How the Big Bash avoided turning into an IPL clone

A super-quick lowdown

Keepin' it authentic: Cricket Australia's administrators saw long-term value in keeping the Big Bash League an Australian product

Keepin' it authentic: Cricket Australia's administrators saw long-term value in keeping the Big Bash League an Australian product © Getty Images

In 2010, several Australian state cricket associations were being seduced by the idea of riches that could be had through an IPL-like franchise-based league down under: get A$30 to $50 million by partly selling your teams to private investors. They lobbied Cricket Australia to consider the proposals but met with resistance from chief executive James Sutherland, head of commercial Mike McKenna, and head of strategy Andrew Jones.

Here's the story through six quotes:

"How could we ignore that sort of money? It's not as if there's a bottomless pit at Cricket Australia. They're hardly flush with funds. At state level we have to think about our own grass roots because we're in serious competition with all the other sports."
Unnamed NSW official supporting the IPL model

"The model the investors had in mind was the IPL model, and it always annoyed me how this is portrayed. The IPL/BCCI hadn't made anywhere near as much money as it appeared. They'd simply capitalised the future value of half the TV rights and folded in other revenue-sharing or sponsorship. The life of those payments were spread over 10 years - the clubs were paying their license fees as they got their TV-rights revenue, so they were really being financed by the BCCI/TV rights holders. It was taking from one hand to another."
Andrew Jones

"There were people who… thought [the BBL] was a flash in the pan and it wouldn't turn a profit. It was not unreasonable in their minds if someone was going to offer them A$30 million over a period of time, just take it. It's not real cricket, it'll fail, and we'll get some money and be happier for it. We didn't think it was worth giving away, even on reasonable terms, half of your team's profits in perpetuity, in exchange for a reasonably small sum of money - A$30 million with a A$7 million upfront payment and a few years of A$5 million and that was it."
Mike McKenna

"Don [Argus]… saw the potential for conflict of allowing private investors in. He even drew the analogy of owning a mine and allowing someone else to come in and share the royalties and doing that in perpetuity. He had a genuine view that T20 was an opportunity that you didn't want to share with anyone else."
James Sutherland on Don Argus, hired in 2011 to run CA's team performance review

"I suspect private owners would have had a very different view of CA leaving out players, resting them from BBL matches for international duty. They might have been much more demanding from a selection point of view. Who knows what other impacts we could have had if we'd ended up with management teams from the subcontinent running BBL sides?"
Mike McKenna

"From BBL01 to BBL05, expenditure to grow the league was A$187m. In the same period, the BBL has generated income of A$154m, ­resulting in a net investment of $33m."
A CA submission to the players

How did Sutherland and Co work to push their agenda and at the same time not antagonise the states? Click here for the full story by Daniel Brettig in the January 2017 issue of The Cricket Monthly.