Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  Four months later, these illusions were scotched. The first season of the Global T20 League was cancelled after failing to secure sufficient broadcasting revenue and sponsorship income. The debacle ended up losing Cricket South Africa an estimated £11 million – about half their total cash reserves – and the job of their chief executive, Haroon Lorgat. A year later, another league was cancelled before its first ball: the UAE T20x, a T20 franchise tournament in the UAE. In August 2019, a third league – the Euro T20 Slam, a competition featuring sides from Ireland, Scotland and the Netherlands – was also cancelled before its first season. All the while, most T20 leagues around the world were consistently posting financial losses.

  All of this shattered the myth that T20 tournaments guarantee profit. Instead, creating a T20 league is more like starting a Silicon Valley company: the few that are most successful make gargantuan amounts of cash, while most of their rivals haemorrhage cash.

  ***

  Traditionally, international cricket subsidised domestic matches. These fixtures – between counties, states or regions – could justifiably operate at a loss because these matches were the nurseries of international cricketers.

  The status of international cricket was instantly transformed with the inception of the Indian Premier League in 2008. The elite of the game – in terms of fan interest, quality of play and player remuneration – was no longer confined to international matches.

  Many leading players now had a better-paid alternative to the international game. India, who did more than anyone else to create this new ecosystem, were the one country completely immune from these forces, because of the sums their players earned from playing international cricket. Since its creation, the IPL has not merely got stronger; it has also made international cricket weaker, by destroying the international game’s near-monopoly over the sport’s best players.

  Before the IPL, only around 2% of the Indian board’s total broadcasting rights came from domestic cricket. Today, thanks to a $2.55 billion contract for the IPL rights from 2018 to 2023, 71% of India’s broadcasting revenue comes from the IPL, while only 29% comes from home internationals.

  Even if Indian internationals remained worth slightly more on a per game basis, the metamorphosis of the value of domestic cricket spoke to how T20 has completely recalibrated the economics of cricket.

  For the first time, cricket has a domestic league that is a serious player in the global sports broadcasting landscape. Broadcasting rights for the IPL are worth $8.5 million per game – four times what each NBA match is worth, and two-thirds what each English Premier League game costs, although the IPL has a significantly shorter season.

  From its first game, the IPL has been so utterly out of kilter with all that domestic cricket was before that it induced jealousy in other cricket boards. Naturally, they sought to create their own versions.

  ‘Matches include fashion shows, after-match parties and entertainment,’ wrote Yorkshire chief executive Stewart Regan in an email to other county executives in 2010. ‘They have launched the word “CRICKETAINMENT” which I think is really innovative.’

  There were certainly broader lessons from the IPL, though not necessarily those Regan proclaimed. Unlike in England’s T20 Blast, every IPL game was televised, enabling an easily understandable narrative to develop around the competition.

  Perhaps most pertinent was the importance of competitive balance, an idea the IPL had embraced from US sports. Through salary caps that stopped teams stockpiling all the best players, the IPL protected the fundamental uncertainty of who would win any game: a crucial point of difference in an age of more predictable international cricket, marked by the growing divergence in financial resources between countries and the increasing salience of home advantage.

  Even so, anyone studying the IPL could not ignore that the competition was unique. Ultimately this was not a reflection on the failings or lack of imagination of other administrators. It spoke to a simple truth: the IPL was built on India’s enormous population, growing wealth and profound love of both cricket and celebrity, a cocktail that no other country could ever replicate.

  This did not stop them from trying. Since the Indian Premier League was formed, the Big Bash League, Caribbean Premier League, Pakistan Super League, Bangladesh Premier League, and the new English franchise competition have all been launched. Barring Bangladesh, these nations all had T20 leagues before the IPL. But now they hoped to channel the glitz – and wealth – of India’s competition.

  Several leagues also made very obvious attempts to woo India. Teams in England and the Caribbean established tie-ups with IPL franchises. The Caribbean Premier League, whose time difference was unconducive to gaining a foothold in India, even experimented with playing matches early on weekday mornings to suit Indian viewers: it did nothing for Indian audiences while alienating local fans.

  South Africa’s stillborn league made a big show of two of its teams having Indian owners, deluding themselves that this alone would be sufficient to entice millions of Indian fans to watch. The Indian market is ‘something you should factor in when developing your league,’ Lorgat declared while developing the Global T20 League.

  No league could have challenged the IPL anyway. Still, the Board of Control for Cricket in India made sure of as much by banning all Indian players from taking part in foreign T20 leagues, despite other leagues imploring them to relax the stance. This was disastrous for the commercial viability of other leagues because ‘India watches Indian cricketers. India doesn’t watch cricket,’ said Sanjog Gupta, the executive vice-president of Star TV Network.

  The BCCI barring its players from playing abroad would have been vulnerable to either a legal challenge, or Indian players abandoning their contracts for free agency, but the BCCI had the financial clout to dissuade them from doing so. For as long as this position holds, it will act as a roadblock to another league gaining serious traction in India.

