Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  T20 would also occupy a greater share of the global calendar. ‘T20 is the format of the future both at international level and league level. Both have to grow in volume significantly. There has to be some level of replacement of cricket days in the calendar of Test and ODI days with T20 internationals, especially multilateral T20 internationals. The volume of T20 cricket will go up, leagues will continue to take up more calendar space, and multilateral T20 tournaments will become more frequent.’

  Over the coming years, Irish predicted, ‘the game will continue to trend towards T20, and continue towards a more club-based model for cricket, as more and more money, players and fans shift that way.’ These are the two overarching trends of this age of cricket: a sport simultaneously being reoriented around T20 and the club game. The question is not about the direction of travel in the sport but how big a stage will be left for the international game and longer formats.

  ‘The evolution of T20 has been a great positive for the game, but we advocate for an appropriate balance between the traditional and international cricket market and the rapidly growing domestic T20 market,’ Irish said. ‘If that doesn’t happen then I think the future of the other international formats, especially Test cricket, is in real danger.’

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  ‘The winner takes it all,’ Abba once sang. These were prescient words about the future of the global economy in sport and beyond. In the 21st century, globalisation and technological change have allowed industry leaders to gain larger shares of their markets, and so become more successful and richer than those which came before them. This has made the margins between success and failure more brutal – and also entrenched the elite.

  As the T20 calendar has become more saturated so leagues are also increasingly in competition with each other, not just international cricket, for viewers’ eyeballs and broadcasters’ cash.

  ‘What will happen in these leagues is they will continue to go on because there’s enough local interest to continue to sustain themselves but growth for them will be a major problem,’ said Gupta. When the Mzansi Super League, a scaled back version of South Africa’s original plans for a franchise T20 league, launched at the end of 2018, it reportedly earned broadcast rights of only £1.85 million a year, less than some players earn for an IPL season.

  In the years ahead, the gap between different leagues is likely to grow further. The IPL’s next broadcasting contract, beginning in 2023, is widely expected to set new records – and leave every other league even further behind. This is also likely to usher in a bigger IPL, too. The competition is better placed to sustain more sides than when it trialled having nine and ten teams, rather than eight, at times between 2011 and 2013.

  ‘The Indian team can only play so many days in a year,’ Gupta explained. ‘If you were a leader or a CEO and had a product that was working and wanted to significantly increase its consumption then the only way you can do it is by increasing the supply, especially if the demand seems to be fully met.’

  So the future of the IPL seems certain to involve more teams, more games and a longer tournament, exacerbating the pressures the competition creates both for international cricket and other T20 leagues.

  ‘I think two more teams for sure,’ Gupta said. ‘There can’t be a better time for the IPL to expand for the good of Indian cricket, for maximising value and for fans. It’s the best time for it. You can’t find more of a tailwind than you do currently. It’s absolutely the right time for the IPL to expand.’

  Pune and Rajkot, who both had IPL franchises in the past, are prime candidates to host teams once again. Staging sides in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh would also be attractive for the IPL. Ten teams may well be one part of the competition’s expansion, not the end.

  ‘Over a ten-year period maybe 12 teams, in fact,’ Gupta envisaged. ‘With ten teams it should expand by at least two and a half weeks. Two and a half, three weeks is what one would expect it to grow by. With 12 teams potentially a month extra or maybe more than a month – a two-month tournament becomes a three, three and a half-month tournament.’ The new normal could be that the IPL runs from February to late May.

  As well as growing in teams, fixtures and season length, the IPL is also likely to expand geographically. Matches have been played abroad before, but owing to clashes with elections, not any concerted strategy.

  ‘Preseason or All-Star games could definitely be looked at as showpiece events abroad to grow the popularity of IPL,’ said Gupta. This would follow on from leagues like Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and National Football League, who all staged regular season matches in London in 2019. As the popularity of women’s cricket grows, IPL franchises are becoming more supportive of the idea of a women’s IPL, which is likely to launch at some point in the early 2020s. IPL teams are also considering launching either a youth league – played by, say, under-23 players – or a B-League staged in cities that currently lack IPL teams.

  The upshot will be to intensify pressures on cricket outside the IPL even further. Cricket West Indies – who have produced many of the most coveted IPL players, even while their board has been penurious and dysfunctional – have argued that, in return for the release of international players and the effective halting of all top-tier international cricket for two months a year, the IPL should better compensate other countries. The league’s release fee to national boards for each player they sign – 10% of the value of the player’s contract, which is matched by the Indian board – scarcely makes up for the money that national boards lose from broadcasting and sponsorship when they cannot stage international matches involving their best talent.

  It is, former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau once said of being next to the United States, not comfortable being a mouse lying next to an elephant. ‘No matter how friendly or even-tempered is the beast . . . one is affected by every twitch and grunt.’ So it is – and will continue to be – with the IPL’s impact on the rest of the cricket world.

  Belatedly, from 2020 the IPL will effectively get its own window in the calendar, free of any clashes with major internationals. No other league gets this privilege. This amounts to tacit acceptance that, when international cricket goes up against the IPL, it is international cricket that appears diminished.

