Last chance for protected counties to prove their worth

The year 2016 is barely three months old, but the Sports Villain of the Year category has already had one compelling entry. Step forward Charlie Stillitano, the American sports executive who questioned Leicester City's credentials for entering football's Champions League, while suggesting that Manchester United and Chelsea should qualify automatically - on the grounds not of achievement but of status.

The argument was based on what Stillitano called the "money pot". Manchester United and Chelsea made football wealthier, he said, and that ultimately was what mattered. Leicester was "a wonderful, wonderful" story, but not one designed to maximise revenue. Stillitano sounds the sort of person who was read copies of the Economist at bedtime while everybody else was listening to Winnie the Pooh.

As Stillitano contended, this debate is largely the expression of an age-old tension between the European belief in sporting meritocracy and the US sports franchise system in which preordained clubs exist because it makes financial sense.

Here is a man, as Oscar Wilde had it, who clearly knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and English football fans largely told him as much. Football in Europe - for the time being at least - is still driven by a belief in meritocracy. Winning, this side of the pond, remains the only thing that matters. Every club, every fan, is entitled to dream.

Stillitano should make his next speech about cricket. Cricket has never needed much persuading to operate a closed shop. Revenue is jealously guarded and potential interlopers are looked upon with suspicion. This is true in international cricket, where there is little appetite for expansionism and the very term "Associate nation" sounds like a slight on a country's worth, and so too in England's county game, where the 18 first-class counties have no wish to share their annual payout from England's international proceeds.

Promotion and relegation in county T20 would have provided an elite division to appease TV rights holders, pin faith in the meritocracy that has served English sport well, and protected a system grounded in history and tradition

The counties have recently emerged unscathed from another consultative process with a reshuffle of competitions that will carry them through to 2020, but it could be a short-lived reprieve. Having benefited from one money pot throughout their protected existence, they are now threatened by the promise of a bigger money pot - only, one that could potentially muscle them into extinction.

If, over the next three years, the county T20 fails to fill the grounds like never before, Stillitano's money-pot rule will surely make the imposition of "City T20" inevitable - a tournament that would unashamedly be based on the American model, where big-city clubs in big-city grounds seek to draw big-city crowds and make big-city bucks, and however the rest of the summer is designed and whatever promises are made, the existing first-class system will inevitably face decline and contraction.

The rest of the world has already moved down this T20 route, but the rest of the world has never had a functioning professional circuit of such depth and tradition as England's.

The decision to shelve the recommendation for promotion and relegation in the NatWest T20 Blast, and retain two regional divisions, has increased the likelihood of City T20. Promotion and relegation in county T20 would have provided an elite division to appease TV rights holders, pinned faith in the meritocracy that has served English sport well (fans want promotion and relegation), and protected a system grounded in history and tradition. What's not to like?

"But what about the risk of losing local derbies?" went the cry. A sport that is overly reliant on one match a season is in a defeatist mindset indeed. The question encapsulates county cricket's lack of confidence in the quality of its product. Perhaps, in some cases, with good reason.

Much is made of county cricket's need to produce players for England. It is a central part of its remit, justification for its share of the ECB payout. But future payments cannot be predicted with certainty - certainly not far beyond England's staging of the 2019 World Cup - as international cricket suffers from a paucity of good sides and club-based T20 advances in every major nation.

The counties must therefore move further towards self-sufficiency if they are to survive. To have any hope of achieving that they must not just build hotels and run pop concerts but strengthen bonds with the communities they serve, work to improve the standard of cricket at all levels and to prove their relevance in countless different ways. Only then will enough people care about their survival at a time when media coverage of the county game is still shrinking.

It was encouraging to be at the ECB Business Awards last year and see some of the good, defiant work being done, but many counties are still falling short when it comes to proving themselves an indispensable part of the cricketing landscape.

English cricket's player pyramid is a system of lost faith. England has limited faith in the ability of the counties to produce international players of quality, so it invests in the Lions, Loughborough, and various development squads. The counties have limited faith in the recreational game, so they rely on private schools, elite coaching from an early age, and use the relative wealth and size of England's professional system to raid other countries for their dual national players.

Dual passport raids are in the news again. It is unfair to chide Essex too much for signing Matt Dixon from Western Australia as an England-qualified player when at least the county's ambitions are stirring again to play in the first division of the County Championship. Equally, in questioning Surrey's signing of two South Africans - Matthew Pillans and Conor McKerr - hard on the heels of the Curran brothers, one also has to recognise the improvement that their recent on-field advance and the fact that financially they are the most successful county in the country. But that does not alter the fact that it is essentially parasitic. County cricket must serve its communities or it serves little purpose.

England has limited faith in the ability of the counties to produce international players of quality so it invests in the Lions, Loughborough, and various development squads

If you want to play cricket for England, it is to be hoped you have maximised your advantage in one of the following four ways: have a family member who has played the game, go to private school, brandish your dual passport after learning your cricket elsewhere, or be born in Yorkshire or Lancashire. Every sport has hot spots, but county cricket's complacency and narrowness of vision is indefensible.

Don Robson, the former Durham chairman, who died earlier this month, understood the importance of community involvement. It is not often that English cricket reflects with sadness upon the passing of a local politician, but then Robson was no ordinary politician. His passion for his native north-east was illustrated in part by his unquenchable campaign for Durham to be elected a first-class county. It was finally awarded in December 1991 after they had dominated the Minor Counties scene for two decades. Even then it was awarded grudgingly.

Both as a chairman of the National Cricket Association (then responsible for the recreational game) and a regular onlooker at Greenside CC in the Tyneside and Northumberland League, he was driven by the wish to provide cricket opportunities for the youth of the region. Durham's proud belief in their own stock - not just from the endlessly impressive supply chain from Durham University but from the leading clubs - stays true to his legacy.

Matt Dwyer, the ECB's director of participation and growth, warned again last week, this time in a discussion managed by All Out Cricket magazine, that "cricket in this country doesn't feel as accessible to as many people as it should".

If solutions are not found, cricket in England is under threat. County cricket, through its county boards, must be central to the fightback. If recreational cricket falters then county cricket will falter with it. Coaches who provide many hours of commitment for the good of the game will wonder why they bother, and the playing base will shrink further. Big city cricket will have its day, but it will be little better than a made-for-TV game show. Without the resources to feed it, Stillitano's Money Pot will boil dry sooner than people think.