Cricket
How Cricket Boards Earn From Bilateral Tours
In bilateral cricket the home board owns the commercial rights and keeps the income, which explains why touring schedules are shaped by who can sell a series rather than by fairness.
A bilateral series between two nations is commercially owned by whichever board is hosting. That single convention explains most of the imbalance in the international cricket calendar.
The host owns the rights
The home board sells the broadcast rights, the ground advertising, the title sponsorship and the tickets. The visiting team is a necessary input rather than a commercial partner.
Touring boards typically receive no share of that income. They may receive hospitality and internal travel, but the revenue from the series stays with the host.
The arrangement is simple to administer and avoids negotiating a split for every fixture. It also means the value of a series depends entirely on the host's market.
Costs also sit with the host
Staging a series means venue hire or upkeep, security, officials, production facilities and a substantial operational staff for a few weeks of play.
Those costs are broadly similar whoever the opponent is. A quiet series against a low-drawing visitor costs nearly as much to stage as a marquee one.
The revenue, by contrast, varies enormously with the opponent. That gap between fixed cost and variable income is the source of the scheduling pressure.
Why some opponents are worth far more
Broadcast value follows audience, and audience follows the size of the visiting nation's following as well as the host's. A series against a heavily followed team attracts a much larger rights fee.
Sponsors price their involvement against the same expected audience. A single high-value tour can fund a board's activities for a year.
Boards therefore compete to secure such tours and structure their calendars around them, sometimes at the expense of formats or opponents that generate less.
What this does to smaller boards
A board with a small domestic broadcast market earns little from hosting, whoever visits. Its income depends on central distributions and on being invited to tour rather than on staging cricket at home.
Because it cannot rely on home revenue, it cannot easily fund domestic structures, player payments or facilities from its own operations.
Some boards respond by staging series at neutral venues in markets with larger diaspora audiences, effectively renting a bigger market for the duration of the series.
Attempts to change the model
Proposals to pool bilateral rights across nations, or to guarantee touring boards a share, appear periodically. They require the largest markets to accept less than they currently keep.
Alternative approaches focus on central distributions from global events instead, redistributing tournament income rather than reopening the bilateral convention.
The result is a system where the global calendar is negotiated bilaterally but solvency for most boards is determined centrally, and the two do not always point the same way.
