India, Australia and England in attempt to take control of cricket

[bulbul]

^ frankly i don't care abot the system , i dont think even after system is changed it will going to help cricket at grassroots level in India.

[G_B_]

I think it will while i mumbai for example they are already rebuilding (with academies) Dadojee Kondev stadium in Thane. So i have seen the results at grass-root level in India. Even Nashik when i went had the stadium being renovated with an academy being set up.

[yoda]

Some absurd proposals there giving elite status to just 3 countries. Yes money is important and there needs to be sensible distribution formula, that doesn't mean the money generators get to decide everything else. I hope the remaining countries reject the proposals and have Eng/Aus/India play against each other every few weeks.

[cowboysfan]

People want Bcci to have more money but they can't even maintain a proper Website, they don't even update ranji scores.

[Zap_Brannigan]

People want Bcci to have more money but they can't even maintain a proper Website' date=' they don't even update ranji scores.[/quote'] Its not about being greedy ( I actually think that its the greediness of the poorer nations thats stopping associate nations to get more funding), its about India getting atleast most of the money generated due to Indian viewers. In the 80's, our International player was shop lifting socks.Now, even ranji players are rich. Cricket has become a proper profession.Even if player dont make it into the international team, they can still have a viable career if they make their state team. Just by doing the rough math..Assuming India spends 2 months a year playing ICC tournaments and the rest bilateral series, and also assuming that Indian viewers generate just 70% of the TV rights (seriously low balling the numbers here), BCCI gets only 60% of the revenue it generates. But teams like Pak and SL , that brings in less than 10%, get more than 800% of the revenue they bring in. Bottom line is , its not fair to BCCI. You dont see your CEO sharing their salary with you..why should the BCCI?

[G_B_]

Its also about per capita distribution. Say BCCI gets 500 million and NZ gets 50 million. Per capita NZ have more than enough to develop the cricket in their country. You seriously cant compare the needs of a nation of 1.2 billion with that of 4 million. Per capita cricketers in England, Aus and NZ are earning more than your run of the mill ranji players.

[Scarves]

Oh the tier system can work, just need to have India, England and Australia not free from relegation and promotion when they are in Div 2.

[G_B_]

Oh the tier system can work' date=' just need to have India, England and Australia not free from relegation and promotion when they are in Div 2.[/quote'] agree on that. The big issue with that is the ashes become a tad uncertain when England and aus are in separate divisions.

[StriKe]

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B58AmBSKMTElSF8zOVE2RkFQX1E/preview Draft ^

[G_B_]

so basically the tiers are top 8 and then (9, 10, 11, 12 etc). Play in the Inter Continental Cup. So its like a 8-8 split. Relegation and promotion when the 8th team faces the winner of a tournament (IC cup). If challenger wins they are promoted. (A) existing ftp to be honoured (B) India England and Aus cant be relegated © Test world cup replaced by champions trophy to be played in England in 2017 and India 2021 (D) Last FTP India contributed 80% of funds in ICC events while others ranged from 5% and below. (E) 75% rev to full members and 25% to Associates from ICC events (F) For 2015 to 2023 expect rights to sell for $3.5 billion. (G) Redistribution of ICC moneies to favour India. But due to increases rights sales even the poorest boards like Zim will see a big hike to their fees. Something to the tune of 10 million USD a year for Zimbabwe cricket. (H) Test cricket fund will allow poorer test nations to host tours. They cover cost of travel and lodgings. CSA not in poor boards. (I) Associates set to get $210 milllion in this cycle compared to some $125 odd million in last cycle. Basically the jist i got from all this is that, all permanent members are set to earn more money. The simple reason is that the ICC rights etc are set to have a quantum jump of 3.5 billion from 1.5 billion. Thats more than double. The fundamental point in all this is that broadcasters indeed bid 3.5 billion USD for this cycle of 8 years. If its much below that then this document evaporates into thin air. Secondly, i dont think people will mind the 8-8 split. The odds of the team ranked 8th being defeated by the team who win the intercontinental cup (Zim or BD or Ireland or Afghanistan) in 2 tests at home and 2 tests away are remote. So test cricket is going to be a closed club of 8 me thinks for a while to come. But this will allow Ireland to play test cricket and be a sort of full member.

