Sport's fear of the free market

Sport's fear of the free market
The billion-dollar cricket league may end up benefiting cricket rather than harming
IPL, the new Indian Twenty20 league that taps into the vast wealth and cricketing passion of the subcontinent, has issued a challenge to international cricket: we can hire your players and make them millionaires for a month's cricket - what can you do about it? According to many thoughtful onlookers, this is the unacceptable face of the free market. As one distinguished cricket writer put it, IPL marks “the beginning of the end of the epoch when international matches were the main events. Like it or not, England v Australia may now move to the edge of the stage. Its centre is likely to be occupied by Mohali against Mumbai.”

As Middlesex captain, my concerns were less theoretical: what will IPL do to the two teams I care about, Middlesex and England? Middlesex will be without our excellent Indian spinner Murali Kartik for the first six weeks of the county season; but England emerge unscathed, with their star players remaining loyal to the national side.

Nor is the big picture all gloom and doom. History tells us that start-up leagues, no matter how irreverent, often leave a positive imprint on the establishment that they challenge. The free market, in sport as in life, may have sharp teeth and base motives, but it can still leave a benevolent legacy.

A famous precedent for IPL is Kerry Packer's World Series cricket of the late 1970s. Using his business dictum “Come on, we're all whores - name your price”, Packer lured many of the best players away from their national teams to play in his jazzed-up league. The schism he inflicted on world cricket didn't last long. But the innovations, like night cricket and coloured clothing, were absorbed into the mainstream.

Background
Cricket’s Indian stunner
Indian Cricket League: Cricket’s sale of the century
Sale of the Century
£20m splashed out in cricket auction
International cricket imitated its competitor and weathered the storm. Packer's league was even more criticised than IPL for vulgarity and iconoclasm, but it left the game enhanced. The athleticism and brilliant fielding of modern cricket owe much to the rise of one-day cricket following the Packer revolution. After a fractious period, the game emerged with a more marketable product - so Packer was half-justified in saying his motives had been “half-altruistic”.

Both Premier League football and the Champions League were essentially breakaway leagues. The Premier League founders may have bullied the old Football League, but the product has provided superb entertainment.

In America, competition between leagues is as old as competition between teams. In baseball, the founding organisation was the National League, which remained the sport's only elite body until the newspaperman Ban Johnson announced in 1901 that his rival American League was also a “major league”. He was written off as a hooligan entrepreneur. But the leagues have coexisted to this day; and since 1903 the two champion teams have played each other in the annual World Series, the sport's greatest spectacle. The free market made winners of both sides.

But where American sports were often founded on the basis that leagues could battle it out in a free market, our sports were run by private institutions - the FA, MCC, the Royal and Ancient. The free market came to British sport much later, when television converted sport into mass entertainment.

This commercial naivety makes us suspicious of innovations such as IPL. Its tone worries people as much as its substance - we aren't used to elite sportsmen being auctioned off like vases. But the best way forward for cricket may be to embrace IPL in the short term, while dedicating its full attention to outwitting it in the future. The free market, by definition, is anti-establishment, unpredictable and unsentimental - it is based on constantly changing choices and preferences. To keep afloat, you have to innovate.

What matters here is how international cricket fights back. If it is forced to play by free market rules, it may as well win by them. Two ideas might help. First, a genuine Test match world championship would give our premier product the showcase event that it richly deserves, and remind people that no matter how much they enjoy Twenty20, being officially crowned world Test champions is the sport's pinnacle.

Secondly, international cricket could revisit its scheduling. If one month of IPL can make $1 billion for the Indian board, that surely exposes the myth that more cricket makes more profit. Spectators want the best playing the best - but not so often that the spectacle is devalued. One counterintuitive answer to the IPL challenge is to enhance the international brand by reducing its number of matches.

Perhaps the IPL shake-up will galvanise the game. Rivalry, as Bjorn Borg said about John McEnroe, can inspire you to new heights. After all, sport is based on competition. With lateral thinking and the odd risk, international cricket, far from being ruined by IPL, might emerge more popular than ever before. And better.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3463383.ece