  ‘A lot of the success or failure of leagues will be determined by whether they are able to get Indian players to participate or not. That for me is a huge inflexion point,’ Gupta observed. ‘If any of these leagues are able to do that, then it will potentially change the value of the stocks for the league.’

  Instead, other T20 leagues will be dependent upon their home markets to make themselves financially viable, in keeping with the norm for all sports leagues worldwide. ‘Most sporting events raise the vast majority of their revenue from their home TV market,’ explained Paul Smith, a sports media expert from De Montfort University. Similar dynamics are at work in T20 leagues: the CPL, a league with a small domestic economy, raises only 35% of its broadcasting and commercial income from beyond the Caribbean. The biggest source of revenue in the CPL, like most leagues beyond Australia, England and India, is ticket revenue.

  The financial accounts of leagues and teams are completely out of sync with the common perception of T20 leagues as facile money-making machines. In the early years of T20 franchise leagues, making losses has been the norm. In Pakistan, the board has made a profit of over £1.5 million a year from the Super League’s first year, but the teams themselves lost around £750,000 in each of the first three years; only in the fourth did most franchises enter the black. It took the Caribbean Premier League until its sixth season to turn a profit for the first time. In Bangladesh teams absorbed losses because most are owned by rich industrialists who viewed running a franchise as ‘part of our CSR [corporate social responsibility],’ explained Obeid Nizam, the chief executive of Dhaka Dynamites.

  Many investors – national boards and private backers alike – did not seem to grasp how long was needed to turn a profit. Even many IPL franchises took until 2018, the first year of the bumper new broadcasting contract, to start recording a consistent profit.

  The Big Bash League made a £17.5 million loss over its first five years. The league viewed these sums as an investment – and it was vindicated by a bumper new commercial deal, which began from 2018/19. But that it took an
admired league in cricket’s third-biggest economy so long to make cash embodied the wider economic challenges of T20 franchise cricket. As of 2019, insiders only considered the IPL, Big Bash and Pakistan Super League safe vehicles for both the competitions themselves, and the teams participating, to make money.

  While McCullum was speaking in London, investors in South Africa’s Global T20 League were working out how they could justify spending around £5.3 million a year each on their new teams. They soon concluded that they could not. These costs were simply too much for private investors to absorb without a clear road to profit. ‘This venture had to undergo the same process and be tested against our standard investment criteria as all other investment proposals,’ explained the chief executive of Brimstone Investment Corporation Limited, when the company withdrew from running the proposed new Stellenbosch franchise. It was a red flag for leagues the world over.

  Most T20 competitions – Australia’s Big Bash and England’s county competition are notable exceptions – follow the IPL’s model of privately owned teams, which may encourage innovation but also exacerbates the risk of short-termism. And when owners can’t see where the money is coming from, they are prone to fleeing.

  ***

  On 2 January 2016, 80,883 cricket fans crammed into the Melbourne Cricket Ground. They were there watching two teams who had not even existed five years earlier: the Melbourne Stars and Melbourne Renegades, who were playing in the new Melbourne derby. The game vaulted past the previous record crowd for any domestic match in Australia by an absurd 28,000. It was a seminal moment in the league, and franchise T20 cricket.

  With scorching weather forecast the organisers were expecting a large crowd but they were totally unprepared for the eventual number. Thousands more fans abandoned going to the game because the queues for tickets were so large. The stadium ran out of food and drink to sell halfway through the match.

  The man of the match was Stars’ opening batsman Luke Wright, who scored a second-innings century. Wright won the T20 World Cup with England but he considered the century the proudest individual moment of his career.

  ‘I think during the first half of the match there were about 50,000 or so in and as we were coming off [at the change of innings] you could see people streaming in,’ said Wright. ‘When I came out to bat with Bobby Quiney we were just looking out and going, oh my God, this is just nuts.

  ‘You sort of knew that the crowd were there – there was a constant hum – but every time you hit a boundary there was a roar of noise.’

  The impact of that derby fixture was particularly outsized because of the juxtaposition with international cricket, which was enduring one of its most underwhelming summers for years in Australia. A week earlier, just 127,069 – an average of 32,000 a day, under half the number who had turned up for the Melbourne T20 derby – had attended the four days of the Australia-West Indies Test, which began on Boxing Day. It was the smallest Melbourne Test crowd in two decades.

  ‘Everything felt it was absolutely at its peak,’ said Wright. ‘We knew at that time that everyone was looking at the BBL with envious eyes. It was run like international cricket but it was domestic cricket. We were getting bigger crowds than Australia were getting playing at home and everyone was getting swept up in it.’

  That fewer fans wanted to attend the Test, or watch on TV, was partly the fault of the BBL. During the tepid Australia-West Indies Test series, six West Indies players, including five with Test experience, were instead playing in the BBL, where they could earn more cash.