[Scarves]

agree on that. The big issue with that is the ashes become a tad uncertain when England and aus are in separate divisions.

I think Ashes has to be special, so continue the trend of what they have been doing twice with every 4 years. I don't think England and Australia should play each other unless it is the Ashes.

[Sachinism]

Looks like the BCCI-Stooges are out in full support.

[Sachinism]

http://thesillymidoff.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-commercial-rights-working-group.html?m=1

[Pakistan]

Not to nitpick but FIFA has more than 1 tournament every year. Copa America' date=' EuroCup are all FIFA events.[/quote'] FIFA World Cup, FIFA Confederations Cup, FIFA Club World Cup and Youth/Women Tournament are FIFA events. Euro Cup is UEFA event and Copa America is CONMEBOL event.

[Chandan]

http://goo.gl/UUR4T9 India and England give ICC a plan to save Test cricket STEPHEN BRENKLEY Sunday 19 January 2014 England are brokering a desperate deal with India to try to ensure the survival of world cricket. If it contains elements of naked greed and self-interest there is a growing fear that without it the whole structure of the international game could collapse. Both countries have been in talks for months, which have also involved Australia, to try to formulate a way forward which will mean a revolutionary change in the way the game is run. At its root is the next TV rights deal which the International Cricket Council is taking to market in the next few months and may be worth $2bn. The final document after several drafts will be presented to the ICC’s board meeting in Dubai next weekend. If it is not approved, or if it is delayed for long, the feeling is that India will simply play who, where and when they want. They have frequently indicated that the Future Tours Programme of international cricket is a hindrance and that playing in ICC events such as the World Cup are inconveniences. While it is a form of appeasement, if not quite a pact with the devil, it will have ample compensation for the three leading nations. Under the proposed new arrangements, all three will take more money from ICC central funds than they have before. Countries will actually be paid for taking part in ICC tournaments. There will also be a four-man executive body of the ICC, which will effectively take all decisions, and will have three permanent members, India, England and Australia. The more money the next batch of rights brings in the greater proportionate increase to which India will be entitled starting at 4.2 per cent and rising to 21.9 per cent. The lesser cricketing nations should also receive more but their proportion of any increase will be much lower. If it seems to ensure that the strong will only become stronger, the ICC’s Financial and Commercial Affairs Committee, on which India and England are the most influential voices, is insisting that there is no other way. India generate 80 per cent of cricket’s finances. The only way that many if not most of the countries make any real money is by selling the rights of bilateral series at home against India to Asian broadcasters. The present Future Tour Programme, which has created a proper rankings system, will be heavily diluted at best and the proposed World Test Championship in 2017 which was formally agreed only last year will be scrapped. The paper insists that the continuation of Test cricket is still the chief concern of all member nations. Unfortunately, it also recognises that too much Test cricket is little watched and not commercially viable. In future, countries will be allowed to play who they wish, though England, where Test cricket remains vibrant, and Australia have undertaken to play all seven of the other top eight nations in at least three Tests in a four-year cycle. Sixteen countries will be split into two groups of eight, the top tier playing Test matches and the bottom in the so-called Inter-Continental Cup. The winner of the bottom group in an eight-year cycle could be promoted to the top group, which would be less rather than more structured, but India, Australia and England could never be relegated. The impression among England’s administrators is that there was no other option. One might have been to tell India to that the other nine nations would cast India adrift but it was a financial risk. That would have left England as the richest nation but the truth is that without India the international game is virtually worthless. The few powerbrokers there are at the ICC appear certain that the market must dictate at all. While anxious not to empty the pockets of the lesser nations entirely there is also a warning in their position paper’s summary. “For cricket to survive and thrive into the 21st century and beyond ICC members have to become self sufficient with sustainable investment and growth in their domestic markets,” it says. “In that context, however, the ICC has lost touch with the issues members face in sustaining the growth of cricket in the markets. It has tried to be all things to all members resulting in a situation where most members look to the ICC to be told what type of cricket to play and expect the ICC to resolve any financial problems they may encounter.” This may work and it probably has to if Test cricket has any chance of prospering beyond Ashes series. Only England and to a lesser extent Australia are truly committed to it, though everyone seems to recognise that it is still the only form of the game that persuades people to talk about it round the water coolers, whatever country they are drinking in. “A key objective of this review and position paper is to provide for changes so that members accept that they are responsible for cricket in their countries and are responsible for running the game in a sustainable way to ensure that cricket thrives in their region.” In other words, they may be on their own. It also ends any idea that the ICC is a proper governing body. Cricket is being played at India’s beck and call. --------------------------------------- Article has been written as if England is the sole saviour of cricket and India is the beast hell bent to destroy it!

