ISLAMABAD:The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has warned of the potentially cataclysmic impact of the rising power of overseas franchises such as the Indian Premier League (IPL) while the appeal of Test cricket declines.
English cricket’s governing body said the “emergence and growth of global franchise leagues” and “the status of Test cricket globally” pose major risks to its business model in its latest accounts, The Guardian reported.
With the ECB expected to overhaul its central contracts system – introducing multi-year deals and significantly increasing match fees in an effort to retain the loyalty of leading players – it also draws attention to the “pressure on player wage inflation in a highly competitive market” as a potential threat.
The owners of several IPL teams are known to want to tie players to 12-month contracts and it was recently reported that several English cricketers had been approached to see if they would, in principle, be willing to accept such a deal.
Venky Mysore, the chief executive of the Kolkata Knight Riders, said last year: “If we were able to have ‘X’ number of contracted players, and were able to use them all in different leagues, I think that would be nirvana. Hopefully, someday it will happen.”
The ECB’s spending on salaries has massively increased in recent years – more than doubling from £25.8m in 2018-19 to £57.4m in 2022-23 – and the need to increase payments to top players is sure to push that figure further upwards.
The launch of the Women’s Premier League, a T20 franchise league based in India and the success of the ECB’s own women’s Hundred suggest salary inflation will also affect the 18 centrally contracted women.
Since 2018-19, the number of cricketers employed by the ECB has risen from 37 to 128, with the average headcount rising from 331 in 2020-21, a figure reached after restructuring as a result of Covid, to 495 in their latest accounts.
The latest increase was put down to “the increase in umpires as well as increases in commercial, communications and events and game support staff” after last year was blamed on “the employment of players and coaching staff of the Hundred entities in the first full year of the competition”.