Everything wrong with the ICC in 28000 characters or less
One of the most convoluted questions to answer for both newcomers to the sport, and fans who simply aren’t neck-deep in administrative news, is also one of the simplest - what, exactly, is wrong with the ICC? Why the hate? After all, it’s not like they’re handing out suitcases of bribes, or declaring themselves above the law and turning tournament hosts into police states, or meeting in a cartoonishly evil underground lair like a certain group of football administrators. The ICC, rank amateurs at sporting villainy, have never even produced a propaganda film about themselves!
Now, it probably comes with the territory of sports administration that disgruntled fans will lay every ill afflicting the game of cricket at the shiny glass doors of the ICC’s office in Dubai. And indeed, they have been blamed for everything from Australia's sandpaper debacle to choking the game's expansion efforts. But often these criticisms miss the point, and entirely misunderstand the ICC's role within the game, because the organisation itself is limited in its capacity to actually make the decisions it is reviled for.
Put simply, the ICC is effectively two distinct organisations. There is the executive board level, where almost all of the power lies, and the ground-level ICC staff who actually work to implement development programmes - in my experience they’re generally passionate and dedicated to helping the sport expand, working tirelessly to grow cricket while the administrators at the top work tirelessly for their own self-interest.
And it’s this dichotomy, this institutional schizophrenia, that goes to the heart of the ICC’s problems. Almost every regressive decision, every cut to development, every roadblock to globalisation can be ultimately attributed to its idiosyncratic administrative structure. It's not actually a governing body in the sense understood by most other sports - it functions more as a coordinating body for a few powerful national cricket boards. This is because at the ICC’s executive level, decisions are voted on primarily by representatives of the Full Member boards. There are currently 17 votes on the ICC board - one for the Chairman, one each for the 12 FMs (the existing Test-playing nations), and for the 92 Associate Members (cricketing nations below Test level), there are just 3 places on the board. As of June 2018, Indra Nooyi also serves as the independent female director (though "independent" is perhaps something of an overstatement, since Nooyi is also CEO of PepsiCo... which happens to be a major ICC sponsor).
So from the very nature of the organisation, we can see that the decision-making will tend to favour the established nations at the expense of developing the game (and even the limited non-FMs representation is quite a recent change, only being approved in mid-2017). This structure contrasts with, for example, FIFA, where member nations simply have one vote each. In the case of FIFA, the structure leads to corruption where people like Sepp Blatter can hold onto power by sending money, tournaments or development projects to many small countries in order to buy their votes; at the ICC the problem is basically inverted in that the small countries get almost no representation and the powerful members keep all the benefits for themselves. To examine the damage to cricket that stems from a "governing" body that is subservient to the interests of its powerful member boards, I’ve put together a highlights reel of some particularly bad cases of the ICC hampering cricket’s development, and how those actions were a direct result of its administrative structure.
Much like the ICC board meetings, the first item on our agenda is money, with cricket being no exception to the Pardoner's dictum radix malorum est cupiditas. One of the major criticisms of the ICC is that instead of funding development projects, it gives handouts to rich FM boards (this is, of course, because FMs are the ones who vote on what happens to the ICC's revenue - a bit like politicians voting in parliament to give themselves pay rises). After the most recent funding carve-up, money for all the Associates combined was cut from US$280 million to US$160 million across the 8-year cycle, with the money going to Full Members. Some of them need the money (for example, the promoted Afghanistan and Ireland received 40 million each), and some of them don't (for example, India's share also increased by 40 million). This 160 million figure is a paltry sum compared with the previous funding model (Associate funding is roughly 75% lower now than it would have been if the arrangements from the previous rights cycle had been kept in place), and the main beneficiaries are, of course, the nations who voted for the model (that is, the FMs). What's especially galling is that rich boards like the Board of Control for Cricket in India, or Cricket Australia, or the England and Wales Cricket Board have their own extremely lucrative TV deals domestically (ECB 1.5 billion USD over 5 years, CA 910 million USD over 6 years, BCCI 945 million USD over 5 years, plus an additional 2.5 billion USD over 5 years for the IPL), meaning they could easily sacrifice some or even all of the money they get from the ICC in order to fund development.
