“The ECB has taken back ownership of cricket from the public and the counties cricket clubs by changing its structure to put, quite rightly, the England team at the top of the pinnacle.” - David Gower
Telford Vice | Cape Town
WHO owns cricket? The ICC, Google says. But ask the friendly neighbourhood search engine if unicorns exist and it struggles to come up with a straight answer. This we do know: if the ICC owns cricket, unicorns exist.
CSA’s members council would no doubt try to convince us there are indeed horned, flying horses out there, considering the dismal level of hubris it sank to in its efforts to retain power and influence. The failure of those attempts has proved that, in South Africa at least, the arrogance of entitled, out of their depth amateurs can be defeated. But it didn’t tell us who owns cricket.
Neither did David Gower, who batted with a unicorn’s grace — or as if he owned cricket himself — for Leicestershire, Hampshire and England from the 1970s to the 90s: “To most people, the ICC definitively do not own cricket. OK, there are ICC events, there’s a lot of money sloshing around that bowl, and it’s a members committee of sorts. But they’re low on my list of owners.”
So, who does own cricket? “The public, the people.” That’s Ali Bacher, South Africa’s last Test captain before apartheid-induced isolation took hold in 1970 and after that an administrator in all sorts of guises, from rebel tour organiser to managing director of CSA’s forerunner to the driving force behind the successful staging of the 2003 World Cup. “The players are crucial and the public’s crucial. The boards, they’re intermediaries. They’re not as important as the players and the public. In my early days the board were the dominant figure. They controlled cricket, but it’s changed considerably.
“The other dominant figure today is television. I can remember a tour by India to South Africa [in 1992-93] with four Tests and one-dayers where we made enough money selling TV rights in India to run South African cricket for four years. One tour!”
Maybe television, then, owns cricket. Or serves as a proxy owner for the public, who must own cricket in the sense that the money players and everyone else dependent on the game for a living — including reporters — comes, ultimately, from ordinary cricketminded citizens. It’s they who buy tickets to matches, subscribe to pay television services, purchase newspapers and magazines, shell out cash to be allowed behind online paywalls, and are the intended targets of advertising on free sites.
But if the public own cricket why are they expected to pay to watch it and to read about it? And if the game is their property why don’t they decide which players teams acquire and for how much, whether a ball that pitches outside leg stump should remain in play for lbw decisions, where, when and in which format series should be contested, who will bat at No. 5, and everything else?
Thus the public do not own cricket. Who does? “It’s a great question that I’m not sure I have an answer to,” said Jason Gillespie, the former Australia fast bowler and Test double centurion, who is hereby thanked for his candour.
A prominent current player was asked the same thing, on WhatsApp through his team’s media manager, who responded: “He’s keen, but he’s going to need the questions ahead of the chat, please. He likes the topic.” Herewith the questions that were duly sent: “Who owns cricket? Who should own cricket? Is cricket ownable or is that like trying to own air? Who would you consider the bigger owner of cricket: the ICC or Shahrukh Khan? And why?”
For four days those sentences hung in the electronic ether, their punctation marks twinkling like baited, barbed fish hooks in the staling silence. Then came this from the media manager, who is among the best in the business: “He’s been running away from me because he didn’t know how to tell me he has changed his mind. He doesn’t want to wade in on that discussion in case it causes offence to anyone. I’m so sorry about this.”
Does that mean Shahrukh Khan, who owns the Kolkata Knight Riders, owns cricket? Or that SRK thinks he and those like him own cricket, but do not? And, therefore, that professional players cannot afford to disabuse him of the notion lest that renders them unemployable in the IPL, the blue chip in cricket’s casino of careers? Or does it mean that players have no clue who owns cricket and don’t care to know as long as they are paid? Or that they do know who owns cricket, and it’s not SRK, and that it is better for all concerned that we think the game belongs to someone who seems to be as besotted with it as billions around the world are with him?
Rather that than the biliously bumptious BCCI owns cricket. The ICC family’s bullying big brother is estimated to generate 45% of the game’s revenue worldwide. Is that enough to claim proprietorship? The point will remain moot while India’s courts effectively own the BCCI, which they have done since January 2017, when push came to shove over corruption and India’s supreme court stepped in. Wouldn’t cricket be better owned by an arm of the state in countries where government is chosen by the people rather than by some overreaching board?
We found out what the ICC thinks of that in July 2019, when it suspended Zimbabwe under threat of terminating its membership in the wake of that country’s sports and recreation commission, citing corruption, replacing ZC with its own appointees. It wouldn’t have helped that Zimbabwe’s government, its agencies and large swathes of the business sector are shot through with all manner of unscrupulous dodgy dealing. Almost anything worth owning in Zimbabwe has probably been acquired in shady fashion. The suspension was lifted three months later after sports minister Kirsty Coventry promised the ICC that ZC would be reinstated.
The converse has happened in South Africa, where sports minister Nathi Mthethwa’s decision in November to appoint an interim board was welcomed as a way to save the game from the malicious ineptitude CSA has flaunted for too many years. Tellingly, the ICC has steered clear of the situation. It took until April 28 — after Mthethwa had moved to yank South Africa’s teams out of the international arena — for agreement to be reached that in future most directors would be independent and not part of the game’s provincial mafia, which until then outranked the board. That’s no exaggeration: police were present at a Northern Cape Cricket meeting in Kimberley in February because delegates said they had been threatened and feared for their lives. Do criminals own cricket in South Africa?
