Cricket is in a hurricane of shit.
Pardon my salty language if it upsets you, but it’s hard to find a more apt description for the state of cricket and especially associate cricket. The United States has its own specific ordeal as a board on borrowed time and desperate for legitimacy picks a fight with its biggest business partner, potentially bankrupting itself in the process. Not much has changed about the ACE/USAC dispute since the last time I wrote about it, and Smit Patel (not that one, although that would be awesome) has given a better and more timely summary of events over at Cricbuzz than I could write myself. USAC and ACE are likely headed for arbitration, and the undisputed champion of American sports, Billable Hours, is getting loose for his next spell down at fine leg. USAC could be suspended in as little as eight weeks with no clear timeline for holding elections and little public faith those elections will be free of shenanigans.
This was an entirely foreseeable outcome for anyone paying attention, a group that does not include the ICC Board of Directors, who put USA Cricket on double secret probation in July. It could have been avoided had USA Cricket been suspended at the annual conference in Singapore a full 12 months after being put "on notice" by the ICC and failing to do anything meaningful to remedy that. Numerous countries have issues because the ICC governs this sport with all the savvy and deftness of Gomer Pyle, expressing profound shock at every new development in the circus of national boards without a single ounce of foresight, wisdom, or even concern.
I am not a fan of the International Cricket Council and haven’t been for several years. If FIFA puts the bar for sports governance on the ground, the ICC comes along with a shovel. The naked power grab over the last decade by the "Big Three" - India, England, and Australia - has created the stage for this mess as those three look to keep high-level cricket as small and elitist as possible while framing themselves as benevolent stewards and messaging that to the public through a whole squadron of Rob Manfreds. The fox guards the henhouse, as evidenced by the BCCI's absolutely unhinged revenue sharing proposal that sees India receive almost 40% of all ICC revenues on the basis of, hey, we made that money for the ICC, so we should get a bigger cut of it. Any serious sports governing body would laugh that idea out of the room - the ICC approved it in 2023, and to say it threatens to stall out a period of explosive worldwide growth is me being diplomatic.
The conflicts among the power brokers and their various blocs of allies and also-rans who are out to kick each other in the nuts at every possible chance to make a dollar is its own set of issues, but where the ICC has truly, catastrophically failed is in governance of its junior members.
That's perhaps not surprising, given that Associate Members have very little say in the actual affairs and governance of the sport at large under the ICC's existing structure which is one of the least democratic setups of any international sport on Earth in the 21st century (World Rugby, which gives certain countries more votes than others, is a close second). The ICC has a fig leaf of Associate representation on its Board of Directors: three of them. A whopping 89% of the membership is represented by 17% of the board and the 98 AMs receive a combined 12% of all ICC revenues. Associate members represent the sport’s vast untapped potential, but the ICC's inability to proliferate full members across the globe from those ranks underscores its insular nature and general failure to govern in the best interests of the sport over the best interest of the Full Member boards, incorrectly viewing the two as one and the same.
In the last 30 years, only Bangladesh (2000), Ireland (2017), and Afghanistan (2017) have risen to Full Member status, and Ireland was banging on the glass ceiling for quite a while before the ICC finally dislodged anterior from posterior and allowed them into the big club. The sport has remained the purview of England and the Crown's former colonies for almost its entire history, but it never had to be that way and doesn’t have to now.
There is an economy and a wealth in some of these AM countries that would let them be additive to the sport's global landscape in short order. The United States, Netherlands, and United Arab Emirates are ninth, eleventh, and twelfth in the world in purchasing power parity per capita according to the IMF, meaning they have the resources to invest heavily into any sports endeavor and are able to pay higher prices for tickets and merchandise in both real and relative terms. The ICC could be doing things like identifying potential future FMs, issuing development and infrastructure grants or Associate-oriented performance funds or including them in the Future Tours Program. Those are things that would give the sport staying power in its fledgling outposts, and they are things the ICC has the power, influence, and even financial wherewithal to do if it wants to.
