Cricket and free-to-air TV – the full story

From the May issue of SPIN magazine, the UK’s only independent cricket title and, not being owned by Sky like the Wisden Cricketer, the only one able to offer an independent view of the major issues facing the game. For special offers on subscriptions, click this link.

When it comes to cricket’s TV rights debate, there is one key observation that is barely ever expressed, even by ECB chairman Giles Clarke himself. Jamie Clifford, chief executive of Kent, spent seven years working for the Kent Cricket Board, administering those famous grass roots of the game. He believes many discussions of the subject are missing something: “It’s not true that simply showing the game on TV is the best or only marketing tool cricket has,” says Clifford. “It’s a nonsense. You have to go out and explain the game and encourage kids to play it. Kids have to be taught and to have facilities to play it: simply being exposed to it doesn’t develop a love of playing it at all. Yes, some kids will copy what they see on the television but because cricket is a bit more complicated, that’s only half the battle.”
Another county chief executive, KD Smith of Leicestershire, puts more meat on the bones of the ECB’s opposition to government intervention in the TV rights bidding process, as proposed by the recent report by David Davies. “It would be a disaster for English cricket if home Ashes Tests had to be broadcast free-to-view,” Smith tells SPIN. “I’ve seen a few dumb cricketers saying how wonderful it would be, but they won’t think like that if their salaries halve. The amount of money Sky put into the game is huge. It really is a good deal for cricket. In the longer term the hope is that ESPN will challenge for the TV rights and ensure that Sky have someone to bid against. The BBC don’t seem to want cricket. They can’t afford it and they can’t schedule it.
“Cricket at all levels would be hit: women’s cricket; disability cricket; kids’ cricket and first-class cricket. I reckon that about 30 per cent of recreational clubs would disappear. If the Tories get in at the election, the issue will disappear. They’ve bigger fish to fry. My worry is what happens if there is a hung parliament. But even if the report is accepted initially – and I don’t think it will be – there will be an appeal. It almost beggars belief that there was no economic impact report and the ECB – quite rightly – will appeal on those grounds if Labour try and force anything through before the election.”

ECB chairman Giles Clarke’s claims that the grass roots of the game will wither without Sky’s money, however, seem alarmist to many. One high-profile sceptic is Scyld Berry, editor of the Wisden Cricketers Almanack and one of the most authoritative voices in the game. “It needn’t be disastrous for the grass roots or for England teams,” says Berry. “It’s question of how the cake is cut. There’s two main issues. The first is the ECB propaganda: the weeping and lamentation over the prospect of the Sky contract being cancelled, the suggestion that no-one will ever play cricket again: women will never play again, no-one blind will ever touch a ball again… the consequences will be more catastrophic than global warming, if you believe the ECB. I seriously object to that campaign.
“The ECB implies that the first thing to be cut would be development. But there’s no reason why that should be. The ECB spends over twice as much on the professional county game as on the amateur game. If you look at the numbers, it is possible to cut the cake so that the grass roots and the England team aren’t affected and only county cricket is affected. But that debate is yet to be had because the ECB has stopped rational debate over whether county cricket should be so heavily subsidised. Maybe it should be. But let’s have that debate honestly.
For those who are sceptical of the ECB’s warnings of disaster, a key argument is this: if, as the ECB implies, English cricket only survives thanks to Sky money – how did it survive all the way up until Sky came on board in 2006? “By cobbling it together,” says Jamie Clifford. “The cricket-playing population dipped into a very low trough, late ’80s, early 90s: you can see it in the trend for volunteers at clubs: those people in their 30s and 40s who would now, traditionally, be running clubs, don’t exist – they weren’t exposed to the game as teenagers in the ’80s and ’90s. Lots of smaller clubs folded during that period. The game was suffering a slow death through lack of investment.
“But the ECB’s commitment to funding development properly by putting TV money into the grass roots changed everything.
I was involved through that whole transition period. It completely changed the way in which cricket was developed right across the country. Cricket in Kent is unrecognisable now, even compared to 10 years ago, in terms of proper engagement, proper marketing.”
Berry agrees that ECB development money has been beneficial to the amateur game but, when it comes to the crunch, believes role models are more important to the future of the game than new facilities and qualified coaches. “You can always find somewhere to play cricket, with a tennis ball and a piece of wood. That’s the worldwide experience of the game. All that street cricket played in Pakistan and India – is there an ECB development officer in charge of them?
“It’s about role models. Cricket has never been so healthy as it was post-Botham in 1981 or in 2005 during and immediately after the Ashes. So when the ECB say that having as few people as possible watching the game is the healthiest thing for the game because then we get lots of money to go into participation… the polite word for that is ‘counter-intuitive’.”