[SLICKR392]

PCB to oppose any change in governance model of ICC

Miffed with the changes being proposed in the ICC`s administrative structure, the Pakistan Cricket Board said it will oppose any overhaul that will cede executive decision-making to India, Australia and England. A draft proposal on these lines will be presented to the ICC Executive Board during its quarterly meeting in Dubai on January 28 and 29. A member of the PCB governing board told PTI that at the meeting held on Saturday in Lahore, the members had made it clear to reinstated Chairman Zaka Ashraf that the draft proposal should be opposed strongly at the ICC meeting. "The governing board was firm that this was a very sensitive issue for Pakistan and the PCB should go to the ICC meeting well prepared to give strong arguments against the proposed changes," the member said. "The governing board made it clear that the draft proposal basically would divide the world cricket order and Pakistan should not accept any position in the lower tier," he added. He said the governing board has authorised Ashraf to use all possible means to convince the ICC against going ahead with the changes. Another source disclosed that the Chairman had been asked to contact the other Boards which will be affected by the proposed changes and ensure a unified stance at the ICC meeting. "The PCB chief has been advised to form a unified stance on the matter with South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and West Indies before the ICC meeting," he informed. The proposal, drafted by a "working group" of the ICC`s Finance & Commercial Affairs (F&CA) committee, in which the BCCI, CA and ECB are key members, recommends wide-ranging changes in the ICC`s revenue distribution model, administrative structures and the Future Tours Programme. It questions the relevance of Test rankings and suggests the reinstatement of the Champions Trophy over the World Test Championship. And almost every recommendation of the "position paper" gives a larger share of control over world cricket to the Australian, English and Indian Cricket boards -- both in the boardroom and on the field.

:giggle:

[Scarves]

Well at least some other board is saying something against it, that's a start I suppose.

[BeautifulGame]

Martin Snedden, the New Zealand Cricket (NZC) director, has said that the possibility of the ICC handing over power to the Big Three - India, England and Australia - and allowing them to control the game's finances may not be a bad thing for world cricket. The proposals from the ICC's Financial & Commercial Affairs "working group position paper" seek, among other things, to scrap the central FTP agreements between the ICC and its members and replace it with bilateral agreements between member nations. It led to concerns that the other Test playing nations, including New Zealand, might not get the share they deserve, at the expense of the Big Three, but Snedden was confident that NZC's interests will be enhanced if the latest proposals are approved. "Do we [NZC] have power at the ICC table? No, not a hell of a lot. Do we have the ability to influence and persuade? A little bit. The critical thing is to identify the things most important to us. That means ensuring the stability of our playing programme and revenue generation," Snedden told the New Zealand Herald. The reason the FTP is to be removed from central ICC control, according to the position paper, is because "the draft FTP, as it stands, contains a large number of unviable tours." Cricket Australia, the ECB and the BCCI it is stated, are "committing" to enter into FTP agreements from 2015 to 2023. "It's a fundamental outcome for us to be left with a playing programme which sees us play all the Test-playing countries in a four-year cycle like in the FTP. Ratification of the existing schedule would be an excellent outcome. It's early stages but we've got a good chance of doing that. I need to stress there's nothing wrong with India, Australia and England working together to produce something for everyone," Snedden said. "Don't jump to the conclusion what they're doing is not good for world cricket. Get this right and the FTP playing programme can be extended to 2023 and we can line it up with ICC events like the World Cup and World T20. That'd be a stable platform to work from." The BCCI continues to generate the majority of the income for the ICC and though Snedden admitted that it will be more of the same, he said that cricket boards will have to embrace India's control. "I've walked back into a different world from what I left in 2007. When I exited, there was no IPL and the broadcasting rights were headed in India's direction but that has escalated over six years," Snedden said. "Whatever the formula reached, India will take a greater slice. I think that's fair because they create 70-80 per cent of the revenue. That's not unusual in the world of sporting rights agreements. The Indian market's escalated out of proportion to everyone else since last time. "We need to remove any doubt over their involvement in 2015-23 tours. If they're fully committed to the programme, that puts the ICC negotiating team in a strong position to exploit commercial rights." The proposals will be presented to the ICC Executive Board during its quarterly meeting in Dubai on January 28 and 29.