For another case study in the ICC’s structure favouring the interests of the haves over the have-nots, we need look no further than those three boards (BCCI, CA, ECB) and their involvement in the Big 3 takeover, an administrative power grab so outrageous that it prompted a spray from Transparency International. (This redistribution of almost all of the power and money to themselves is the topic of the excellent documentary film "Death of a Gentleman", which I highly recommend). The reforms were, to an extent, rolled back last year, however the Big 3 (as they're still known) continue to wield disproportionate influence on ICC policy - leading to a lot of resentment from smaller cricketing nations (and especially cash-strapped Associates for whom a few million a year would make a huge difference). Additionally, as all of these governance and political shenanigans were going on between FM boards, the consequences were being felt by Associates with the budget cuts leading to drastically reduced opportunities in terms of tournaments and funding.
Meanwhile, outrageously corrupt FM boards like Zimbabwe can be in a rolling shambles but get away with no consequences and an order of magnitude more ICC money than even the best-run Associates. Why? Because FMs are the ones who control the board, and the board needs to approve the enforcement of governance standards (which do actually exist). Obviously the other FMs won't vote to censure Zimbabwe since the precedent would then be set for the rest of them to be held accountable for their own failings (though they do occasionally crack down on incompetent Associate Members). The turkeys may have their differences, but they sure stick together when Christmas is put to a vote.
Another example of the ICC’s split personality pulling the organisation in contradictory (and damaging) directions can be found in perhaps the most visible case of cutting opportunities for Associates - the terrible, terrible 2019 world cup format with the number of teams reduced to just 10 teams (down from 14 in 2011 and 2015, and 16 in the 2007 edition) so that they can all play each other in a league stage. The format's awfulness has been discussed at length (not least by me), and various weak excuses have been trotted out by the ICC, but this is generally viewed as a cynical move to appease TV broadcasters after India and Pakistan crashed out of 2007 in the first round. By adopting a 10-team league structure, the ICC can promise 9 games each for the major drawcard nations, no matter how poorly they play, and even ICC CEO Dave Richardson admitted to the "commercial implications to consider" around the decision in an interview after the 2015 CWC. The decision to move to a 10-team event certainly didn’t come out of the ICC’s development arm; it was a top-down decision made by the executive with little consultation. More precisely, it was a top-down decision emanating from one man, working for one board - Giles Clarke of the ECB who was "hell-bent" on the idea. The fact that such a significant decision with such far-reaching consequences to the sport can be made by an extremely concentrated cabal of powerful interests once again demonstrates the ICC’s great weakness as an organisation: that the organisation itself is powerless in the face of (a few of) its members’ interests.
That’s not to say the ICC’s development arm is perfect of course - this year’s qualifying tournament for CWC2019 drew further attention to the ICC's shabby treatment of Associates, partly by putting the spotlight back on the 10-team format, but also due to the largely incompetent organisation. Despite being a thrilling tournament with plenty of memorable upsets and tense finishes, and with 5 teams in contention for 2 places going into the last round of matches, less than a third of the games were actually available to watch. It’s not just that they weren’t televised, the ICC couldn't even be bothered to run a single-camera stream. The lack of streaming is all the more bewildering considering they do actually pay a cameraman to film every ball and cut the footage into highlights packages; so it’s not even a cost-cutting exercise.
There was also no DRS at the tournament, even for matches that were televised, as the ICC argued that it wanted playing conditions to be consistent across all matches (despite allowing DRS in the partially-televised 2017 Women’s World Cup), there were no reserve days (during the rainy season in Zimbabwe!) and they were too stingy to even pay for their top-ranked umpires, leaving the second-string officials deciding arguably the most high-stakes cricket tournament ever held. All of these factors combined into a crescendo of injustice as Scotland missed a place at the CWC due to a shocking LBW decision putting them behind on Duckworth-Lewis calculations just before a sudden downpour, meaning that the West Indies scraped through at their expense.
