‘Money is the root of all evil,’ as St Paul is (wrongly) supposed to have said, but there is no doubt that money, wisely used, can be a force for good.
It was the love of money that St Paul was on about, and there are plenty of evils in the world of modern cricket which can be attributed to the insatiable greed of a few highly-placed bad actors.
But the World Cricketers’ Association, in their recent report, try to turn this around, looking for ways of using cricket’s wealth in the interest of the global game, rather than to line the pockets of the few.
The current situation is familiar enough, or ought to be: India takes 38.5% of the ICC pot, which rises to over 51% when England and Australia are added in; the remaining nine Full members receive a shade over 37% between them; and that leaves just over 11% for the 94 Associate members.
If you were designing a system to cripple the growth of world cricket, perpetuating the historical inequities which have developed over a century and more, you could scarcely do a better job, but the realpolitik of the BCCI’s stranglehold on the game has until now dictated that this is how it has to be.
What could the position be, the WCA has the courage to ask, if you start from somewhere entirely different, somewhere much closer to Lord Woolf’s starting-point: what is needed for the good of cricket, considered as a whole?
First, the report’s authors contend, we need to top-slice a sum sufficient to operate a ‘Global Growth and Development Fund’, to underwrite the costs of the ‘Core International Cricket’ programme, for centralised marketing and promotion, not least of women’s cricket, and to support ‘targeted growth markets’.
They don’t put a figure on the percentage of the available resources that would be required for this, which would obviously depend to a large degree on the scale of the core programme: the need to keep it manageable, so that it doesn’t eat too much into the money available for direct distribution to the members, is doubtless one reason for the minimalist definition of ‘Core International Cricket’ as one match in each format against each opponent across a two-year cycle.
‘Direct’ is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, because of course the money from the Growth and Development Fund (GDF) would ultimately find its way to the members as well, if only in the form of ear-marked player, umpire and support staff costs.
In other words, some costs which currently come out of the members’ budgets would now be fed via the GDF, which would, amongst other things, fulfil the function of the promised but not-yet-implemented Test Support Fund.
The rest of the cake, the WCA suggests, could then be sliced up according to need rather than, as at present, on the basis of raw political power and the willingness to bully the weak and powerless into submission.
The precise details of the scenarios offered in an appendix to the report are less important than the direction of travel: although the identities of the members referred to only as ‘Country 1’, ‘Country 2’ and so on are tactfully withheld, it doesn’t take too much thought to figure out who most of them must be.
And the table envisages ‘Governing Body Uplift’ (I know, I know) of between 3% and 30% for the 11 Full members other than India, with increases of more than 100% for the leading Associates and a five-fold ‘uplift’ for the next group, who currently get buttons.
All of this, it is claimed, could be achieved with no more than a 3% reduction in the ICC resources available to the BCCI, partly because that august body has such a massive income anyway, through its own rights deals, that its allocation from the ICC is a relatively small factor, and partly because the WCA projects a significant increase in ICC income as a result of the scheduling changes it proposes.
The authors acknowledge that their information is incomplete, and it is in any case true that every number in the projections is dependent on the outcome of a debate which has as yet barely started.
But a few things are immediately apparent.
First, a great deal of good could be achieved for the world game without having more than a marginal effect on a coffers of the BCCI and the oligarchs who run it.
That won’t, of course, be how the proposals are viewed in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, but it’s something the rest of us have to keep firmly in mind.
Secondly, every other Full member stands to gain financially, as well as in reputation and respect, by developing a spine and making it clear that they are committed to governing in the interests of world cricket as a whole and not just in their own narrow and inevitably short-term interest.
And make no mistake, any series of changes along these lines would be truly transformative.
To take one example close to my heart, and probably to the hearts of most readers of these virtual pages: leading Associates like Scotland, Namibia and the Netherlands are currently caught in a paralysing Catch-22.
To achieve their ambition of Full membership, whatever that may look like in the years to come, they have to invest massively, in grassroots growth, in infrastructure, in payments to players; they need, in short, at least the order of resource available to even the most poorly supported Full members.
But that sort of allocation only comes with Full membership, so they are trapped in a sort of no-man’s-land, facing many of the demands of a Full member without the resources to fulfil them.
This is a deadlock that the WCA’s funding ideas, like those of Lord Woolf more than a decade ago, could break, if only cricket’s leaders can find the courage to do it.
And it is with that question of leadership that we shall conclude.
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