WILL INDIA REMAIN CRICKETING SUPERPOWER BY 2025?

India’s emergence as the world’s cricket superpower over the past decade upends an old colonial-era hierarchy. It’s a highly visible showcase of the political effects of economic power, where sheer market size creates new forms of leverage. And India’s new pre-eminence in cricket politics, exemplified in its ascendancy within the International Cricket Council (ICC), offers lessons for how a more powerful India might approach its future role in global politics. If India becomes even remotely as indispensable to the world economy as it has become to the cricket economy, it will have the throw-weight to demand changes in the world order to accommodate its goals. That may be India’s future as it seeks to transform itself into a leading global power.

Cricket’s development in India cannot be separated from imperial history. The British introduced the game in the early 18th century, Indian players set up cricket clubs in the 19th century, and in 1928 created a national board to govern the sport, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, or BCCI. The BCCI linked India to the governing body known as the Imperial Cricket Conference, later reconstituted as the International Cricket Council (ICC). Though smaller in scale, it’s analogous to FIFA or the International Olympic Committee — a global organization with participants comprised of national member associations.

ICC has, apart from India, England and Australia six other full members. It also has 94 associate members, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan complete the list. These associate members have teams that play the game in a more limited way.

The bar for associate members requires that the cricket be played “in accordance with the Laws of Cricket” in the country.

Given the sport’s origins and the process of its dissemination around the world, it’s hardly news that the boards of England and Australia were the dominant national boards within the ICC for most of its history. England, Australia and South Africa created the old Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909; apartheid South Africa exited the British Commonwealth in 1961 and fell out of the ICC, leaving the English and Australian boards as leading players and dominant forces until 1993.

But, over time, Anglo-Australian dominance began to erode with the emergence of India. Until 2005, the ICC had been based at Lord’s, the hallowed London cricket ground in St. John’s Wood regarded as the spiritual home of the sport. That year, after a nearly unanimous vote of its executive board, the ICC moved its headquarters to Dubai. Contemporary press accounts of the move describe the decision as financial: Dubai was offering an incentive package with favourable tax treatment not to be found in the United Kingdom. Yet there was a broader, structural impetus behind the move as the BBC observed - cricket’s “power base has now moved to the east.”

World cricket got a pivot in Asia – India in particular, because the recognition of its future and prosperity increasingly depended on its growing fan base in India, and to a lesser extent in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. This pivot foreshadowed the emergence of today’s Indian dominion over cricket. But India has been cricket-mad for decades, and it has long been the largest cricket-playing nation in the world, so the question arises why India’s size and enthusiasm hadn’t translated into greater power earlier. As Richard Harrow, a respected cricket observer, puts it

“There probably isn’t another market in the world where one sport matters so much disproportionately to everything else.”

We can look at three things: the Indian economy took off; Indian television rapidly expanded and thoroughly commercialized itself; and Indian cricket created a new, more broadcast-friendly league. Each of these developments reinforced the commercialization of the ICC.

India rose to become the source of 70 to 80 percent of revenue generated under the ICC umbrella. And for 2018 released figures ICC’s worldwide event-related revenue stood at nearly USD 196 million.

The Cash Cow Indian Cricket:

It might not seem quite out of place - in the 2016-2023 rights cycle ICC revenues touched USD 2.5 billion. India’s kitty - USD 293 million followed by England – USD 143 million, 7 other full members namely Australia, Pakistan, West Indies, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and South Africa each get USD 132 million. Zimbabwe has agreed to USD 94 million and the associate nations get as per the contracted terms with ICC.

India’s cut in the global ICC revenues would have been much higher but for the strictures put in place by Shashank Manohar (the previous ICC boss). India had objected vehemently and it would be quite right to increase the share given the clout it has on world cricket.

The rise of Indian Premier League: IPL has been a crucial development in India’s ascendency in world cricket. Modelled on European soccer clubs the IPL, launched in 2008, is a league of private franchises free to draw players from anywhere in the world — distinct from the ICC model of nation-based teams. Playing a shorter form of the sport known as Twenty20, the IPL has been hugely successful for television viewership.

It all started with the popularity of Indian cricket which gave birth to a cacophony of more than 800 private channels in more than twenty languages. Astonishing though, these newly created private channels were willing to bid hundreds of millions of dollars to get cricket on their airwaves. In parallel, with their enormous audience in mind, Indian channels successfully bid for the broadcast rights to ICC world events. These broadcasting rights have been a “game changer,” ones that altered “the fate of Indian cricket.”

The recently concluded 2023-27 cycle media auction for IPL fetched the Board Rs. 48,390 crores!!

Without doubt, India is emerging as the undisputed global cricket superpower, dominating international commerce, driving international decision-making and remaking international institutions to align with Indian priorities. India now sets the agenda in a sporting world long dominated by former colonial power England – now reduced to an important but not decisive role.

This all became possible through the political strength India’s economic growth delivered. That’s why the new cricket world order also tells us something about how a wealthier and therefore more powerful India might approach international politics in the future. Consider the ICC restructuring itself: it met with resistance within the organization from Pakistan, South Africa and Sri Lanka - all of which stood to lose substantial financing.