Cricket Counties in Financial Trouble
Cricket is a gentleman’s game and is known for being financially sound. Well not anymore, it seems the England counties are facing serious financial trouble at the moment. India’s much touted IPL cricket league went through a string of financial trouble recently and its issues are still not resolved. Now English counties are also seeing red and it is unclear what is going to happen to them in the future. The entire system that is funded by bank loans needs a complete overhaul for cricket in England to become profitable again.
A report was commissioned recently by a company called Deloitte, and it outlined a serious problem in cricket that takes place in counties in England and showed that test match venues in particular have a serious financial problem to deal with. It seems that test match venues have been upgraded since the year 2000 and more upgrades are planned for the future. All of the development work took place on borrowed money, money that was taken at high interest rate loans from banks in the UK. Test match venues have already invested £156 million since 2000 and another £56 million projected for the next four years with a further £126 million planned until 2019. The problem for these test match venues and the counties that run them is the fact that the loans were expected to be paid off by raising the price of entry fees to the matches. What no one anticipated though was the global recession that hit in 2008 and 2009. That led to lower attendance and lower revenue being generated and in turn lower profits resulting in difficulties in paying back those high interest loans.
The Chief Executive of Lancashire County, Jim Cumbes has issued a stark warning to the cricketing world. Lancashire country has posted a record loss for the last financial year, a staggering £546,000. It seems the county was unable to host any premium test matches during the year and is strongly vying to try and host the Ashes Series in 2013. He believes changes should be made to the international bidding process which enables venues to host matches. Cumbes has also suggested that a franchise based system involving the nine major venues should be the best way to move forward in the future. With Lancashire, which is a very popular cricket county in England in such dire financial problems, it does not bode well for the other counties in the country. The smaller counties in England will really face an uphill struggle to try and keep their heads above water. Hopefully though, the situation should right itself in a few years or even as early as next year as the global recession subsides and financially the world sees a slight turn in fortune.
This is not the first time that the sport of cricket has been in the news over financial dealings. The Indian Premier League (IPL) in India was supposed to be the poster child for T20 cricket leagues around the world. It was to be the greatest thing to hit the world of cricket since the T20 format was invented and approved. The organisers of the IPL had modelled it on the English Premier League and it was supposed to be a hugely profitable and game changing league system for cricket. Then the Lalit Modi scandal took place. Lalit Modi, the Commissioner of the league, got himself embroiled in controversy which saw allegations of match fixing and money laundering flying at him and a Minister of the Indian Government. The controversy saw the Minister resign from his post and also led to a massive investigation into the whole affair being launched by the government.
Cricket has been getting more and more popular over the years. But it seems that with recent changes to the formats, the way the game is run and new countries emerging to play the game, the old formats of the game are feeling the pinch. T20 cricket brought about a revolution in cricket and almost killed off test cricket, which is hanging on by a thread. But as we have seen not all is 100% clean and good in T20 as well. It will take some time to sort everything out and hopefully we will see the revival of test cricket and T20 get cleaned up as well. Cricket is a hugely popular sport around the world and it would be a shame to see it die.
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