Instead, they have allowed the associate boards to become fiefdoms for niche weirdos, giving rise to a hundred petty tyrants across the planet. Oman and Papua New Guinea tried to pull a fast one on their players by not paying them prize money explicitly earmarked for them by the ICC after the 2024 T20 World Cup; the ICC responded with a shrug, and Oman later got mad that it was being called out on its BS. Many of the players who were on the wrong end of those ordeals are no longer professional cricketers. Canada has a number of issues, most notably that the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit is investigating their board after they were allegedly recorded attempting to fix national team matches plus a CEO who was charged by Canadian authorities with defrauding a local cricket league out of more than $200,000, but it has been months since these investigations reportedly began and nothing has come from it one way or the other. France's board was caught flat-out defrauding the ICC with fake women’s matches by France 24 in 2023 and has faced no visible consequences for it. Even Nepal, the most serious prospect for Full Member status, has dealt with endemic corruption and governance issues for over a decade that echo those currently faced by USA Cricket... along with spot-fixing in the Nepal T20 League, which was scrapped and replaced with the Nepal Premier League, which, after the government briefly put a halt to preparation activities, is on track to start year two in November.
Of those countries, Nepal is the only one that faced public discipline: the Cricket Association of Nepal was suspended for three years because of a dispute with Nepal’s National Sports Council. It has been open season for kickbacks, petty politics, score-settling, wannabe authoritarians and alleged criminals to squabble over scraps of power that prevent the sport from fulfilling its potential in many places where cricket could flourish and make a lot of people very, very rich.
The ICC's revenue sharing debacle compounds this, because the lack of distribution to Associate Members is likely coming home to roost soon. Dream11, a daily fantasy app that has done far more to help the sport grow in new markets than the ICC has over the last six years, shut down its real money gaming operation this week as India passed new online gambling regulations banned such activities. The sudden loss of the overwhelming majority of its revenue likely halts Dream11 sponsorship of things like the Indian national team and the Indian Premier League - entities which should have no trouble recovering those sponsorship costs through the overwhelming market demand to associate brands with them in a country where the sport is ubiquitous.
More crucially, Dream11 is a major sponsor of cricket in Europe and along all the lower-level ICC competitions that allow Associate Members to compete against each other, grow, develop, and also gather some amount of prize and/or sponsorship money to help finance their operations. Dream11 has reportedly pumped USD $5.4 million total into European cricket through the European Cricket Network and its competitions, the European Cricket Championships, European Cricket International, and the T10 European Cricket League for both men and women. The future of all six competitions and many others like them is now up in the air. While the ICC may be inclined to shrug, it must be aware of and alert to the knock-on consequences for Associate Members and step in to ensure they are protected from the full extent of the fallout - because they will feel it a lot more than the Full Member boards, and a decade’s worth of growth could collapse without an urgent and serious response.
What's most upsetting about the ICC's infighting, foot-dragging, and greed is that when it has undertaken progressive measures, they have been clear positives for the sport. Folding Affiliate Members into the Associate tier of ICC membership in 2017 has directly led to the rising ambitions of countries as diverse as Argentina, Bhutan, Brazil, Croatia, Indonesia, Romania, and Spain. Making T20 International status universal to all ICC members has made it the dominant form of the sport worldwide and accelerated the ascent of Italy, Malaysia, Nepal, and the United States. Relaxing residency criteria for eligibility has allowed countries with significant expat communities from traditional powers to grow and become much more competitive in the short term while they work on grassroots development efforts. Many of these countries are far from the center of the cricket world competitively or otherwise, but the point is that they are actively growing the sport, and they are afforded the chance to do so because the ICC created avenues for them to progress to a more competitive level internationally. All the ICC has to do to sustain that momentum is care about the other 98 countries playing this sport.
The ICC's failure to govern the Associate Members is comprehensive and infuriating. It has eaten the carrot and misplaced the stick. While it may feel like they are handling the United States with kid gloves because of the potential economic impact of bringing the USA into the sport's upper echelon, mismanagement of this situation reflects a pattern of negligent governance that is at the root of its culture as an entity and seems poised to continue on Jay Shah's watch. It remains to be seen if Shah will awaken to the ICC’s unwitting undermining of efforts to develop stable, transparent, democratic governance in these countries, or if he’s fine with them doing whatever they want as long as he gets his photo ops.
Locally, this means that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and whatever comes after the fallout of USA Cricket’s dramatic unraveling will simply reboot the cycle unless other, more serious sports people get very serious about cricket in a short period of time.
Forget buying me a Ko-fi, I’m gonna need a Bour-bon. Maybe I’ll actually get to write about Karima Gore next time. Stay tuned.