Radical changes to the way cricket is governed – and by whom – are in the offing, according to a working document drafted by the three richest member nations of the International Cricket Council (ICC).
The Finance & Commercial Affairs (F&CA) Commercial Rights Working Group position paper, a copy of which has been seen by The National, has been drafted by the boards of Australia, England and India.
The 21-page document, presented to all full members of the ICC at a little-publicised January 9 meeting in Dubai, is set to return cricket to the days when Australia and England ruled supreme over administration; only, in an ironic twist, India – which fought so hard to abolish that old system – is now a part and perhaps leader of this emerging oligarchy.
The intended restructure of the way cricket is governed revolves around plans to set up an Executive Committee which will be made up of Cricket Australia (CA), the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) as permanent members. One other non-permanent member will be nominated on an annual basis by the three boards.
The Executive Committee, the paper proposes, will supersede the current executive board of the ICC, which is made up of all full members and makes decisions; effectively, it narrows all major decision-making in the game into the hands of these three boards. This body will also have the power to nominate the head of the influential F&CA committee and also the ICC chairman.
The paper also calls for the current Future Tours Programme (FTP), the international calendar of the game, to be scrapped and taken out of the control of the ICC. “No member should be forced to play another member except as bilaterally agreed,” the draft reads. “No member should be forced to host uneconomic tours. … There should be no ICC FTP regulation or central FTP agreement between ICC and full members.”
The current FTP – though its enforcement is erratic – sets basic parameters of bilateral engagement over an eight-year period: each full member must host and visit every other full member at least once in that period. In the newly proposed FTP, set over a minimum four-year period, “CA and ECB will offer a guarantee of three Tests and five limited-overs matches per cycle to the top 8 members.”
The requirement of the BCCI is not currently available.
This would seem to solidify growing fears in recent months that the three boards are happy to play each other as often as possible as their most lucrative assignments, without the compulsion of playing tours against lesser full members.
The final major overhaul the report calls for, and one that has been whispered about for some time now but is only confirmed by this document, is of the current financial distribution system of the international game.
Currently, a vast portion of the money from all ICC events is divided equally among all full members and the remaining given to associate and affiliate nations. In this new plan, subtitled “ICC distribution ranking system – Meritocracy not just Membership”, the boards that earn the most revenues for an ICC event, will be entitled to the greatest returns.
“In the past, there has been only an equal payment to all full members” from ICC events, the paper states. “Under this new model – the Contribution Costs – a small proportion of gross income – recognise the role of each member in contributing to generating the ICC revenues required to sustain the game.”
A number of other recommendations are made in the report, the most eye-catching of which is the idea of scrapping a proposed World Test Championship (launched with much fanfare by the ICC only a few months ago in Abu Dhabi) and replacing it with a system of promotion and relegation.
This, theoretically, allows associates such as Afghanistan and Ireland to be promoted and play Test cricket, at the expense of the bottom two of the 10 full members. But in a sign of how concentrated power will be, the paper makes Australia, England and India exempt from relegation.
The report has, it is believed, been in the works for the past six months though no mention of it has been made to the ICC or any other member board. The first time the rest of cricket administration saw this was during the January 9 meeting; that meeting would not have been made public at all had it not been for an inadvertent public reference to it in a media release by the Pakistan Cricket Board on a separate matter.
According to officials present at the meeting, the draft was presented as a fait accompli. Members outside this trio were left in no doubt that the report, presented by the BCCI head N Srinivasan, is the final position of the three boards: take it or lump it, was the message.
Discussions and reactions emerged at the meeting and, unsurprisingly, boards outside this troika, expressed great unease and opposition to the proposed changes: “If we don’t stop this then it will become a huge problem,” one official said, describing to The National the general reaction.
The role of the ICC stands to become further diminished and its headquarters possibly moved to another country. A spokesman for the group declined to make an official comment. But officials familiar with the meeting stress that it is a draft, currently, a working plan and could be changed.
Others suggest that may not be the case. One full member official says that the BCCI has essentially pegged its participation in future ICC events on this financial redistribution plan going forward – a reason why the ICC did not begin the process of tendering its commercial rights last year.
The report will be discussed further at the official ICC board meeting on January 27 and 28 in Dubai. It is expected to be a particularly messy meeting and talk of legal options being explored by the boards outside this trio is not fanciful.
An official not from one of the three boards evoked the prospects of a return to the old “veto” system of administration on which cricket was once run, until the subcontinent’s growing financial strength overturned the system in the mid-1990s.
“These are very radical changes,” the official said. “The view of many boards is how on Earth can we come back to this system? In ICC when veto was abolished, it brought in a notion of equality. This negates that completely. Using the front of economy, they are attaching the right of a country to rule the cricket world by using economic strength as a plank.”
He also questioned how any new system can be based on meritocracy when the three boards have exempted their own teams from relegation. “Permanent cycles don’t exist. India was not in the position it is now in 10 years ago and 10 years from now, Australia might not be in the position they are in now.
“How can three countries be exempt from relegation? How can that be? They say at one end they are following meritocracy, but you base it on their financial strength who is promoted or relegated.”
There is some urgency on the paper, as well. The three boards want to have either all or some parts of this draft ratified by April this year, when the ICC will begin the process of tendering its eight-year commercial rights agreement; the next batch of rights are from 2015-2023.
It is possible that the decision goes to a vote as early as the meeting at the end of January. For the report to be accepted, with such vast structural changes, it would have to secure at least seven out of 10 full-member votes.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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