Today's podcast is about how product innovation has changed cricket's audience and the problems that has created for a game wedded to a 20th century economic model.
'You watching this?'
There’s been an unusual feel to the current ICC T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka, one you don't often get during the early rounds of a major global sports event: Uncertainty.
England felt it against Nepal in their first game. ‘You watching this?’ was the gist on WhatsApp last week. In Colombo, Pakistan were 119 for seven in the 18th over, being dragged to the edge of elimination by the Netherlands. In Mumbai, the United States had defending champions India at 77 for six. That’s before we mention Australia; cricket’s big swinging dicks are already out.
For a so-called conservative sport, cricket is ahead of the game when it comes to product innovation
Compact, volatile, accessible to anyone with three hours and a phone signal, T20 has done something fifty-over cricket never managed: it compressed the development timeline for nations outside the traditional power base.
Franchise leagues, often derided for creating calendar chaos, have been a useful training ground for players locked out of the test playing arena.
Afghanistan reached a World Cup semi-final. Nepal fills grounds in Darwin. Italy qualified for the first time. The format works as a competitive leveller in ways that simply weren’t available to previous generations of associate nations, for whom the pathway to relevance was measured in decades.
But what now?
A brilliant product and a functional structure are not the same thing. Cricket has the former. It is still negotiating its way toward the latter.
The financial architecture of the game remains almost entirely oriented toward the previous world. Ninety-six associate nations split eleven percent of a $600 million annual pool.
The appeal of the format and the product has been there for years: associate teams generating the kind of moments that fill highlight reels, win hearts, sell broadcast windows and give tournaments their most unpredictable headlines.
Yet the commercial logic remains circular. Those moments generate attention, attention drives broadcast value, and broadcast value produces revenue. Most of that revenue flows back to the traditional powers, who advance deepest in the tournaments and collect the largest shares of the prize. The teams that supply much of the tournament’s early drama see little of its financial reward.
The calendar, controlled by the boards with the most commercial power, is built to protect bilateral series revenues rather than to create the repetition that turns tournament performances into sustainable programmes.
Under the International Cricket Council’s 2024-27 revenue distribution model, the 12 Full Members — Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies, and Zimbabwe — are the national boards that control Test cricket and hold full voting rights. They share 88.8 per cent of an annual pool of roughly $600 million. The BCCI, which runs Indian cricket, takes 38.5 per cent, around $231m a year, the largest share of any member.
A small team can cause a sensation in February and not face comparable opposition until the next qualification cycle.
This is the paradox every major sport is approaching, whether it recognises it yet or not. The global fan has arrived. Digital platforms have made geography largely irrelevant to consumption. A Pakistani cricket fan in Houston, a Nepali fan in Tokyo, a Brazilian fan discovering the sport through Portuguese highlights on YouTube — they are already there, already watching, already invested.
Who's leading who? And the Public-Private Question
The race for the global fan is typically framed as a distribution problem: how do we get our content in front of more people in more places? Cricket’s data from this tournament suggests the question is already out of date.
The content is finding the audience. The harder problem, the one cricket is living through in real time, and the one football, rugby, and basketball each face in turn, is whether the commercial and governance structures can reorganise around an audience that is dispersed, passionate, and no longer located where the product was designed to go.
Twenty20 proved that the right product can rewrite competitive hierarchies. The next proof of concept is harder: whether the right structure can follow.
America is the microcosm, host of the last World Cup and of cricket's return to the Olympics in LA.
As discussed on the podcast, the US cricket fan has been signalling their obsession for a long time now, to little response from the suppliers.
That latent demand will be filled by public money, in the form of the governing bodies voting for Christmas, or private money, in the form of the franchise leagues and their owners seeking to build team brand followings.
Or there's a third way, cricket interested people living in 'dark markets' go largely unserved by the sport they love. And find something else to do with their time.
