The world money made

There are better ways to bring in a new decade, but here are a few numbers. In 2007-08, the BCCI announced revenues of over US$213 million. Cricket's two other richest boards by comparison are not a world away. The ECB and CA, respectively, rolled in $148 million and $128 million, but it is the BCCI's spurt over the decade - and particularly the second half - that is to be noted. Only in 2005-06, for example, the BCCI's revenues were $91 million. At the turn of the decade, in 1998-99, their revenue was not even $2 million. In 1992 they were trying to wipe out a deficit of $150,000, which is the kind of chump change their peon might throw at you while driving you by now. The next few years the gap will only widen.

Various estimates have Indian cricket generating anywhere between 60 to 80% of the sport's entire revenue. Everybody wants a piece of India, everybody. Countries are desperate for them to tour. Some, like Bangladesh, don't even mind if they don't ever tour India. The PCB, more loyal than the king for much of the decade, is now striving hard to make light of the latest political fallout between the two countries. It's easy to see why; in 2003-04, India's tour to Pakistan saved the PCB from the financial ruin brought on by security concerns following 9/11 and the war on neighbouring Afghanistan. This year, security concerns have led to a $125 million loss for Ijaz Butt's administration, of which $40 million is just from the cancellation of an Indian visit. The PCB's $140-million TV deal is mostly pegged on Indian tours.

Others fare better. West Indies are granted the favours of pointless ODI series when the need arises, for votes they may have given or might soon give. Sri Lanka prefer handouts, looking at the BCCI as a kind of IMF or World Bank, without the debilitating repayment plan. Even richer boards like Cricket Australia and Cricket South Africa want to piggyback on the BCCI for the Champions League. The ECB, meanwhile, is in a funk, not knowing whether to hitch a ride or try and emulate the Indian board's ways. And three modern-day truisms, finally, that confirm India's dominance. One, entire tournaments are said to be scuppered financially should India fall early, as happened during the 2007 World Cup and the 2009 World Twenty20.

Two, there was a time still, during the early years of the decade, when it took an Indian at the head of the ICC to symbolise the BCCI's growing clout. Now it doesn't matter if someone from Timbuktoo is at the head, for everyone knows who is running the show. And three, the IPL has become the new county cricket. Big benevolent India, doling out the cash everywhere, making sure the world game runs along. Everybody wants a piece of India, everybody.

Cricket has made more money this decade than in any other. The late Bill Sinrich of IMG, among the most influential sports-television executives, was the key instigator behind cricket's emergence into the broadcast limelight in the mid-90s. The 1996 World Cup changed cricket's financial equations. Across the board, cricket boards have benefited from bigger TV deals as the decade has worn on. Sky, for instance, paid the ECB $475 million for four-year rights last year. The ICC, which reportedly had $25,000 in its kitty in 1997, has not missed out, netting comfortably over a billion dollars for eight-year rights for its events.

But nobody has accrued more benefits than the BCCI, whose TV deals have not only gotten bigger but broader. Nimbus paid $612 million for four-year rights to Indian cricket, and separate deals came in with the IPL and Champions League. The country has changed as much as anything else. A newly liberalised economy, an electronic media boom, a growing, hungry and transformed middle class wanting to spend not save, and a huge captive population have all shaped the BCCI's rise. But it shouldn't be seen entirely as an accident of fate, however. Somehow, as they say of India itself, the BCCI has worked. At key moments it has worked.

. The problem is not that <i>India</i> enjoys and abuses the power. The problem is, as it was with the age of Australia and England before, that cricket seems so predisposed to concentrate so much power in so few hands

Not only was Twenty20, for example, not their idea, it was something they were entirely averse to, and nobody remembers the grudgingly organised domestic Twenty20 tournament they held before the IPL came along. The IPL wasn't even the first franchise-based Twenty20 league. In fact the idea for such a league, in different formats and shapes, had actually been kicking around India since the mid-90s - Lalit Modi himself and the late Madhavrao Scindia were the early floaters. The BCCI was forever wary, mostly of letting any kind of control slip out of their hands, and even at one stage objecting to foreign players participating.

But when the moment was right, just after the 2007 World Cup, they struck, spurred on by the arrival of the ICL and Misbah-ul-Haq's monumental mis-scoop. They chanced it and here came, with the IPL, the decisive shift of the decade; the then-gradual lurch of cricket's centre towards Mumbai in the decade between the mid-90s and the mid-noughties became speedier, much speedier.

