Daily Times

DUBAI: The International Cricket Council’s (ICC) next revenue-distribution model looks set to confirm the Board for Cricket Control in India (BCCI) as the only really big player in the game, with the Indian board projected to take home nearly 40% of the ICC’s net surplus earnings from its next four-year commercial cycle. The new model, currently at a proposed stage, draws from much of the rationale that underpinned the short-lived Big Three takeover in 2014, but as far as take-home earnings go, it is more the Big One. The BCCI stands to earn approximately US$ 230 million per year between 2024-27 — or 38.5% of the ICC’s annual earnings of US$ 600 million.

That dwarves the next-highest earner, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), in this proposed model: the ECB could earn US$ 41.33 million — or 6.89% — of the ICC’s earnings. Cricket Australia (CA), the third member of the original Big Three, comes next, and could get US$ 37.53 million (6.25%). The only other board projected to make over US$ 30 million among the remaining nine Full Members is the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), which could receive US$ 34.51 million (5.75%). The earnings of the remaining eight Full Members are below 5% (see table below). Of the US$ 600 million projected pool, the 12 Full Members will get US$ 532.84 million (88.81%), with the remaining US$ 67.16 million (11.19%) going to the Associate Members.

The overall annual figure is based on the estimated earnings of the ICC — over US$ 3.2 billion — from the sale of its media rights alone, which recently, for the first time, were sold across five separate regions globally including the Indian market. The vast bulk of that money has come from the sale of rights in the Indian market, where Disney Star paid just over US$ 3 billion for four years.

The four pillars of the proposed model:

The proposed model was developed originally by an ICC team and then worked on by the governing body’s finance and commercial affairs (F&CA) committee, before being discussed by the ICC Board this March. At that meeting, it is understood, only some details of the model were shared, including the criteria by which each Full Member would be graded when the distribution was calculated. The paper detailing the proposed model was circulated to the Full Members and board directors thereafter.

Full Members were meant to send their feedback on the proposed model by the first week of May, after which the F&CA will put a final proposal in front of the ICC Board to ratify. The timeline, according to some officials, is for the Board to approve the model during the ICC annual conference in June in Durban, but it isn’t clear whether it will pan out that way. Members are expected to pose questions to test the rigour behind some of the calculations in the model, not least the four criteria on which members have been ranked. How much objection will be raised — and whether it will go beyond questioning — is not immediately apparent. One point that will be discussed is the timeline for the performance parameter: while the proposed version has looked at the last 16 years, some want it changed to 12. In the March meeting, at least one board is understood to have raised concerns about this. Some might ask for more transparency in the calculation of the other weighted components: at least one official from a Full Member board has referred to this being a Big Three repeat and called the calculations arbitrary and reverse-engineered.