The ECB’s estimates suggest that 45 per cent of the value of a four-year TV deal is based on Sky being able to show exclusive live coverage of the Ashes: almost as much as the rest of the rights – seven international Test series, all the one-day internationals and T20s and all the domestic tournaments – put together. Based on this calculation, the ECB would lose £34m of income a year. ECB chief executive David Collier says that 40 per cent of professional cricketers would lose their jobs. Chairman Giles Clarke says it would be “absolutely devastating” for grassroots funding. “We’re coaching 10,000 coaches in the next four years… we wouldn’t have a hope of coaching them in the future.”
But opponents of the ECB view argue that Clarke and Collier have set up a false debate; that rather than rely on inflated TV incomes to support 18 counties and 400 full-time professionals, English cricket needs to tighten up the way it does business.
“I don’t accept the ECB’s figure that 137m will go out of the game, or anything like that,” says Berry. “But you could easily reduce the annual handout to counties by half and still make it work: reduce the fixture list, get rid of 40-over cricket, play fewer Twenty20 games and reduce staff and salaries – there’s too many journeymen earning six-figures. The sums can be made to add up. Franchises might be a more radical solution – but why not try and make the 18-county system work before considering other alternatives?”

At the root of the debate is one unanswered question: what is county cricket for? Are counties there primarily to provide players for England? Or primarily to compete in tournaments that stand alone as crowd-pleasers and revenue-raisers in themselves? Of course, the answer is ‘both’ – but no-one is clear on how the two jigsaw together.
“If our chairman says publicly that we’re here to produce England players, he’ll get shot down in flames by the members and supporters,” says Jamie Clifford. “Which is fair. The supporters aren’t here to develop England players – that’s the last thing they want – they want Kent players to play for us!
“We’re there to compete, to win things. Members, supporters and sponsors want to be associated with success.”
The wages of county players have risen over the last decade to the point where the economic viability of the average county wage bill is questionable. Yet that rise has not been wholly driven by the Sky money: counties were already receiving as much as £1.3m a year each from the ECB a decade ago.
Which isn’t to say that the counties shouldn’t keep their own house in better order and become less reliant on that central handout. Wage bills have nearly doubled over the last decade and there is
no doubt that counties could become
leaner operations. For most counties, the ECB handout represents somewhere between 33 and 50 per cent of their annual income; roughly speaking, it tends largely to go straight back out of the door on
player salaries. County wage bills start at £800,000 (Northants, Derbyshire) and go up
to £1.8m (Durham) – and the pinnacle of £2.2m (Surrey). Kent – No 8 on the list – spent £1.5m in 2008. Kent spend 33 per cent of their income on player and coach salaries; Surrey and Glamorgan – Test grounds –
just 9 per cent.
“There should be a wholesale drop in player salaries,” says one insider. “The gap between a star player who tops the run lists for a county and the salary for a squad player who only plays a handful of first-team games is not as great as people would expect. Can the English game afford fringe squad players even at small counties to be taking £50,000 a year out of the game in wages alone?”
So, when David Collier says 40 per cent of professionals would lose their jobs, critics may ask 1) how secure the future of the game can be when it is so reliant not just on one source of income, TV money, but one particular partner within that sector. And 2) Would it necessarily be a bad thing for the game if there were 40 per cent fewer professionals? Australia, after all, only has six professional teams, closely integrated with a very competitive amateur game. And if county cricket in its current form is so valued, why are there little over 100,000 county members across all 18 clubs?
“The argument is about the fabric of the game and what you need to constitute a meaningful sport,” says Jamie Clifford. “You don’t want to become like hockey: it’s played to a high level, but you’d barely know about it and that’s the danger for cricket. Six professional teams? I don’t think it would work in this country: I think we’re quite regional, even parochial. I think you need a critical mass of the game at a professional level to ensure that the game is taken seriously.”

