If IPL has stood all you thought you knew about cricket on its head, it has done the same with finances too. In a year when franchisees were complaining about shifting how to South Africa would make a mess of their budgets, each one of them will make a profit.

If that’s not strange enough, try this: The two finalists, Royal Challengers and Team Hyderabad, will make a fraction of the profit that bottom-of-table Knight Riders will, even if you take prize money into account.

The main reason for the healthier bottomlines is a jump in the share of revenues from broadcasting. Last year, each franchisee got Rs 25 crore from IPL as its share of the central pool. This year, that has risen to Rs 67.50 crore each.

BCCI’s profit too has apparently jumped to Rs 477 crore from Rs 350 crore last year. Sony Max is also likely to be in the black this year.

In 2008, teams like Knight Riders, Mumbai Indians and Team Delhi earned around Rs 20 crore from ticket sales alone as the capacity of their home stadiums was large enough to accommodate over 70,000 and the crowds just poured in.

Knight Riders, which finished lowest in the league table during the qualifying round in South Africa, will nevertheless end up with the third-highest profit of Rs 25.8 crore in the second edition of IPL.

This is despite the fact that prize money in the IPL is a sizeable amount, with Rs 4.8 crore for winner, Rs 2.4 crore for the runners-up and 1.2 crore each for the losing semifinalists.

For those who didn’t get past the league stage, the sums are correspondingly smaller - Rs 80 lakh for the team that finished fifth (Kings XI Punjab), Rs 70 lakh for the sixth placed (Jaipur), Rs 50 lakh for the seventh (Mumbai Indians) and Rs 40 lakh for the lowest one.

The healthy bottomlines are a happy change from last year when besides Knight Riders and Jaipur, Team Chennai just scraped into the black due to its Rs 2.25 crore prize money for the runners-up position, according to a highly placed source.

What has helped the IPL and franchisees is essentially the re-awarding of the broadcasting rights. The renegotiated contract was for $1.64 billion (Rs 8,200 crore) for nine years -- a jump of 90% from the original figure.