Back to the ICC's structural problems, and I would argue that another aspect of the power imbalance lies with the fact that cricket has evolved to place international tours as the primary (and most lucrative) form of the game. Essentially, it means that individual boards rely on income from touring one another to survive (incidentally, these tours have nothing to do with the ICC, since the ICC has no capacity to mandate a touring structure due to the FMs being the drivers of executive decision-making - this is what leads to the lopsided touring programme that we saw released earlier in the year). This in turn means that the Big 3 can essentially cut off smaller boards' revenue streams if they don't tour - so they can very easily force the FMs to vote the way they need. In fact, the BCCI refers to its behaviour at the board room as formalising dadagiri. That pretty well sums up the behaviour of all FM boards (but especially the Big 3).
Another major bone of contention for supporters of cricket development is the refusal of the ICC to commit to getting cricket into the Olympics. Doing so would result in massive funding increases at no extra expense to the ICC, most notably in the powerhouse economies of China, Germany and Brazil (since many governments have large sums of money set aside to fund Olympic sports), but the pro-Olympics development arm had until recently been held hostage by one board, the ECB (or more accurately, their superlatively odious president Giles Clarke). This is again due to the structure of the executive, since nothing is passed without the approval of FMs, and in particular the Big 3. The argument as to why the ECB don't want to accept the Olympics is that they claim it would interfere with their domestic summer, despite the fact that the Olympics last for just 2 weeks.
Fortunately Clarke retired earlier this year, and the current management of the ECB are more open to Olympic participation. But just as progress seemed possible, another powerful board stepped up to sabotage cricket’s Olympic plans - the BCCI. Their primary objection is to submitting their players to WADA’s anti-doping regulations, specifically the whereabouts clause. Due to the BCCI’s stance, WADA has recently started proceedings to declare the ICC a non-compliant body, which will simply make Olympic participation impossible. Once again, the recalcitrance of a single board is dragging the whole of the ICC down with them, despite the astronomical benefits it would bring to global development.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that a few years back there was a plan submitted to reform the ICC into a genuine governing body with control over its own finances and development projects. It was called the Woolf Report, and it went about as well as you'd expect (that is, it has been studiously ignored ever since).
To conclude, I tend to say that the corruption in FIFA would be a luxury in cricket, since at least their brand of pocket-stuffing and greed results in growing the game (i.e. ambitious administrators buttering up small nations for their votes). Ultimately the ICC’s great failing is not corruption or incompetence or short-sightedness (though those characteristics certainly exist), it’s the system of perverse incentives that both enables and encourages such behaviour from the decision-makers at the top.
Now, it probably comes with the territory of sports administration that disgruntled fans will lay every ill afflicting the game of cricket at the shiny glass doors of the ICC’s office in Dubai. And indeed, they have been blamed for everything from Australia's sandpaper debacle to choking the game's expansion efforts. But often these criticisms miss the point, and entirely misunderstand the ICC's role within the game, because the organisation itself is limited in its capacity to actually make the decisions it is reviled for.
Put simply, the ICC is effectively two distinct organisations. There is the executive board level, where almost all of the power lies, and the ground-level ICC staff who actually work to implement development programmes - in my experience they’re generally passionate and dedicated to helping the sport expand, working tirelessly to grow cricket while the administrators at the top work tirelessly for their own self-interest.
And it’s this dichotomy, this institutional schizophrenia, that goes to the heart of the ICC’s problems. Almost every regressive decision, every cut to development, every roadblock to globalisation can be ultimately attributed to its idiosyncratic administrative structure. It's not actually a governing body in the sense understood by most other sports - it functions more as a coordinating body for a few powerful national cricket boards. This is because at the ICC’s executive level, decisions are voted on primarily by representatives of the Full Member boards. There are currently 17 votes on the ICC board - one for the Chairman, one each for the 12 FMs (the existing Test-playing nations), and for the 92 Associate Members (cricketing nations below Test level), there are just 3 places on the board. As of June 2018, Indra Nooyi also serves as the independent female director (though "independent" is perhaps something of an overstatement, since Nooyi is also CEO of PepsiCo... which happens to be a major ICC sponsor).