The question seems to have leapt a level in Sri Lanka, where SLC was moved to issue a release in January this year to make clear that it is “in no way … carrying out an agenda of a religious group”. That followed theory-mongering that the island’s corridors of cricket power had been hijacked by evangelist christians. Surely that would qualify as a miracle in a country where more than 70% of the population identifies as Buddhist? Unlikely or not, the squabble is part of this conversation: does one or other god own cricket?
Finding out who or what does was proving increasingly slippery. Less so finding people who offered to proffer an answer. In November last year a research company issued, to promote a report it had compiled, a press release headlined, “Global cricket market forecast by countries, type and application, with sales, price, revenue and growth rate forecasts [for] 2020 to 2026.” The summary promised much: “The market research includes historical and forecast market data, demand, application details, price trends, and company shares of cricket by geography. The report splits the market size, by volume and value, on the basis of application type and geography.” Surely this would reveal, somewhere in its 110 pages, who owns cricket. But the report itself is owned, and a single copy costs USD3,000. Gentle haggling brought the price down to USD2,000. Another firm wanted USD4,299 for apparently similar data. The answer to the question of who owns cricket was too expensive to own.
Not wanting to spend that kind of money, plan B was to ask Gower, whose reply unspooled as expansively as one of his dazzling innings. “I’ve no idea. The easy answer is nobody. Cricket is like open source software; it’s there for all.” To illustrate his point he spoke of the endearingly amateur White Hunters Cricket Club — “I might point out none of them have been to Kenya” — which he described as “a place where amiable no-hopers can come together and play cricket” and which “kind of sums up what cricket is to 98% of people who’ve ever played”.
Please explain? “Most of the people who’ve played the game are not Test players. They’re not first-class players, they’re not even good club players. And yet somehow they get some sort of possibly masochistic pleasure out of spending all day playing cricket with the only consolation that they’re likely to get tea and crumpets and cake, and a drink at the end. For all those people who make up the bulk of players around the world, it is their game.”
What had the IPL done to that appealing but quaint idea? “There are so many answers to the question and so many angles to it. The one I gave you is ownership of the game as a philosophy: what it is in its basic form. If you’re talking about owning it as in a major corporation, it’s incredibly different.
“The ECB, for example, has taken back ownership from the public and the members of county cricket clubs by changing its structure to put, quite rightly, the England team at the top of the pinnacle. When I first played if there were major issues to be decided by what was then the Test and County Cricket Board. That was done by chairmen, who were told what to do by their members. If they wanted cupcakes with their tea then that had to get past the executive level. Because that’s what the members had asked for. It was driven more from the bottom than the top.
“The new model is driven from the top. There’s still some element of control with the various county clubs and their executives. But the England team is now the most important thing. The money that the ECB derive from selling rights to TV and all the rest of it feeds down into the game, and much more so than it ever used to. So you could say, in terms of the ownership of English cricket, the ECB do own it. But it’s far from Amazon. It’s still something like a cooperative bank. It’s trying to make money for all its members and all its constituent parts. You’ve got that sort of thing replicating itself around the world. But we all know there are places where making money to feed money down is not so easy.
“Then you have the financial powerhouse, which everyone is brutally aware is India. Whether it’s the BCCI [which owns cricket] ultimately or whether it’s because they own the IPL ultimately …
“Of course, if you’ve just been paid a million dollars to play, you’ve kind of been bought by the IPL. There’s no other way of looking at it.”
Which had its pros: “You can say that — as Kevin Pietersen actually for once rightly said — the pressure of playing under IPL conditions, the expectations, the things you learn by doing it, these are all good things for the game as a whole and for the players involved. There are a lot of young Indian players involved and it’s been brilliant for them, too.” But the introduction of the IPL was a devilish wrong ’un: “The concept of ownership now is, I suppose, even further spread than before.”
How much cricket is there to own? In April 2019 a report by Media Partners Asia projected that the spending on media rights for cricket globally would soar past USD2-billion in 2021. ICC research conducted by Nielsen Sports and released in June 2018 revealed that the game could claim more than 300-million participants worldwide, and that it enjoyed the attention of upwards of a billion supporters aged between 16 and 69. Ninety percent of them were in India. There is enough in this paragraph alone to fuel a slew of competing theories about who owns cricket. At least, that would have been the case had Covid-19 not turned the world, and with it all predictions about cricket, upside down.
It’s a grim thought, but maybe Covid owns cricket. At least for now. Or not. Maybe, as French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote in 1840, “Property is theft!” Maybe cricket, like air, is unownable.
First published by Cricbuzz.
good morning mr, vice
imho cricket is owned by india, england and australia. they appear to decide when we play and how much we play. RSA has been quite a force since about 2006 as well as 1970 ane we all know what happened then. CSA FIASCO this saga came about because all are equal. so LIMPOPO HAVE ONE VOTE AND NATAL HAVE ONE VOTE. that is absurd. i cannot quite undsrstand how RSA can have 14 provincial teams, 11 first class. first class are matches of three or more days duration, which surely means, RSA schools v ENGLAND schools played over three days should be 1st class 1948 the national party got 38% of eligible whites only votes but won election by 7 seats in a two party contest. Free State had 18 seats that had less voters than Sea point and cape central anything is possible in RSA .even the president csn be sacked by one individual. WONDER IF THAT STORY WILL GO TO CONCOURT. ANUTHING IS POSSIBLE. CHEERS SHAUN PRICE