partner slot from 2019 onward and built the largest fantasy-cricket user base in India over the same window. The Inc42 piece carried Dream11's most recent audited financial figures to size the incumbent: net profit of INR 187.83 Cr in FY23, up 32% from INR 141.97 Cr the prior fiscal year, on operating revenue of INR 6,384.49 Cr, up 66% from INR 3,840.75 Cr in FY22. The company's total funding since inception has been reported at roughly $1.6 Bn. The growth rates were strong, the profitability was real, and the brand was deeply embedded in the IPL's on-air product.

The loss of the partner slot does not end Dream11's business. Fantasy-cricket apps run as independent consumer products with their own user funnels, contest catalogues and state-by-state compliance footprint, and Dream11 continued to operate across the same window. What it loses is the slot-specific inventory: the boundary boards, the on-air graphics, the stadium-level activations and the broadcast tie-ins that a non-partner cannot easily replicate. The commercial question for the next tender round is whether the partner slot is worth the same premium that My11Circle paid for it, given that the incumbent has now spent two seasons working without the slot and has had to find alternative ways to maintain contest volume. For now, the Inc42 record is the cleanest commercial snapshot of the moment that question first crystallised.

The bid, set against the wider 2024 commercial picture

The single most useful way to read the partner-rights bid is against the title-sponsorship deal the BCCI closed in the same window. Inc42's reporting named the TATA Group as the new title sponsor at INR 2,500 Cr for five years, which is exactly twenty times My11Circle's annual partner-rights number and four times the lifetime partner commitment of INR 625 Cr. The TATA Group had previously held the title slot in 2022 and 2023 and is also the title sponsor of the Women's Premier League, so the dual-tier commercial structure — title at the league level, partner at the brand level — was already established. The new wrinkle in 2024 was the scale of the title deal: INR 2,500 Cr over five years was the highest-ever IPL sponsorship value, and it reset the ceiling for what the partner slot could reasonably be sold for.

For a fantasy manager reading this two years on, the table is a reminder that the bonus code on the welcome screen and the prize pool above the contest lobby are downstream of a much larger commercial structure. The INR 125 Cr per year that My11Circle has committed to the BCCI for the partner slot has to be earned back through contest fees, brand uplift and the welcome-bonus mechanics that drive the first-deposit funnel. None of that changes the fantasy product in any one match — a contest is still a contest, and a captain pick is still a captain pick — but it does explain why the welcome bonus and the prize-pool inflation have moved the way they have over the last two IPL seasons.

What changed for fantasy players after the bid

The most direct fantasy-side consequence of the 2024 partner-rights deal was the bonus structure on My11Circle. The current welcome bonus code MY11CIRCLE100 — a 100% match on first deposit up to INR 100 — sits inside a wider promotional calendar that includes Friday reload bonuses, referral rewards, weekly iPhone contests and festival-window 200% deposit matches. None of that structure is unique to My11Circle; the broader Indian fantasy-cricket industry runs similar mechanics. What is specific to My11Circle is the size of the marketing budget behind the welcome screen, which is anchored to the partner-slot economics rather than to contest fee revenue alone. A brand that has paid INR 625 Cr for a five-year commercial commitment can afford to be more generous with the first-deposit bonus than a brand that has to recover its marketing spend in a single season. The full running list of My11Circle welcome bonuses, reload offers, referral terms, KYC requirements, state-wise eligibility and the weekly iPhone contest rules is tracked on the main My11Circle bonus codes and offers page.

The second consequence is the contest catalogue. A partner-tagged fantasy app has the broadcast inventory to run contests that lean on the on-air product — captain-pick contests tied to specific matches, leaderboards that run across the season, and prize pools that are marketed as part of the partner sponsorship rather than as contest revenue. The practical effect on a fantasy manager's weekend is small per contest: the scoring rules, the salary cap, the captain and vice-captain multipliers are all standard. The cumulative effect over a season is that the prize pools on offer tend to be larger than they would be on a non-partner app with the same user base, because the partner brand can subsidise them with marketing budget that a non-partner cannot access.

