Whiteboard

Whiteboard exists not only to promote our opinions but to give a platform to those with something fresh to say of interest to our readers.

You can find out why we are interested in the world of cricket at the end but, in the meantime, let Rob Eastaway, an independent consultant and author of several books including the bestselling ‘What is a googly?’, give you his insights on the business of cricket.

What were you doing in the summer of 2005? Whether or not you are a cricket fan, it’s almost certain that you spent at least part of that summer watching cricket. It was the summer England reclaimed The Ashes from Australia, and most of the country was hooked.

On the final Monday, offices stopped work, schools cancelled lessons and staff took sickies as everyone clambered to find a tv to watch the denouement at the Oval. Arguably it was cricket’s finest hour.

Cricket was on the brink of challenging football as the nation’s favourite sport. So what did cricket’s marketers do next? They pulled the plug, that’s what.

September 2005 is the last time that live cricket was broadcast into English homes.

Not a single ball of live cricket, not one, has been shown on terrestrial tv in the four years since, despite the fact that international cricket – particularly in its exciting new short form called Twenty20 – has stepped up massively in global appeal since then.

Instead, the England and Wales Cricket Board decided to sell live cricket, every single last delivery of it, to Sky. Now it is necessary to fork out upwards of £300 per year to watch live cricket. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people don’t do this.

You might think this crass decision was commercial suicide. Surely the worst form of marketing is to hide your product at the back of the shelf so people don’t even know it’s there, and then price it so that it is unaffordable to the majority?

The ECB in their wisdom don’t think so. “Look at all the money we’re making”, they say. The minority who fork out their £300 bring in more revenue than the majority who used to get cricket for nothing. Those with a business head might say “well if cricket is making more profit than it was, then what is the problem?”.

Unfortunately, this Faustian pact has had nasty consequences that the ECB tries desperately to hide. Kids, the future market of the game, aren’t playing cricket in the parks any more (why should they? – most under 12s have never seen it!). The game is no longer the talking point in the typical household.

When England beat Australia to reclaim the Ashes this summer, less than two million watched the dramatic finale (on a Sunday) compared with nearer 10 million in 2005 (on a working Monday).

And if cricket is less popular, there are commercial organisations who will be particularly worried: the sponsors.

NPower spends millions each year sponsoring Test matches in this country. The commercial reason for this is simple – their exposure to millions of viewers. But now they are exposed to only a fraction of the audience they used to reach.

Sponsors like NPower have hinted that they are unlikely to continue their sponsorship at the current level. (Indeed, surely the sponsorship is now worth only a fifth as much as it was four years ago!)

Just as worrying is where all this cricket money is being spent. Most of it is channelled towards county cricket, a form of the game followed by a diminishing audience. Many county matches are watched by only a handful of people.

A lot of the money is meant to be nurturing the England team of the future, yet in truth it seems to be serving as a finishing school for South Africans who come to England aged 21 and spend four years qualifying to become ‘English’.

(When England tour South Africa this winter, it’s quite likely that four of our top six batsmen will be South African by birth. It’s hard to support your national team when they look like a bunch of mercenaries who used to fly a different flag).

An independent body is about to produce its report for the government on the future of cricket on terrestrial tv. They will argue that some cricket – probably The Ashes – should be a ‘crown jewel’, like The Olympics and the football World Cup, which has to be available free to everyone.

Sky will hate this report and is no doubt lobbying furiously behind the scenes. The ECB will hate it even more – because they are at risk of losing an easy revenue stream.

But only the short-sighted cannot see that for the long term commercial future of cricket, let alone its place as “the people’s game”, Test Cricket needs to come back onto terrestrial TV now.

These views are Rob Eastaway’s and not ours and no conclusions may be drawn on our advice to sponsors. Our interest is that we introduced one of our major clients to a three year sponsorship of the England Cricket Board and then managed it alongside other strategic marketing initiatives. This particular sponsorship proved a great success but Rob raises important questions about the short termism of sponsorship in the post-credit crunch era – questions equally important as those about short-termism in banking and politics.