So from the very nature of the organisation, we can see that the decision-making will tend to favour the established nations at the expense of developing the game (and even the limited non-FMs representation is quite a recent change, only being approved in mid-2017). This structure contrasts with, for example, FIFA, where member nations simply have one vote each. In the case of FIFA, the structure leads to corruption where people like Sepp Blatter can hold onto power by sending money, tournaments or development projects to many small countries in order to buy their votes; at the ICC the problem is basically inverted in that the small countries get almost no representation and the powerful members keep all the benefits for themselves. To examine the damage to cricket that stems from a "governing" body that is subservient to the interests of its powerful member boards, I’ve put together a highlights reel of some particularly bad cases of the ICC hampering cricket’s development, and how those actions were a direct result of its administrative structure.
Much like the ICC board meetings, the first item on our agenda is money, with cricket being no exception to the Pardoner's dictum radix malorum est cupiditas. One of the major criticisms of the ICC is that instead of funding development projects, it gives handouts to rich FM boards (this is, of course, because FMs are the ones who vote on what happens to the ICC's revenue - a bit like politicians voting in parliament to give themselves pay rises). After the most recent funding carve-up, money for all the Associates combined was cut from US$280 million to US$160 million across the 8-year cycle, with the money going to Full Members. Some of them need the money (for example, the promoted Afghanistan and Ireland received 40 million each), and some of them don't (for example, India's share also increased by 40 million). This 160 million figure is a paltry sum compared with the previous funding model (Associate funding is roughly 75% lower now than it would have been if the arrangements from the previous rights cycle had been kept in place), and the main beneficiaries are, of course, the nations who voted for the model (that is, the FMs). What's especially galling is that rich boards like the Board of Control for Cricket in India, or Cricket Australia, or the England and Wales Cricket Board have their own extremely lucrative TV deals domestically (ECB 1.5 billion USD over 5 years, CA 910 million USD over 6 years, BCCI 945 million USD over 5 years, plus an additional 2.5 billion USD over 5 years for the IPL), meaning they could easily sacrifice some or even all of the money they get from the ICC in order to fund development.
For another case study in the ICC’s structure favouring the interests of the haves over the have-nots, we need look no further than those three boards (BCCI, CA, ECB) and their involvement in the Big 3 takeover, an administrative power grab so outrageous that it prompted a spray from Transparency International. (This redistribution of almost all of the power and money to themselves is the topic of the excellent documentary film "Death of a Gentleman", which I highly recommend). The reforms were, to an extent, rolled back last year, however the Big 3 (as they're still known) continue to wield disproportionate influence on ICC policy - leading to a lot of resentment from smaller cricketing nations (and especially cash-strapped Associates for whom a few million a year would make a huge difference). Additionally, as all of these governance and political shenanigans were going on between FM boards, the consequences were being felt by Associates with the budget cuts leading to drastically reduced opportunities in terms of tournaments and funding.
Meanwhile, outrageously corrupt FM boards like Zimbabwe can be in a rolling shambles but get away with no consequences and an order of magnitude more ICC money than even the best-run Associates. Why? Because FMs are the ones who control the board, and the board needs to approve the enforcement of governance standards (which do actually exist). Obviously the other FMs won't vote to censure Zimbabwe since the precedent would then be set for the rest of them to be held accountable for their own failings (though they do occasionally crack down on incompetent Associate Members). The turkeys may have their differences, but they sure stick together when Christmas is put to a vote.
Another example of the ICC’s split personality pulling the organisation in contradictory (and damaging) directions can be found in perhaps the most visible case of cutting opportunities for Associates - the terrible, terrible 2019 world cup format with the number of teams reduced to just 10 teams (down from 14 in 2011 and 2015, and 16 in the 2007 edition) so that they can all play each other in a league stage. The format's awfulness has been discussed at length (not least by me), and various weak excuses have been trotted out by the ICC, but this is generally viewed as a cynical move to appease TV broadcasters after India and Pakistan crashed out of 2007 in the first round. By adopting a 10-team league structure, the ICC can promise 9 games each for the major drawcard nations, no matter how poorly they play, and even ICC CEO Dave Richardson admitted to the "commercial implications to consider" around the decision in an interview after the 2015 CWC. The decision to move to a 10-team event certainly didn’t come out of the ICC’s development arm; it was a top-down decision made by the executive with little consultation. More precisely, it was a top-down decision emanating from one man, working for one board - Giles Clarke of the ECB who was "hell-bent" on the idea. The fact that such a significant decision with such far-reaching consequences to the sport can be made by an extremely concentrated cabal of powerful interests once again demonstrates the ICC’s great weakness as an organisation: that the organisation itself is powerless in the face of (a few of) its members’ interests.