The bonus-code angle for My11Circle users

The natural question this retrospective sets up is the present-day bonus-code framework on My11Circle, which the bonus-code overview covers in full. The headline numbers are: MY11CIRCLE100 for a 100% match on first deposit up to INR 100, FRIDAY50 for a 50% reload bonus up to INR 500 on deposits above INR 200, a referral program that pays INR 100 per friend plus a Rs 50 friend-side bonus with no monthly cap, and weekly iPhone giveaways for top-scoring teams in any contest. The headline sign-up bonus has been steady through the partner-rights window — INR 100 has been the floor for new-user welcome offers across the fantasy-cricket industry for the last several years — but the contest-pool inflation and the marketing calendar around it have been the larger partner-rights dividend. Full bonus terms, KYC requirements and state-by-state eligibility are on the main bonus page.

The wider partner-rights economics also explain why My11Circle can run festival-window 200% deposit bonuses during Diwali, Holi, New Year and IPL finals without changing its core welcome offer. The cost of a temporary 200% match is absorbed by the same marketing budget that justifies the INR 125 Cr annual partner commitment. For a fantasy manager, the practical takeaway is straightforward: deposit size and timing matter, because the partner-slot economics make the promotional calendar richer than the headline welcome code alone would suggest. The current bonus-code overview has the running list of active offers, including any time-limited festival matches that the partner brand may add during the IPL season.

What to watch in the next tender window

The 2024 partner-rights bid was a five-year commitment, which means My11Circle holds the slot through the 2028 IPL cycle. The next opportunity for the commercial picture to shift is the post-2028 tender, when the BCCI's commercial team will run a fresh process for both the title sponsorship and the official partner slot. Two specific markers will tell the story when that window opens. The first is the headline title-sponsorship number — whether the INR 2,500 Cr record holds, rises or falls will set the ceiling for the partner-slot bid. The second is whether Dream11, the incumbent that lost in 2024, returns to the partner table. The Inc42 piece carried Dream11's audited financials and growth rates in the same paragraph as the bid, which suggests the BCCI's commercial team was tracking both sides of the tender carefully. The 2028 round will be the cleanest test of whether the premium My11Circle paid in 2024 was the new market-clearing price or a one-off bid that the next round resets lower.

For fantasy managers planning ahead, the implication is that the bonus-code framework and the contest-pool economics of My11Circle will stay broadly stable through the partner-rights window. A platform that has committed INR 625 Cr across five years does not unwind its marketing budget in the middle of the term. The calendar of welcome bonuses, reload offers, festival matches and weekly iPhone giveaways is the steady-state product, and the bonus-code overview tracks the running list. What may change between now and 2028 is the contest inventory on the broadcast side — captain-pick specials tied to marquee matches, season-long leaderboards with the partner branding integrated into the on-air product — and that inventory is worth watching if a fantasy manager's strategy depends on the larger prize-pool contests rather than the standard Rs 1 entry fee.

Underlying source: Inc42, "My11Circle outbids Dream11 to become official partner of IPL," published 22 February 2024 at 15:18 IST, drawing on BCCI tender filings opened 21 February 2024 and BCCI sources cited by Mint. Verified facts: My11Circle won the IPL official partner rights at INR 125 Cr per year for five years (INR 625 Cr total); Dream11 counter-bid at INR 103 Cr per year; TATA Group separately granted IPL title sponsorship at INR 2,500 Cr for five years; My11Circle endorsers include former India captain Sourav Ganguly and India batter Shubman Gill; Dream11 reported INR 187.83 Cr net profit in FY23 on INR 6,384.49 Cr operating revenue; Dream11 was founded in 2008 in Mumbai by Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth and has raised roughly $1.6 Bn in total funding. Editorial mode is reference: the original 22 February 2024 announcement is preserved as the verified event, with present-day relevance drawn from the partner-rights economics that still shape My11Circle's bonus-code framework in 2026.