ECB bailouts have to stop, insists expert
A COUNTY should be allowed to go bust to demonstrate the truly parlous state of the domestic game.
That’s the view of one of the country’s foremost sports business experts, who believes that recent headlines concerning county finances have once again served to illustrate the issues that many first-class teams face.
Durham, who host this week’s second Test against Sri Lanka, are currently between £5 million and £6 million in the red, while Yorkshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire are also battling financial problems.
To date, no county have ever gone into administration but, according to Simon Chadwick, ‘Class of 92’ Professor of Sports Enterprise at the Salford Business School, there should be a growing realisation that the ECB is here to manage the sport effectively rather than act as the bank of last resort.
“We all know communism lost and that we now live in a capitalist, free-market world, but it does seem as though cricket is a triumph of heritage over market forces,” he tells The Cricket Paper.
“At certain levels of the game, there seems to be an overwhelming desire to preserve the heritage of cricket and just to continue functioning and operating on the basis of how things used to be.
“The use of (cash) reserves to prop up ailing clubs is, I think, a triumph of heritage over freemarket forces.
“Heritage is a very powerful thing because obviously bound up in that is a whole load of cultural factors too, such as national identity and a particular way of life.
“In many ways that’s to be applauded in this world, where money seems to trump all.
“But obviously one of the arguments for exposing, not just sport, but any industry to the free market is that the organisation becomes more efficient and financially more sustainable.
“Perhaps it would be appropriate for the ECB not to step in in such situations because essentially what it does is sharpen the county’s focus on the nature of the game.”
That’s not to say that counties have been taking their eyes off the ball in a financial sense, it is just, Chadwick argues, that there has to be a continual appraisal of where their priorities lie.
Foremost among them is the need to do more to ensure that counties continue to be viable businesses, not just serving the local community but also building a legacy for the future.
“Any financial assistance really offloads the problems of poor attendances or poor county management to the counties themselves,” he says.
“I guess the comparison is with the Premier League. They don’t turn around and say ‘it’s not our problem that X club gets poor attendances, it’s not our problem that X club isn’t financially sustainable’.
“In spite of all the criticisms there might be of the Premier League, I do think they have a certain sense that they have a responsibility to ensure that the clubs are strong, the clubs are healthy, that they’re well managed. You don’t necessarily get that sense from the ECB.
“They just seem prepared to bail out clubs when clubs get into difficulty. Clearly there are structural issues around county cricket but it almost seems like the ECB is ignoring the inevitable in the name of preserving the sport’s heritage. Clearly, financially and commercially counties are in some difficulty.
“At the very least they do need some help and they need some guidance beyond simply getting bailed out when times get tough.”
For a competition that has survived for 126 years, the questions surrounding the future of the County Championship are particularly pertinent.
The size of attendances at fourday matches are a constant bat to beat the counties with, but it’s the make-up of that crowd rather than the numbers coming through the gate that should be of greatest concern.
“Falling membership at a lot of these counties is a shocking indictment of cricket’s hidden secret, which is that it’s in real difficulty,” says Chadwick.
“There’s this whole piece around the demographic profile of cricket fans.
“What we’re seeing is a greying of cricket fans. These people are increasingly older, more affluent, grey-haired men because they’ve got this connection with cricket in a way that millennial consumers haven’t.
“What a 14 or a 15-year-old wants from sport now is very, very different to what a 55 or 60-yearold wants. The way in which they engage with sport and the way they consume sport is very, very different too.
“This is the real challenge for cricket. There is some engagement with the heartland – the older generation – but you need a sustainable fanbase that is being built at the bottom end by younger age groups. Cricket isn’t convincingly or effectively dealing with that and that needs to change.
“It may well be a county going under – not just for the counties but for the authorities more generally – that leads to some serious thought on how to properly engage the next generation.”