Cricket’s free market is an IPL monopoly

For years, cricket people have been talking expansively about “the market”. All must change, but it is nobody’s doing; it is just “the market”; it is just “supply and demand”; we have to focus on “cricket consumers” and the “entertainment industry’.

These assertions have laundered any number of self-interested short-term decisions. It wasn’t us; the market made us do it! And with each step has dwindled any sense of cricket being anything other than a product, having any purpose save the maximisation of profit or any need for independent, disinterested global governance.

So here we are, animal spirits of the marketplace thoroughly loose. Bringing us to David Warner.

Love or loathe him, Warner is an epochal cricketer. He represented his country before he played first-class cricket; he incarnated the T20 revolution before assimilating the rigours and rhythms of Test cricket, dynamising the relationship between them.

Plus, aged 35, he’s still box office. And last week he appeared set to align that appeal not with the well-established if lately unloved Big Bash League but with an exotic UAE T20 rival where the teams have as yet no names but the backers, shared with the Indian Premier League, have a tonne of money.

If Warner wants to go, no grounds exist for denying him the standard No Objection Certificate. He would miss no cricket for Australia. He has not played the BBL for a decade. If he can earn far more playing far less in the Gulf, why hang around to electroplate the local T20 turd?

If he can captain, from which in Australia he is disbarred, all the better. It’s “the market”.

Will CA make Warner a counter-offer? Chances are it would simply engender a counter-counter-offer. Whatever transpires, a point has already been reinforced about there now being effectively three structural variations on the well-worn domestic T20 concept.

Emboldened by the $US6bn ($8.58bn) in media rights of which they gained a share six weeks ago, the 10 franchise owners in the ­Indian Premier League and their corporate peers are busily extending their reach.

The UAE and South Africa now form part of this sphere of influence; so too, the West Indies, albeit that the Caribbean Premier League suffers a permanent time zone disadvantage in obtaining Indian audiences.

Private capital, albeit local and on a considerably smaller scale, also underwrites leagues in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Then there are Australia’s Big Bash, New Zealand’s Super Smash, England’s Vitality Blast and The Hundred, all still defined by the strategic control and resource constraints of their national boards, even if for the last you can already hear the auctioneer warming their gavel.

What am I bid for the …(shuffles papers) … London Spirit? Imagine as a mascot an outsized Boris Johnson made from foam and faux fur …

Expectation is now of convergence. That the BBL would benefit by private capital has many ardent and ubiquitous proponents. Hell, it would certainly benefit those proponents, viz ­venture capitalists, elite players, their managers and sundry other ticket-clippers.

We can guarantee that the arguments for will not promptly be settled. Let us say, for the moment, that private equity is an ­answer dragging a whole host of new questions.

In the meantime, the breathless hunt is on for what always seems to be the same familiar FIFOs – Rashid Khan, Kieron Pollard, Faf du Plessis et al – who are unlikely to stick around for the duration anyway because of the rival enticements of the Gulf and South Africa.

That familiarity, in fact, tells a bit of a tale. Genuine star power in world cricket is in shorter supply than it looks. Because despite all the talk this week of free agents and guns-for-fire, we remain paradoxically a long way short of a genuine open market for cricket attraction and talent.

That’s because, despite no organisation being more closely identified with cricket’s neoliberal consensus, the Board of Control for Cricket in India forbids Indian internationals, the world’s wealthiest and most sought-after, from playing in any league bar the IPL – a restriction they would denounce were it imposed by any other board.

Hidebound, stuck-in-the-mud Australia lets David Warner go anywhere; turbo capitalist India prevents Jasprit Bumrah doing the same, and the country has no players’ association to argue for his freedom of sporting trade. Given the staggering wealth the IPL has spun off for others, in fact, you can argue that Indian players are proportionally underpaid.

Might this change? One wonders about the implications of the new Indian vogue for transnational investment.

The BCCI has kept its IPL franchise owners on a tight leash hitherto, but they are no longer so beholden.

The BCCI has worked hard to build a home international season round the new year, but part of it now coincides with competitions largely Indian-funded that would benefit from the participation of Indian players.

The BCCI is wealthy, but the Ambanis are wealthier.

And if “the market” was truly let rip, what might a cricket world of unrestricted movement and unrestricted investment look like?

Can we envision a Sydney Super Kings featuring eight Indians, an Englishmen, a South African, David Warner on a walking frame for a bit of local colour but no Pakistanis in homage to the BJP, playing a Boxing Day derby against the Melbourne Indians at 11pm for the pleasure of prime time viewers in the subcontinent?

What’s that? We’ll never get there? Perhaps not.

But we didn’t think we’d get here, did we?