Could the money the ECB says is needed to underwrite the future of the game come from sources other than Sky? Some already does. Over the period 2009-2013, English cricket will receive £37.3m basic funding from Sport England – or £7.5m per year. This is more than any other sport receives. The ECB itself gives £1m a year to Chance to Shine but the rest of the campaign’s £4m annual spend comes from a mix of private fundraising and government support.
To complicate the debate further, Lottery funding tends to be dependent on a sport that already has its house in order, grass roots wise. It is no coincidence that cricket should receive more money than other sports: from NatWest Cricketforce to Asda Kwik Cricket to the Sky Sports Coach Education Programme, the ECB has put in place a series of big, high profile, sponsored schemes designed to improve the grass roots of the game – not to mention that £1m that goes to Chance to Shine.
Sky’s money is not the sole provider for cricket development. But, in a declining market in which fundraising has become harder, would the ECB not be foolish to willingly give up a partner happy to put down serious money? The TV deal starting in 2010 is, after all, worth 27 per cent more than the one that started in 2006.
The ECB is hopeful that ESPN might even jolly Sky along when the rights come to be renegotiated: the American network established a ‘Classic’ channel in 2006, featuring archive BBC cricket footage and has, this season, been paying £2m a game for live Premiership football rights. ESPN already do business with the ECB, as they own the rights to show England games in Asia. Whatever happens with the Ashes terrestrial debate, there is a chance that pay TV rights will be a competitive market.
English cricket was reportedly offered a 16.66 per cent stake in the Indian-run Champions League. Scyld Berry thinks that’s a red herring – “I wouldn’t criticise the ECB for not getting into bed with the BCCI or the IPL: their sums don’t seem to add up,” he says. Nonetheless, the collapse of the Stanford deal, struck up in place of a liaison with the BCCI, has, by the ECB’s account, left many of English cricket’s eggs in Sky’s – or at least pay TV’s – basket. This month the ECB’s top brass are locked in talks with the government, talks in which they insist that the vast majority of the British public should not have the right to see their sport on free-to-air television and that such exposure would indeed ruin the sport for good. It’s an unhappy and complex situation. The result of the general election, at least, may make the path ahead clearer.

From the May issue of SPIN magazine, the UK’s only independent cricket title and, not being owned by Sky like the Wisden Cricketer, the only one able to offer an independent view of the major issues facing the game. For special offers on subscriptions, click this link.

T20 offers way out of ECB’s TV crown jewels impasse

Children need to eat fruit, right? And they need heating. And houses. And shoes. Look, I’m no expert, but it seems to me they need masses of stuff. It would probably be cheaper to be a crack addict than a parent.

Yet the government has never insisted that Tesco give away oranges to children. Or npower give away electricity. So I’m not sure why they feel they can insist that the ECB effectively give away their most valuable assets ‘in the public interest’.

On the face of it, the decision to recommend home Ashes Tests return to free-to-air TV seems like good news. As Michael Vaughan made clear in his recent autobiography, it was the chance exposure to Test cricket on TV that inspired his love of the game. Many of us can identify with such experiences and there’s little doubt that the long-term future of cricket would be best served by allowing the greatest number of people access to it.

But life isn’t that simple. By preventing the ECB from selling TV rights to the game’s most lucrative series on the open market, the government would actually be jeopardising the game’s viability.

Sound hysterical? Well, the current TV rights deal is worth £300 million to the ECB over four years and, if ECB figures are to be taken at face value, they would expect revenues to fall by up to 50 per cent under the proposed new arrangement. Even conservative estimates suggest the figure would be in excess of 20 per cent.

What would the effect? Well, consider how the counties are funded. Or how their academies and development programmes are funded. Or where the money comes from to pay for many of cricket’s coaching initiatives and grass roots projects. It is, I’m afraid, largely earned from TV rights. Most pertinently, consider what would happen to all those counties who have just borrowed millions in order to fund ground redevelopment schemes. Any threat to their income could have catastrophic consequences. Whatever the long-term benefits of free-to-air cricket, the short-term costs make it almost impossible to bear.

Maybe the effects of free-to-air cricket are somewhat overstated, anyway. After all, the Grand National is shown free-to-view: has it ever made you saddle up a horse and point it in the direction of a hedge? Have years of exposure to the Boat Race had you building a raft and taking it round the Surrey Bend? 

Besides, I’m not convinced that some of the free-to-view channels deserve a helping hand. While Channel 4’s coverage was admirable, it’s worth remembering how they interrupted coverage to bring us horse racing and how they insisted that the start time of Tests were brought forward to accommodate Hollyoaks.

The BBC hardly deserve any favours, either. They already have the advantage of a £3 billion hand-out from license-fee payers, yet have failed to even bid for cricket packages of late. 

It would be nice to think that, if the government believe it’s so important that the nation sees cricket, then the government would pay for it. But even the most ardent cricket lover would surely have to admit that there’s no way the tax-payer should be paying for such things.

But perhaps there is another solution. Not only could a free-to-view highlights Test package be utilised better, but it’s possible that Sky could show some games free-to-view, perhaps on Sky 3.

In the long-term, however, the solution might be to forget the Ashes as the cornerstone of this debate. For the best part of 20 years, there was nothing more likely to put a youngster off cricket than watching England suffer another thrashing at the hands of Australia. Besides, selecting it as cricket’s only ‘crown jewels’ event perpetuates the myth that England-Australia is the only event that matters.

Instead, I’d offer domestic Twenty20 matches to a free-to-view audience. The format might offer more mass-market appeal anyway, while the brevity of games could be more appealing to broadcasters. Ideally I’d like to see an FA Cup style knock-out (incorporating the minor counties) almost given away to a free-to-view broadcaster. The long-term effects would surely counteract the relatively minor loss in income and increase support for the county game. And we wouldn’t have to wait until 2016 for it to happen.