That’s not to say the ICC’s development arm is perfect of course - this year’s qualifying tournament for CWC2019 drew further attention to the ICC's shabby treatment of Associates, partly by putting the spotlight back on the 10-team format, but also due to the largely incompetent organisation. Despite being a thrilling tournament with plenty of memorable upsets and tense finishes, and with 5 teams in contention for 2 places going into the last round of matches, less than a third of the games were actually available to watch. It’s not just that they weren’t televised, the ICC couldn't even be bothered to run a single-camera stream. The lack of streaming is all the more bewildering considering they do actually pay a cameraman to film every ball and cut the footage into highlights packages; so it’s not even a cost-cutting exercise.
There was also no DRS at the tournament, even for matches that were televised, as the ICC argued that it wanted playing conditions to be consistent across all matches (despite allowing DRS in the partially-televised 2017 Women’s World Cup), there were no reserve days (during the rainy season in Zimbabwe!) and they were too stingy to even pay for their top-ranked umpires, leaving the second-string officials deciding arguably the most high-stakes cricket tournament ever held. All of these factors combined into a crescendo of injustice as Scotland missed a place at the CWC due to a shocking LBW decision putting them behind on Duckworth-Lewis calculations just before a sudden downpour, meaning that the West Indies scraped through at their expense.
Back to the ICC's structural problems, and I would argue that another aspect of the power imbalance lies with the fact that cricket has evolved to place international tours as the primary (and most lucrative) form of the game. Essentially, it means that individual boards rely on income from touring one another to survive (incidentally, these tours have nothing to do with the ICC, since the ICC has no capacity to mandate a touring structure due to the FMs being the drivers of executive decision-making - this is what leads to the lopsided touring programme that we saw released earlier in the year). This in turn means that the Big 3 can essentially cut off smaller boards' revenue streams if they don't tour - so they can very easily force the FMs to vote the way they need. In fact, the BCCI refers to its behaviour at the board room as formalising dadagiri. That pretty well sums up the behaviour of all FM boards (but especially the Big 3).
Another major bone of contention for supporters of cricket development is the refusal of the ICC to commit to getting cricket into the Olympics. Doing so would result in massive funding increases at no extra expense to the ICC, most notably in the powerhouse economies of China, Germany and Brazil (since many governments have large sums of money set aside to fund Olympic sports), but the pro-Olympics development arm had until recently been held hostage by one board, the ECB (or more accurately, their superlatively odious president Giles Clarke). This is again due to the structure of the executive, since nothing is passed without the approval of FMs, and in particular the Big 3. The argument as to why the ECB don't want to accept the Olympics is that they claim it would interfere with their domestic summer, despite the fact that the Olympics last for just 2 weeks.
Fortunately Clarke retired earlier this year, and the current management of the ECB are more open to Olympic participation. But just as progress seemed possible, another powerful board stepped up to sabotage cricket’s Olympic plans - the BCCI. Their primary objection is to submitting their players to WADA’s anti-doping regulations, specifically the whereabouts clause. Due to the BCCI’s stance, WADA has recently started proceedings to declare the ICC a non-compliant body, which will simply make Olympic participation impossible. Once again, the recalcitrance of a single board is dragging the whole of the ICC down with them, despite the astronomical benefits it would bring to global development.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that a few years back there was a plan submitted to reform the ICC into a genuine governing body with control over its own finances and development projects. It was called the Woolf Report, and it went about as well as you'd expect (that is, it has been studiously ignored ever since).
To conclude, I tend to say that the corruption in FIFA would be a luxury in cricket, since at least their brand of pocket-stuffing and greed results in growing the game (i.e. ambitious administrators buttering up small nations for their votes). Ultimately the ICC’s great failing is not corruption or incompetence or short-sightedness (though those characteristics certainly exist), it’s the system of perverse incentives that both enables and encourages such behaviour from the decision-makers at the top.
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