Cricket rights cash fight threatens lifeblood of the game

In The Candidate, Robert Redford's darkly satirical film about an ambitious young politician running for the United States Senate, the last line resonates more than most.

Upon winning his seat, Redford’s character Bill McKay turns to his campaign manager with a panicked expression and asks, “What do we do now?”

World Cup winners Glenn Maxwell and David Warner last year. The tournament’s broadcast rights money is the lifeblood of most cricket nations.Credit: Getty Images

The campaign to replace the International Cricket Council chair Greg Barclay with the BCCI secretary Jay Shah had a similar ring. It has been much more a matter of gaining power than a case of thinking carefully about how to wield it.

Shah is on the fast track to a political career in India, following his father Amit Shah, Narendra Modi’s right-hand man and a pillar of the BJP party that rules the world’s most populous nation. Having served all but a year of his maximum term at the BCCI, Shah needed another post. The ICC’s chair, previously occupied by other Indian figures such as Jagmohan Dalmiya, N Srinivasan and Shashank Manohar, is it.

But in the time when numerous national boards, including Cricket Australia, and its chair Mike Baird, have manoeuvred to prepare the ground for Barclay’s resignation and Shah’s election, the cricket world has been in a state of increasing ferment.

As revealed by this masthead, the ICC’s $US3 billion broadcast partner Star is chasing a discount of up to 50 per cent of that fee, a matter of concern for India, England and Australia but absolutely life-threatening for the likes of Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and the West Indies.

Jay Shah (left) with Indian skipper Rohit Sharma.Credit: ICC via Getty Images

While their shares of that money, divvied up by the ICC last year, are minuscule next to the 40 per cent claimed proudly by Shah and India, they are the lifeblood of cricket nations that can no longer fetch big fees for bilateral tours, including those by India, Australia or England.

ICC distributions are the bedrock of those countries’ cricket business models, the spinal funding reliably baked into their budgets for the next four years and used for all manner of key costs, from paying players to upgrading facilities.

As one example, Pakistan’s board is using part of its ICC share to renovate its stadiums ahead of next year’s Champions Trophy, the first global event they have hosted in decades. For the West Indies, the revenue derived from World Cups is more vital than ever because the market value of inbound tours, even by the big three nations, is declining.

Pakistan, unable to play bilateral games against India because of politics, are struggling to fetch a fee of much more than about $US10 million for their matches over the next three years, including a visit by England.

For Australia, of course, the ledger is flipped. The rich deals signed with Foxtel and Seven for the home market and Star for the Indian market mean the ICC distributions don’t matter anywhere near as much for CA. But an unbudgeted reduction in the size of that pie would make for increasingly famished Test match programs for the countries that Australia sorely need to maintain that bilateral broadcast value.

It is laudable on a theoretical level that Baird, Shah and England's chair Richard Thompson have discussed the introduction of a Test match fund to cover the travel costs and match fees of countries with weaker cricket economies. But then again, the matter of who pays for it leads back to many of the aforementioned problems.

Part of the ICC rights carve-up agreed by Barclay and his chief executive Geoff Allardice was a multimillion-dollar “strategic fund” from which numerous growth projects could be addressed, including the sustainability of Test cricket. But that money, too, was predicated on Star paying full freight, as agreed in 2022.

As Star and ZeeTV wrestle through arbitration about how the latter backed out of sublicensing a portion of the ICC rights and therefore balancing the cost, cricket administrators will be looking very carefully at the fine print of the ICC contract.

Cricket Australia chair Mike Baird (right) on Monday with (from left) Nathan Lyon, Cricket NSW boss Lee Germon, NSW Premier Chris Minns and Josh Hazlewood.Credit: Edwina Pickles

While CA successfully warded off a similar fight for a discount by Seven in 2020-21, a battle with Star would come with considerable danger, since it has long been cricket’s most reliable south Asian broadcaster. Fracturing that relationship to preserve the contracted money would risk taking a major player out of the rights market in the medium term – in other words more money now but much less later.

A “blend and extend” compromise with Star would strike a balance between money and partnership, but also leave cricket’s smaller economic powers with some potentially ugly balance sheets.

Baird, then, may be required to follow through on these words in January: “We need to support, retain and grow Test cricket, and we’re going to have to think through our priorities and part of that is how we distribute funding.”

With ICC dollars now in question, Shah and his acolytes in England and Australia have much to do. Unlike Redford’s character, this movie doesn’t end with the taking of power – now it is a case of wielding it wisely.

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