Others did not take advantage. The people who created the very format, for example, sat around not knowing what to do with it. Just how and why the ECB didn't pre-empt the IPL will remain one of the mysteries of the decade. Back in 2003, when the format was first unveiled, England and the county circuit remained cricket's premier, most lucrative, destination outside of international cricket. Who would have turned down big deals to play Twenty20 for a county league? Instead the ECB came up with a belated, retrospective, utterly confused and ultimately embarrassing bid to outflank India; even if Allen Stanford was not now in jail, the dalliance with him marked a sorry nadir in the ECB's fortunes this decade.

Some boards, like Cricket Australia, haven't even made any attempt to outthink, outflank or out-innovate. Their bed was made early in the piece and nothing has been allowed to get in the way of that; no team has played more Tests against India this decade and only one team (Sri Lanka) has played more ODIs against them. A rivalry has been happily milked, understandably, even if the lengths to which they went to ensure Sydney 2008 didn't end in India abandoning the tour were less so. But what else has there been? Have Australia never felt the need, for example, to further illuminate the toughest domestic system in the world with more foreign players?

In as much the tale of the decade is about the BCCI taking a punt, it is also about the inertia of all else around them. In their immediate neighbourhood it has been supreme folly upon folly. At the start of this decade the concept of a powerful Asian bloc still existed. Project Snow was still fresh in the minds of many; the idea was mooted at a fractious ICC meeting in 1996, where Australia, England, New Zealand and the West Indies were prepared to break away from the ICC, threatened by the increasing influence of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

But both the PCB and SLC have spent the noughties slowly hacking at their own feet. Afflicted by such infighting, such crippling lack of leadership and governance, they have only been a threat to themselves and no one else. No administration has been able to look beyond its nose. The Asian Cricket Council has never been more nothing. There have been the same number of Asia Cups this decade as there were the last - three - but each one has seemed less significant, less relevant. Already it is difficult to see even that many over the next 10 years. And let alone finding enough mourners, are there enough souls who even remember the Afro-Asia Cup?

So cricket feels it has a problem. The BCCI is ruining it with too much money, not enough direction. Players want to freelance, and representing their country suddenly seems not such a big deal. The very order of the game is being shaken, by the BCCI. Like America politically, they are an easy and fashionable scapegoat, not least because they don't really care about the sniping. Like with America, some of the barbs are justified. On at least two occasions this decade, in 2001 in South Africa and 2008 in Sydney, the BCCI has played a petulant bully in battles with the ICC. In the matter of the ICL it led what amounts to a witch-hunt.

The lust for owning production of the cricket broadcast is also unseemly; the replacement of commentators with cheerleaders, in particular, a tasteless fallout. The suspicion that it has tried to isolate Pakistan - albeit with help from the PCB itself - also lingers, and Lalit Modi does often seem to make up rules as he stomps along.

But the jibes are also, in a sense, misplaced. The problem is not that India enjoys and abuses the power. The problem is, as it was with the age of Australia and England before, that cricket seems so predisposed to concentrate so much power in so few hands. At some point over the next 10 years, the ICC must seriously ask itself: what is its purpose? It cannot be the UN of cricket, because there is no use for the UN. Because of its very format, the ICC has not been able to rise above the sum of its constituent units in governing the game. If the game is global now or is trying to be, either governance has to spread and involve everyone, not just one, or the ICC has to change its very structure and grow a spine.

Those who defend the BCCI's bullishness, that it is about time the old colonials got their comeuppance, often argue that had Australia or another country been so powerful, there wouldn't be such a fuss. The implication is that race plays a part in all this. Perhaps there is some truth in it; a group as small as cricket's, with the kind of unique coloniser-colony dynamics, cannot avoid that. And the ICC still feels at times like one of those old gentlemen's clubs that has finally given admission to the oppressed, where neither the old or new order seems comfortable with their new status.

But more and more this game is about money, about who has it and who doesn't and not race. Fourteen years ago Project Snow was baldly inspired by race. These days the new talk of breakaways stems from finance and power; cricket's new alliances between the BCCI, CA and CSA, for example, in the Champions League, and their joining hands with the ECB in opposing a Test championship, cut through colour and get to the heart of all matter in this new world. Cricket has come far and yet it hasn't come far at all.