Cricket’s ‘superpower’: India rises from ashes of old game

For many fans, the Ashes series between England and Australia has been the pinnacle of cricket. Since the 19th century, the two traditional powerhouses have faced off in back-to-back multiday test matches, gruelling contests of skill that have made cricket lore.

Yet the buzz around this summer’s Ashes disguises that the pulse of global cricket has decisively moved elsewhere. Some 4,000 miles to the east, India is quickly eclipsing England and Australia as the ultimate power in global cricket, revolutionising the game in ways early proponents in London or Melbourne could never have imagined.

Since it launched the wildly successful Indian Premier League tournament in 2008, India has brought unparalleled riches to the sport. Its teams now attract the world’s best players and have bought up new international franchises.

The country’s governing body, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, dominates global decision making and takes a larger share of global revenues than England and Australia combined. India is even influencing how the game is played, with test teams such as England increasingly adopting crowd-pleasing, aggressive playing styles that fans trace back to the IPL’s shorter, fast-paced Twenty20 format.

“India’s influence in global cricket cannot be overstated,” said Arun Dhumal, the IPL’s chair and a former BCCI executive. “The IPL has been a game-changer not only for Indian cricket but also for world cricket, in terms of the traction it has generated with fans across the globe, in terms of the financial bandwidth . . . It has been phenomenal.”

This is partly arithmetic. With 1.4bn people, India has a larger population than every other established cricket nation put together. Yet it is also a product of the IPL, whose powerful cocktail of shorter, made-for-TV matches and star appeal has proved irresistible for players and fans around the world.

“It’s the first time that cricket has been brought into an area where it’s on a par with the NFL, basketball and football,” said Reece Topley, an England international who made his IPL debut with the Royal Challengers Bangalore this year. “All I’ve ever really wanted was to play cricket and for it to be how a 10-year-old imagines what playing professional sport is.”

India will enjoy a homecoming of sorts this year when it hosts the men’s World Cup in October for the first time in more than a decade. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cricket has proved a useful tool at a time when he is projecting India as a rising power. Many of the World Cup’s most important matches, including the final, will take place at the eponymous Narendra Modi Stadium, the world’s largest cricket ground, in his political base of Ahmedabad.

But some see India’s growing dominance as a threat to the game, as the country exerts more control over the rules, finances and politics of cricket. The BCCI, which is run by loyalists of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party, can display this power bluntly. Last year it said it would refuse to travel to arch-rival Pakistan for the upcoming Asia Cup, forcing the tournament to be rescheduled with many matches now in Sri Lanka.

“India has become like a global cricketing superpower,” Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former World Cup-winning cricket captain and prime minister, told the Financial Times this year. “It’s the power of finances which they have, and I think through that they’re wielding disproportionate amount of power in the cricketing world.”

India’s clout is only growing, with the global governing body, the International Cricket Council, this month agreeing a new revenue-sharing deal that will cement the country’s financial dominance.

BCCI will take nearly 40 per cent — about $230mn a year — of the ICC’s earnings between 2024 and 2027, according to a board member. That compares with around 6 per cent each for England and Australia.

Advocates said this was a fair reflection of the money India was bringing into the game, with countries enjoying higher overall revenues even if their share of the pie had shrunk. Media rights for the 2023-27 IPL games, for example, were sold for an unprecedented $6bn, making the sports league the second-most valuable on a per game basis after the American NFL.

“When you see where that value is created, I think it’s understandable,” Richard Gould, chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, said on a podcast last month. “Without them, we wouldn’t have the kind of revenues that are coming into the game.”

Yet many smaller cricketing nations fear they will struggle to survive. Some said India’s ever larger share of riches risked depriving teams such as the West Indies, an erstwhile on-field force long in decline, of the funds they would need to keep the sport alive.

“Yes, India deserves to have the dominance because of the support and commercial standing of Indian cricket, but that doesn’t mean at any cost,” Thilanga Sumathipala, a former president of Sri Lanka’s cricket board, said. “Economically affected cricket-playing nations are helpless unless the ICC puts their foot down.”

Dhumal argued India sustained the game in many of these countries, with matches against India helping generate lucrative TV audiences. “BCCI is very happy to share that revenue with all the other emerging countries,” he said.

India’s biggest impact is arguably set to be felt at the club level. Flush with cash, Indian teams such as Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s Kolkata Knight Riders and tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s Mumbai Indians have bought franchises in new Twenty20 leagues everywhere from South Africa and the Caribbean to the United Arab Emirates. The first season of Major League Cricket, an American T20 tournament, started this month.

People familiar with the discussions said IPL teams were now pushing to overhaul rules to allow them to contract players year round, moving them from league to league in an international club model. Players such as England’s Jason Roy and Andre Russell of the West Indies have already forgone international contracts to play for global IPL franchises, a trend fans fear will ultimately lead to fewer stars being available at international tournaments, including the Ashes.

“We try to have a core group of players who can be involved in all the franchises,” one team owner said. This would become “a caravan model”, moving from one tournament to another.

Critics said this would inexorably undermine international fixtures, cricket’s traditional mainstay. A recent financial report by the England and Wales Cricket Board identified the “growth of global franchise leagues” as a big risk, with long-form international Test matches ceding ground to the T20 leagues.

Mike Fordham, a former chief executive of the IPL team Rajasthan Royals, said the game was “some way away” from such a model, though the pressure would build as “the money increases and the influence of these teams increases”.

He added that for all the criticism, cricket was lucky compared with some other sports. “A sport like rugby would probably kill to have a financial behemoth like India as its main source of revenue,” he said.

Ironically India has not kept up its off-field dominance on the pitch. While the men’s team is comfortably among the best in the world, it has not won an ICC tournament since 2013 and were beaten by Australia in the final of the World Test Championship last month. “The IPL has increased the depth of talent,” Fordham said. “They’re certainly due a major win.”

Additional reporting by Sam Agini in London