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  There may be a deep market for T20 leagues around the world. Yet the broadcasting pot of cash is simply not great enough to sustain a multitude of leagues competing for A-list talent.

  ‘T20 leagues outside India need to be funded by domestic broadcasters in the host country first and foremost. Countries with weak domestic broadcast and media markets will struggle,’ said Wildblood. ‘Only the strong will survive; it will be sustainable if the metrics for successful modern sporting events – entertaining, audience attracting and therefore commercially viable – are met. Events need first to be sustainable on a local level.’

  Even in some of the most popular leagues, the identikit nature of the squads from one competition to the next means that teams can struggle to create a compelling reason for international fans to watch, admitted Pete Russell, the chief operating officer of the Caribbean Premier League. ‘I look at the number of international players we have in the CPL and actually, I’m thinking yes, it’s good for the tournament, gives it the right profile, they’re great to have around but actually are there too many of them? Because they’re just the same faces that pop up in all the leagues so there’s no differentiation between a player playing in PSL, IPL, for us and what will be the Hundred.

  ‘Almost the easy bits have been done – setting up these leagues. Now it’s how people sustain them – that’s going to be the challenge.’ Russell said that the ecosystem of T20 leagues has ‘got to give somewhere’.

  ‘People get the IPL because of what it started as. But do people really make an appointment to view PSL or CPL or any of these other leagues unless you’re from that region? That’s the challenge – how do you keep the international
interest?’

  One possibility is that T20 leagues may resemble football and basketball around the world. In these sports, there are undisputed industry leaders: Europe’s big five football leagues; and the NBA in the US. For cricket, the NBA is the better comparison, because the US’s economic clout in basketball is similarly overwhelming to India’s position in cricket. The IPL, like the NBA, effectively has a monopoly on the best talent in the sport, and both leagues view other leagues as breeding grounds for future talent. The salient difference is that, because the IPL is a two-month league rather than a nine-month league it also allows leading players, at least as long as they’re not Indian, to play elsewhere.

  While there are unlikely to be fewer T20 leagues in the future, there will be a distinct hierarchy of leagues. The IPL will continue to occupy the top tier. A small coterie of others – the Big Bash, Pakistan Super League, Bangladesh Premier League, Caribbean Premier League and England’s new Hundred competition – will vie to cement their position in the second tier. ‘IPL is going nowhere – it’s just going to get bigger and better,’ Russell said. ‘I can see there being two or three super leagues and then the also-rans if that’s the right expression.’

  Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, envisaged a similar future. ‘There’ll be a tiering of leagues – there’ll be a top tier which continue to dominate and control the window they operate in. And then the second tier which will have much less choice on player availability, they can probably operate in different times of the year but they won’t be able to compete with the big leagues.’

  Other leagues may be akin to feeder leagues. The most viable future for incipient leagues in smaller markets would be as development vehicles for glitzier leagues – a little like how Dutch football’s Eredivisie has found a role for itself in the shadow of the big five football leagues.

  ‘For the younger players now you almost have a pyramid where you play in these other leagues so you get recognised and get the experience,’ Russell explained. ‘But it’s all about IPL. That’s the lottery ticket for them.’

  Even leagues established in the tier below the IPL will have to adapt to remain relevant. The Caribbean Premier League has long been attracted by the possibility of teams in Canada or the US, thereby becoming an American League. ‘In my dream league I’d have teams in the Caribbean, teams in the US, maybe a couple of teams in Canada,’ Russell said, saying that such a proposition – with a total of somewhere between eight and twelve teams, up from six now – could be viable anytime from 2021.

  Perhaps the most likely outcome is for a rationalisation – with the biggest leagues expanding, and others merging, across nations. Cross-nation leagues are common in other sports – rugby union now has South African domestic teams playing in European domestic competition – and might soon do so in T20 too.

  A pan-nation Asian league – featuring a series of countries, though not India, who would have no need for such a venture – would be an attractive concept, Gupta explained. ‘Commercial viability will force nations to collaborate more. If nations don’t collaborate they will start struggling with the viability of the leagues.’

  For leagues to become more commercially viable, one solution is an old one: the Champions League, which was scrapped after its sixth edition in 2014. ‘The fates of some of these leagues are intertwined with that of the Champions League,’ Gupta observed.

  Yet the reason that the Champions League was abandoned is emblematic of the broader problem facing T20 leagues beyond India: there was simply limited interest in India to watch matches not involving Indian sides, leading to the competition being culled midway through its broadcasting contract. This speaks to the broader imbalance in cricket’s economy. While football’s Champions League has established itself as the pinnacle of the club game, cricket’s version was, in terms of eyeballs and cash it attracted, little more than an IPL-lite.