Already NZL towing the like WI and Srl will follow soon :cantstop: Doubt BCCI CA ECB will come with a controversial proposal like this if they already havent ensured enough votes pass this.

[alexander]

My understanding is that the big 8 will be tier 1 and the bottom 2 plus 6 associates will be tier 2 with a 1 up/1 down cycle? Every 4 years?

[Chandan]

http://goo.gl/UYI1aF SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS….. Gideon Haigh January 2014 Whatever you might say against the mooted financial remodelling of the International Cricket Council, one thing to be said in its favour is that it exposes at last the existing sham. ‘I’m not worried because it’s a democratic organisation,’ said the previous ICC president Sharad Pawar when three and a half years ago a small majority of members sided against his succession by John Howard, and even then it required an effort to keep a straight face. Now we can have a good, old-fashioned belly laugh. World cricket boss Alan Isaac! My sides! Also swept away is the pretence that the big three boards have the overall interests of cricket at heart, as distinct from their own. Cricket’s just another business, and the ethos of business is every man for himself. The Board of Control for Cricket in India, Cricket Australia and the England Cricket Board haven’t put their snouts in the trough so much as reminded everyone who owns the trough, from which the occasional cup may be handed down if everyone plays along with international cricket becoming a vast roiling BordGavPataudi Ashes. Naryamaswami Srinivasan of the BCCI, Giles Clarke of the ECB and Wally Edwards of CA can return to their home boards like gladhanding politicians and say: Look what I’ve got you. Players will get paid more. State associations will get to build posh new facilities. Commentators will receive bigger inducements to bless it all. Journos may get nicer press boxes – grumbling malcontents that they are, they’re pretty easily pleased. The rest? Well, they’ll just to cultivate ‘parallel revenue sources‘ in case of ‘untoward happenings’, I guess. Now, it is certainly true that the ICC’s financial model, in which India and Zimbabwe, for instance, get the same cut, is….ahem….sub-optimal. A new model might even make more. But shouldn’t it bestow its benefits a little more equally? Because that seems to be what’s at issue here: the end of what in comparative historical terms was a brief experiment in the ICC’s economically predominant members setting aside their parochial interests in favour of a larger agenda. It was during a brief window of League of Nations-like idealism at the ICC in late 1990s that New Zealand Cricket’s Chris Doig promoted an initiative to redress the divide opening up between richer and poorer members, pointing out how the reluctance of the former to visit was impeding the latter’s development. The result was the Future Tours Programme, designed to guarantee that each full member played the other at home and away over a five-year period, thereby providing smaller boards with some financial certainty. Why then was there such willingness to commit? Part of the reason, I suspect, was the general strength of cricket at the time. Australia’s supremacy was in its early stages; Sri Lanka had won the 1996 World Cup; look around the teams for the 1999 World Cup, and they’re uniformly awesome, with West Indies unable to penetrate the Super Sixes despite the presences of Lara, Ambrose, Walsh, Chanderpaul and Adams. South Africa had been successfully reassimilated. Even Zimbabwe was good. Kenya could beat the Windies, Bangladesh could roll Pakistan: on the field, cricket had perhaps never been so genuinely even. Then some things happened. Australia began to soar away on the field, India to soar away off it. As the depredations of match fixing were exposed, the members made only token efforts at multi-lateral remedies: individual boards levied their own token penalties, and set to whispering behind one another’s backs. And for West Indian cricket, the 1999 World Cup was a harbinger. Since 1 January 2000, they have won 26 of 141 Test Matches, whilst losing more than half. This was not merely, I would argue, the decline of a team; it was the collapse of an idea. The Caribbean ascendancy from the 1970s to the 1990s had been astounding: generations of great players surmounting their region’s economic, administrative and political disadvantages to become and remain the world’s best team. Cricket publics round