India-Pakistan conflict could cripple cricket

Matches between Pakistan and India are among the most valuable in world sport - Getty Images/Punit Paranjpe

How to cope without the most valuable international fixture in all sport? This is the question that international cricket dare not confront.

Following last month’s terrorist attack on India-controlled Kashmir, and the subsequent military responses from both sides, cricket now faces a future in which fixtures between India and Pakistan cease. Should this happen, the sport will be robbed both of its most-watched game and hundreds of millions of pounds.

“The financial consequences for every cricket nation will be huge,” explains one former International Cricket Council insider. “India, England and Australia will be OK because they don’t really rely on ICC money that much. But other countries – including Test nations – that are heavily reliant on the ICC money could find it really difficult. I don’t think people realise just how bad this is going to be.”

India’s games against Pakistan are so valuable that tournament groups are fixed. India and Pakistan have been drawn in the same group – though ‘draw’ is the wrong word, implying chance rather than careful design – for 11 consecutive men’s global events.

The guarantee that the two countries will meet is an essential feature of JioStar’s broadcasting contract with the ICC. JioStar pay around $3 billion for the Indian rights to the 2024-27 cycle, which equates to nearly 90 per cent of what the ICC generates.

The package includes one men’s global event every year, each bringing the guarantee of at least one India-Pakistan game. Insiders suggest that perhaps one-tenth of the ICC’s total broadcasting value from 2024-27 – £250 million – is based on the guarantee of an India-Pakistan match each tournament.

‘Scarcity has value’

At last year’s T20 World Cup, The New York Times hailed the India-Pakistan fixture as bigger than the Super Bowl. While around 125 million watch each Super Bowl, India’s clash with Pakistan on Long Island attracted more than 400 million viewers worldwide. Naturally, such a spectacle entices sponsors to pay more to associate with the event and lure clients into VIP boxes at the ground.

In the last 12 years, the ICC has, bizarrely, been a beneficiary of the grim geopolitical climate between India and Pakistan. With the two nations not meeting in bilateral international cricket since 2013, there has been greater anticipation of their encounters in world events.

The match between the two nations at the 2024 T20 World CUp was watche by 400 million people - Getty Images/Alex Davidson

“The interest in the fixture has only been getting bigger,” says one former ICC executive. “It’s a good lesson for cricket as a whole: scarcity has value.

“It’s one of those fixtures that people are aware of who don’t necessarily follow cricket closely. It’s got interest all over the world and the tension between the countries adds to that. India-Pakistan is a pre-eminent sports fixture in the world.”

Matches between the nations are the centrepieces of global cricket events. When organisers plan the group stages, they first focus on the India-Pakistan game. The matches tend to be staged on Sundays, the best day for Indian TV.

For many casual sports fans, the India-Pakistan match is the first time that they even realise that the tournament is happening. Indeed, the recent design of ICC events has been to avoid a repeat of the 2007 World Cup. To the anger of broadcasters, sponsors and fans alike, India’s scheduled match against Pakistan in the second round in Barbados never happened; the sides had already been knocked out by Bangladesh and Ireland.

“You want it to be pretty early in the event,” the former ICC executive explains. “Once that game happens, people are switched on.” Less glamorous fixtures benefit from the afterglow, later matches in the competition involving other sides tend to enjoy a ‘bounce’ and attract more eyeballs than those before India face Pakistan.

Gambhir says ‘no’ to fixture

After a dozen years of ensuring that India always meet Pakistan in world events, now the ICC could be forced to do the opposite: ensure that India and Pakistan do not meet. This is the wish of Gautam Gambhir, India’s head coach and a former MP for the ruling BJP party.

“My personal answer to this is absolutely no,” Gambhir said when asked if India should continue playing Pakistan at neutral venues earlier this week. “Until all this [terrorism] doesn’t stop, there should not be anything between India and Pakistan.”

For international events, the most immediate question will be how to adjust to the position outlined by Gambhir: that India could only meet Pakistan in a knockout match.

In September, India will host the Women’s World Cup. The format consists of a round-robin in which all eight nations play each other. Should India refuse to meet Pakistan then, it would invite the question of how points in the fixture are divided up – and whether India would forfeit the game. In practice, it seems unlikely that the Indian government would penalise their own national team in this way.

Gautam Gambhir says no fixtures should be planned between the nations until ‘all this stops’ - Getty Images/Saeed Khan

But in all men’s events, there are multiple groups. As such, beginning with next February’s T20 World Cup – held jointly in India and Sri Lanka – there is scope for the Indian government to request that the national team is placed in a different group to Pakistan.

“Whether they’ll actually play at all will be the issue,” says one prominent administrator at another Test nation. “We’re all scratching our heads and thinking, what is it going to mean for the Women’s World Cup or for the Men’s World Cup? It will just be a race on to see if relationships calm down and then normalise in time.”

Besides ICC events, Asian Cricket Council tournaments have been the only place in which India have continued to meet Pakistan. Sunil Gavaskar, now an influential commentator, does not believe that India will face Pakistan in this year’s Asia Cup, due to be hosted by India in September. “If you’ve got two countries fighting each other, then it’s difficult to play sport with each other,” he said this week. “If things haven’t changed, I can’t see Pakistan now being part of the Asia Cup.”

‘Serious financial consequences’

The new uncertainty over the sport’s most lucrative match could have immediate financial repercussions. If India are no longer playing Pakistan in the group stages of events, “Star will come back and want to renegotiate [their existing contract],” says Ehsan Mani, the former president of the ICC and chair of the Pakistan Cricket Board. “There’s going to be serious financial consequences.”

World cricket was already braced for a major contraction in the size of the next ICC broadcasting deal for the 2028-31 cycle. Last year’s merger between Jio and Star, the two main sports broadcasters, will lead to dramatically less competition for the next batch of ICC rights; it is akin to Sky Sports and TNT Sports merging in the UK. The upshot is that, even before the new collapse in India-Pakistan relations, insiders feared that the value of the ICC broadcasting rights for 2028-31 could fall by as much as half, a decrease in the region of $1.5 billion.

“It’s not good timing, if there would ever be good timing,” explains the former ICC executive. “There’s a high probability, when the next deal is put out to market, that the same numbers wouldn’t be achieved.”

ICCC chair and former BCCI chairman Jay Shah will have to chart a course through uncertain times - Getty Images/Philip Brown

The impact on the 96 Associate nations, who share just 11 per cent of ICC revenue between them, would be particularly dire. “Reduced ICC broadcast revenue would be a serious setback,” says one chief executive of an Associate member. “It would force cutbacks and deepen existing gaps between the haves and have-nots.”

If ICC revenues were reduced, the game in Associate nation could only be protected by revising the distribution model – yet this would entail Test nations agreeing to take a smaller share of a smaller pie.

For cricket, the doomsday scenario is terrifyingly apparent: India not just refusing to be drawn against Pakistan, but refusing to play in any tournament that involves Pakistan at all. Should the Indian government refuse to grant participation to the national team to feature in events alongside Pakistan, the ICC would face one of the gravest crises in its history.

It would do so as an organisation that scarcely bothers to maintain the veneer of independence. The chair of the ICC, after all, is Jay Shah – the son of Amit Shah, India’s minister of home affairs who is widely considered the second most influential figure in Narendra Modi’s government.

“How does the independent chair of the ICC deal with dad?” asks the former ICC executive. “That’s a big question. Can he disassociate himself? Can he be independent? Would he, in any situation, be advocating a position contrary to an Indian national position in a political sense?” The answer, you suspect, lies in the question.