  In its desperation to appeal to Indian fans – which could be best done by ensuring that as many Indian sides as possible were involved for as long as possible – the Champions League also shed any vestiges of sporting probity. While non-Indian teams were restricted to two overseas players, IPL teams were permitted four. In 2011, after injuries to Indian players, Mumbai Indians were allowed to field a fifth overseas player ‘to ensure the integrity of the tournament’.

  The Champions League’s failure affirmed a wider truth, often poorly understood by delusional administrators in other countries. In India in 2018, virtually as many people watched the Tamil Nadu Premier League, an intrastate T20 competition, as Australia’s Big Bash. ‘It doesn’t say much for the BBL’s following here,’ said Gupta.

  Any reintroduction of the Champions League would also need to be accompanied by concerted attempts to grow the brand of the non-Indian teams. If it is to return, the Champions League ‘needs a certain context which is unique,’ Gupta explained. ‘For example if it was Champions League T20 happening many years down the line when relations between India and Pakistan were better and Pakistan teams were participating, Champions League T20 could have more prominence.’

  After a certain point the tussle between T20 leagues threatens to become a zero-sum game: for one to grow, another will need to weaken. The supply of elite cricketers, and the amount that fans will watch, is limited. Most importantly, broadcasting cash is finite.

  ‘We’ll see a few leagues going down the tube and not sustaining a footprint in the world and other ones that will continue to grow,’ Harrison said. ‘There are very few that are commercially successful – that’s the reality. Most of them are effectively losing money. Inevitably players will migrate to the tournaments where they feel it makes the most sense for them to hone their skills.’

  So the road to T20’s new ecosystem will be Darwinian. For some leagues to surge to new heights, others may have to flounder – or even completely cease to exist in their current guise.

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  In 2013, City Football Group, the umbrella company who own Manchester City, bought a majority stake in a new football team in New York. It presaged a radical new approach. By May 2019, City Football Group had stakes in seven teams around the world – in England, China, the US, Australia, Spain, Uruguay and Japan.

  The project – having a network of interconnected clubs in different continents – was unprecedented in its scale or ambition, across football or any other sport. City Football Group executives believed that each club could also help each other on the pitch, and that the cross-continental scale of their operation would give them advantages, even if others believed that the idea was driven by finding ways for Man City to circumvent Financial Fair Play laws.

  Like McDonald’s stores around the world, each team in the group subtly promotes the others. ‘We are part of a global organisation that brings incredible benefit, but we operate locally,’ Scott Munn, Melbourne City’s chief executive, explained at Melbourne’s training ground, where even the changing rooms were explicitly modelled on Man City’s.

  For Venky Mysore, Man City’s model provided a template of what was possible for Kolkata Knight Riders. For all the enormous popularity of the IPL, its teams suffer from a simple problem: the league is very short. Each team only plays a guaranteed 14 games a season. In 2019, the entire season only lasted 50 days.

  That leaves IPL teams with ten months a year when they aren’t actually playing. ‘In the discussions with our owners, one of the questions we were trying to address was: how do we grow? The IPL and other leagues are fantastic but they happen over such a short period of time,’ Mysore explained. ‘The question always was how do you keep your brand alive for the rest of the year? How do you grow your business and increase your revenues, grow your fan base and grow your brand?’

  And so Mysore stumbled upon a plan. Red Chillies Entertainment – the parent company of KKR, where he was chief executive – would become like City Football Group, operating teams around the globe. ‘What we landed on was to figure out a way to pot
entially own multiple franchises – or assets, as we call them – and in an ideal world we said that if we have three or four or five assets then it becomes a year-round activity. That was the thought process.’ The idea, Mysore believed, would also help KKR reduce their reliance upon Shah Rukh Khan, their Bollywood owner, and help people conceive of KKR more as a sporting brand and less as an entertainment one.

  The Rajasthan Royals were the first IPL team to attempt to become an international brand, acquiring a stake in teams in foreign leagues and changing their nicknames to Royals. ‘Our plan was to create a global network of like-minded franchises,’ explained Manoj Badale, the co-owner of the franchise. The idea was scrapped, he said, because ‘with all players bought through the auction, the benefits of these link-ups are primarily marketing related.’

  Mysore brought the same systematic planning that he applied to IPL auctions to which teams would be a suitable fit to pair with KKR. In 2014, he began conversations with the Caribbean Premier League about purchasing a team in the league. A year later, the CPL told Mysore about an opportunity to buy Trinidad and Tobago Red Steel – particularly appealing for Red Chillies Entertainment because of the large Indian diaspora in Trinidad and Tobago. ‘Of all the owners I know, he has the most vision,’ said Pete Russell from the CPL, who was involved in the negotiations. ‘Their whole thing is about building a global brand.’

  Russell believed that the KKR model would become more common in the years ahead. ‘If you’re building a sports team and you have the opportunity to run it all year round then it makes perfect sense for commercial partners, staff and players. There’s a huge amount of upside to it.’

  After their first season owning the team, Red Chillies Entertainment changed the team name, to Trinbago Knight Riders, solidifying the link with KKR. In the four years after being bought by Red Chillies Entertainment, Trinidad and Tobago won three titles.