the world craved to see them because they were exciting, powerful, daring, cool. But when it ended, all was ruin. And now, of course, what matters is not on-field brilliance but financial heft. The team that every board wants to host is India, not for any of the reasons people wanted to see the West Indies, but because they have a massive television audience in respect of which a home administration can sell broadcast rights. I’m simplifying, of course. The West Indies were bankable too, at least in the terms of their time. But I think they did stand for something: the potential of a team to rise to the top on the basis of excellence and spirit, to usurp what was then cricket’s big two of England and Australia. What does a two-tier system in which three oligarchs take most of the moolah and can’t be relegated stand for? Answer: it’s not ‘meritocracy’. The oligarchs argue that some tours are – shock horror – ‘unviable’. Who knew? And yet at a guess, I’d say that the vast majority of cricket tours since the dawn of time have been ‘unviable’, in the sense that their profit and loss accounts probably ran red ink. The first Marylebone tour of Australia in 1903-4 incurred a colossal deficit, absorbed by the club. But out of it sprang the Ashes, revived as a motif twenty years after the initial incineration by Pelham Warner’s tour book How We Recovered the Ashes. A financial loss a hundred and ten years ago, then, became a franchise from which self-inflating administrators continue to wring megabucks. Yes, the vast majority of bilateral arrangements are unprofitable on their face: there is so much cricket being played, supranational as well as international, that the market for content is flooded, and television’s values predominate. But it’s also true that a continuity of contact matters for other reasons, contributing to an on-going epic story, longer and bigger than any individual, however famous, and any administrator, however enduring. It’s even truer that the decline in the value of bilateral series is due in part to their neglect. Who can get fussed about two-Test series? How is it possible that India has not played Pakistan in a Test in six years, and not hosted Bangladesh for a Test in thirteen? Increasingly, bilateral series have become about back scratching among the mutually interested and the pursuit of administrative vendettas. To repeat, it’s not an economically optimal model. Nor is it surprising that the BCCI is a bit tired of seeing money it effectively contributes to the global game being shovelled out the door to, for example, enrich Zimbabwean carpetbaggers and Sri Lankan spivs. But then, the BCCI as a member of ICC did nothing to prevent that, by, for example, urging that full members give a decent account of how they spent their distributions. Nor is it startling that CA and ECB have sided with the BCCI in the reform process. The alternative was leaning the other way, and further leveraging the Ashes as a profit centre: not really much of an option when they’d already leveraged it to the hilt. Clarke and Edwards are nothing if not practical. In a sense, this regularises what had already informally been the case, that the BCCI exercised economic veto at ICC, with the tacit approval of CA and the ECB. One remaining anomaly is that the BCCI and CA are partners in the Champions League with Cricket South Africa. Be interesting to see how much longer that lasts. But let me think aloud a bit here. While this might be the way that business conducts itself, what are fans entitled to make of it? Fans do respond to the idea of sport as a ‘level playing field’. They do want to feel that the game is being decided on the field rather than off it. While they still primarily wish their own team to win, they are gratified by improbable or unexpected success, the steady fluctuations of results and balances of power, with universal benefits arise from localised improvements. Australian cricket is subtly better off for Sri Lankan cricket being better off, because better contested series are more watchable and valuable, and because it adds to the richness of the cricket conversation. Promotion and relegation provide an exciting concept, it is true. It is the staff of life to premier leagues in football round the world. But it’s not the only way of looking at organising sport. Having no particular expertise in this area but sensing that division would be the way of the future in cricket, I did some reading last year into the historical