  ‘The Big Bash League has changed the dynamic a lot, and let’s be open: all over the country it has cannibalised the demand for international cricket,’ the then-chief executive of Cricket Australia, James Sutherland, acknowledged at the time. It was a microcosm of a much broader question: how could the international game, and the rapacious growth of T20 leagues, peacefully co-exist?

  Since England’s T20 Blast launched in 2003, leagues have popped up on the whims of national administrators, opportunistically slotted in whenever there is a brief gap in the calendar. Without broad agreement among administrators worldwide about what the overall schedule should look like, leagues have jostled for territory.

  T20 has created a new ‘club versus country conflict,’ reflected Tony Irish, the head of FICA, the sport’s players’ association. ‘Due to lack of coherent global scheduling, players are often forced to choose between the two.’ For many players this was really no choice at all. The time-wage ratio of playing was inverted in T20 leagues, with players paid much more to be on the field much less.

  By 2019, only the two months given over to the 50-over men’s World Cup and preparations for it lacked a T20 league. In August and September three leagues with official status – England’s T20 Blast, the Caribbean Premier League and the new Euro T20 Slam – were scheduled for the same time. It was the first time ever there had been such a three-way clash – or, at least, it would have been had the Euro T20 not been cancelled at two weeks’ notice.

  The strife extends to international cricket, which is facing unprecedented pressure thanks to T20 leagues. It is, as Sutherland said, at risk of being cannibalised.

  Club cricket has several salient advantages over the international game. Urbanisation throughout the world, with a growing proportion of people living in major centres, has made club vs club games a more appealing way of organising fixtures. The impatience of the modern world is another boon: the notion of waiting four years for A.B. de Villiers or Chris Gayle to return for their next games in India, as they would have done before the IPL, seems quaint.

  For administrators, T20 leagues have another crucial advantage over the international game: they do not rely on the cooperation of any other country. Relations between national boards have frequently been poisonous, with tours planned late and curtailed at minimal notice; when India reduced their tour to South Africa in 2013/14, it cost South Africa an estimated £15 million. Prioritising domestic T20 cricket is prudent risk management by boards, allowing them to reduce their dependence upon other countries touring. When the Pakistan Cricket Board – who have lost an estimated £150 million from rarely playing at home since 2009 – launched the Pakistan Super League in 2016, they declared that within five years it ‘will be the most exciting event of the year, far more exciting than any FTP [Future Tours Programme event] could ever be.’

  The rise of T20 leagues has meant that the biggest countries generate a lower proportion of their overall revenue from the international game, they have become less dependent upon it and so are less inclined to play fixtures that aren’t lucrative. And, with so much T20 action to watch, fans are becoming less enamoured with the international game – at least, when matches are not marquee.

  The upshot has been to exacerbate divisions in wealth within international cricket. Dwindling interest in India for India’s away matches against mid-ranking international teams – really, all opponents bar Australia, England and Pakistan – means that those boards aren’t able to raise as much in broadcasting rights when they host India, intensifying the financial chasm within the international game. Players from smaller markets could often earn more playing domestic T20 than playing internationals. This has driven premature retirements from international cricket, either in one format or across all three. Star quality confined to T20 leagues alone diminished the appeal of international cricket.

  T20 leagues, with each season building up to an overall winner, have highlighted the failings of international cricket, which has lacked any coherent structure. ‘The lack of clarity and consistency in scheduling and formats is causing bilateral cricket to rapidly lose its appeal to broadcasters, fans and players,’ FICA noted in a report in 2016. The unflattering contrast with T20 leagues, expressed in the preferences of viewers and broadcasters, was an influence in the ICC introducing new league structures in Test and one-day international cricket, beginning in 2019.

  Administrators agree that the unprecedented pressures on internatio
nal cricket are a major problem; devising a solution has proved rather more onerous. One of the biggest challenges facing the sport, observed Andrew Wildblood, a former executive vice-president at International Management Group (IMG) who was instrumental in launching the IPL, is ‘dealing with the short-sighted petty provincial politics that continues to blight many cricket administrations through aligning stakeholders behind a collective strategic approach embracing all formats both domestically and internationally.’

  The ICC has often discussed making distinct windows for T20 leagues – limiting all leagues to, say, six months a year, thereby providing a free chunk of the calendar for international cricket. Yet every new T20 league that is created makes this change ever more unworkable. More controversially, the ICC has also mooted limiting players to appearing in a total of three leagues a year – forcing players to choose between leagues, rather than between leagues and international cricket. Such a policy would be unlikely to survive a legal challenge.

  The contours of cricket’s near future – really, its present – are increasingly discernible. In its structure cricket is likely to resemble football, with the majority of revenue derived from the club game, and internationals focused around tournament play.

  ‘That change will continue – it has to happen,’ said Gupta. ‘At a fundamental level the only way that you can significantly augment the supply of the game and thus continue to grow the game is by going down the path of moving away from nation v nation.’ He envisaged a future in which ‘franchise-based cricket occupies 50% of the calendar and you have major global tournaments, typically multilateral, that occupy the rest of the calendar.’