Two stories broke within an hour of one another last week, illustrating the relative state of football and cricket, two of the most popular sports on the planet.
On the one hand, UEFA announced that the governing bodies of European football had united in opposition to FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s grandiose plan to create a commercial operation, independent of the membership, to exploit the opportunities provided by his expanded men’s World Cup.
And barely an hour later, the organising committee of the 2027 men’s Cricket World Cup (the 50-over one) revealed that the slogan (or “brand”, as the ICC likes to call it) for the event would be “Make the circle bigger”, “a powerful expression of our ambition to inspire new generations, bring more people into the game and create an event that is inclusive, vibrant and unmistakably African.”
Since UEFA, soon followed by CONCACAF, football’s American regional organisation, stood up to Infantino’s plans, his situation has steadily worsened: It now seems likely that there will be a serious challenge to his presidency when he comes up for re-election next year, if he is not forced to step down before that.
By contrast, there has been a deafening silence in response to the all-too-obvious dichotomy between the declared aspirations of cricket’s World Cup and the decision of the ICC Board at its July meeting to Make the Circle Smaller by reducing the number of participants in the 2027 event from 14 to 12, introducing a so-called “Super Series” which is in fact nothing but another qualifier, designed to make it even more difficult for all but the twelve privileged Full Members to make it into the tournament proper.
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We have seen this ploy before. Between 2014 and 2021 the Men’s T20 World Cup featured a similar preliminary round which purported to be part of the main tournament but in reality functioned as another qualifier.
Once upon a time, it was the ICC’s proud boast that every member was part of a pathway which led from the lowest level of regional competition to “the Cup that Counts”, a long-abandoned “brand” which has fallen victim to the harsh reality that global competitions, like the proliferating franchise tournaments which increasingly threaten the former’s very existence, are no more than an excuse for relentless profiteering.
Something of that spirit survives, just barely, in the qualifying structures for the T20 World Cup, where sub-regional qualifiers in principle give every member the possibility of reaching the global level in the format which the ICC has evidently concluded is all that most of its members are good for.
50-over cricket, on the other hand, is now the preserve of just 32 of the ICC’s 111 members, and who knows how long even that degree of reach will survive, given the mutterings we’re hearing about the possible disappearance of the ODI format?
The truth is that the expansion of cricket has been supplanted by the exploitation of “markets”, a fundamental shift which goes back to the baneful influence of the ICC’s one-time “principal advisor”, I.S. Bindra.
It was Bindra who in 2008 declared that priority should be given to promoting cricket in the USA and China, because those were the two largest potential markets.
Never mind that US cricket was a model of maladministration and that the prospects of turning China into a serious cricket-playing country were remote in the extreme; Bindra’s calculation was that the huge Sub-continental population in the USA and the sheer numbers of the Chinese made those the most likely areas for expansion, not to increase the numbers playing the game, but to generate a TV audience, thus maximising the ICC’s (read, the BCCI’s) potential take from television rights deals.
Read more: From Spain, Nigeria to Japan – What would an expanded 32-team T20 World Cup look like?
The previous year, of course, the BCCI had launched its new cash cow, the Indian Premier League, a development of the kind that Bindra himself had earlier identified as potentially “bigger than international cricket.”
And that has proved to be only too true, with the tentacles of Indian money reaching ever more widely into the proliferating franchise leagues and the ICC surrendering to the point that they are now considering windows for international cricket amongst the splatter of franchise leagues, where not so long ago it was the other way around.
Tinkering with World Cup formats may seem like small beer by comparison with these massive shifts, but in reality they are part of the same ghastly process: Every decision is made with the balance sheet front and centre, part of the argument for the changes to the 50-over World Cup being that they make it possible to slip in an extra match between India and Pakistan, putting broad grins on the faces of the money-men.
The axis of those now in charge of running the game is essentially about two things: Enhancing the role of Narendra Modi’s BJP within world cricket, and extracting every possible rupee from the game, if necessary at the cost of the game itself.
And that takes us back to the other story, the rebellion of football’s governing bodies against the Trumpian regime of Gianni Infantino.
Part of Infantino’s trick has been to promise national associations undreamt-of wealth as a result of his corporatist wheeze, a technique which served the BCCI well when it was building up the massive power which it now wields over world cricket.
And it may still be true that the smallest ICC members, those with little or no hope of ever being serious contenders for a World Cup spot in any format, are happy with the pittance they receive as India, England and Australia monopolise all the power and most of the money.
But the weaker Full Members and the leading Associates have different interests, and potentially a common cause: A smaller 50-over World Cup and more stringent qualification processes are a genuine threat to them, and cricket needs them to understand that they ought to be allies, and that the time has come for them to work together to challenge the hegemony of the Gang of Three and rescue the game – and themselves – from the vortex of greed which threatens to engulf it.
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