and intellectual bases of equalisation in sport in the US: in particular a collection edited by John Vrooman, The Economics of the National Football League (2012). The parallels with cricket are obviously imperfect. But I think the implicit notions of how a sport is followed are quite instructive. Sixty years ago, a sub-committee of the US House Judiciary Committee investigating monopoly power made a celebrated study of Major League Baseball. Following what was known as the ‘Celler Hearings’, for the committee chairman Congressman Emanuel Celler, was an economist at University of Chicago, Simon Rottenberg, who published what is regarded as the first significant paper on the subject of the economics of sport, ‘The Baseball Players’ Labor Market’ (1956). It was Rottenberg who first stressed the importance to sporting competition of uncertainty of outcome and distribution of talent: ‘The nature of the industry is such that competitors must be of approximately equal ‘size’ if any are to be successful; this seems to be a unique attribute of professional competitive sports.’ This ‘invariance principle’ was because a league in which the strong simply soaked up all the talent would defeat itself. Explicitly collusive measures against unfettered competition at the time, however, were circumscribed by America’s strict anti-trust laws, so stringent, in fact, that it was illegal to sell any more than local broadcasting rights to sporting contests; any collective action was construed as restraint of trade. The disparity of the value between the local rights available to, for example, teams in New York and small market teams like Green Bay alarmed National Football League commissioner Bert Bell, with his famous vision of a league in which ‘[o]n any given Sunday, any team in the NFL can beat any other team’. The NFL had an abiding commitment to equalization measures, its player draft dating back to 1936. So after the NFL’s first attempt to bundle its television rights was blocked on anti-trust grounds by the Department of Justice, Bell’s successor Pete Rozelle successfully lobbied Congress to exempt sales of broadcast rights for football, baseball, basketball and hockey, the Sports Broadcasting Act becoming forerunner of other equalization measures, including a hard salary cap. The NFL is less equal than it was, but more than 70 per cent of revenue in the world’s most successful football competition is still shared, including an annual $US4 billion in television rights, and Rottenberg’s original thesis sits little modified. As Vrooman says: ‘Sports leagues are unique in that individual clubs are mutually interdependent in their cooperative production of competitive games. As joint members of natural cartels each sports team is only as strong as its weakest opponent.’ The point is this: private owners in the NFL, the biggest sporting competition in the world, whose main aim is franchise profit, choose to achieve this by centralising and evenly distributing revenues so that the result of no game is foreordained, and every game is a potential television ‘blockbuster’. International cricket is different in key respects, of course. It’s not a league as such, although it does have ranking tables, and it can’t do much about distribution of talent when it is constrained by geographic boundaries, although players are also more mobile than they were. But the ICC does have global events to which it sells the rights that depend on uncertainty of outcome, and cricket elsewhere is paying some lip service to equalisation, at least in theory: even if it is doubtful how binding they are, salary caps operate in the IPL and the BBL. So how does cricket’s global ‘cartel’ benefit from the rich becoming richer? Doesn’t the ICC’s strategic plan speak of ‘More Competitive Teams’ and ‘Promoting the Global Game’? Isn’t the lack of other equalisation measures all the more reason to tred vary warily where further inequalities are concerned? I stress that these are early thoughts, based on limited detail: I offer this simply in the spirit of context for what should be a key cricket debate, in which, I think, we all have a stake. And like I said, in some senses this merely regularises what has already long been the case: that the cricket world is profoundly, if not irrevocably divided, and observes the Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences. But I’m not sure how in the long term entrenching that divide benefits even those on the right side of it.