Business of cricket needs businesspeople

•  Cricket Boards need to bring in those who know how to run the kind of big business the sport has become, says article in Wall Street Journal

Cricket’s governance is changing — but it’s moving in all sorts of different directions. Lacking central authority, with global governing body the International Cricket Council effectively controlled by its most powerful members, the evolution of the way in which the game is run continues to be haphazard and frustratingly inconsistent. At its heart, the sport remains a big business run mostly by amateurs and riven with conflicts of interest.

Cricket Australia took a step in the right direction with the appointment on 28 September three Independent Directors: David Peever, Australia Managing Director of mining giant Rio Tinto; Kevin Roberts, former Chief Executive of clothing retailer Colorado Group; and Jacquie Hey, former Managing Director of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, and the first female Cricket Australia Board Member in its 107-year history. They join a slimmed-down, nine-member Board featuring one representative from each of the six member states, ending the previous system, where founder members New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia got two votes each.

South Africa, likewise, are at least giving the appearance of getting their house in order — and not before time. As a result of the Nicholson Committee, an enquiry into board governance convened by the Country’s Sports Minister, Fikile Mbalula, Cricket South Africa has appointed five Independent Directors: Louis von Zeuner, Deputy Group Chief Executive of bank Absa Group; Dawn Mokhobo, Chairperson of mining company Wesizwe; Vusi Pikoli, former Head of the country’s National Prosecuting Authority; Mohamed Iqbal Khan, Chief Operating Officer of financial services company Old Mutual Investment Group South Africa; and Geoff Whyte, who has been a senior marketer for Unilever, Pepsico, Cadbury Schweppes and SAB-Miller.

On 19 October the Board also fired suspended Chief Executive Gerald Majola after he failed to contest a disciplinary hearing; it was the accusations against Majola that prompted Mbalula to set up the Nicholson Committee. Majola is taking the matter to the country’s Labour Court; his legal representatives have questioned the legitimacy of the committee and say that he has been denied his constitutional right to fair labour practices.

The board found him guilty in absentia of failing to declare payments, totalling about $670,000, made to him and 39 other CSA employees when the Indian Premier League was hosted in South Africa in 2009; the Board’s auditors have even suggested that the payments could be a criminal matter. The Board has further accused Majola of deliberately hiding the payments and lying about them, and concluded that he had brought both the game and the Board into disrepute.

In both Australia and South Africa, the appointment of independent directors has copped a certain amount of flak; to fans concerned about the growing commercialisation of the game, putting it in the hands of people who appear to know more about money than cricket looks like a move in precisely the wrong direction. But Majola is a cricket insider through and through, and a former player, albeit one whose career was blighted by the iniquities of apartheid; and if even half of the accusations against him are true, perhaps cricket people aren’t the best people to run cricket.

In reality, what cricket needs is a blend of both groups: people who are passionate about the game, but also people who have the necessary skills to run the money-making behemoth that it has become. Like it or not, cricket is a big business these days, and needs to be run — at least in part — by people who know how big businesses work. Whatever their background, it needs people of vision rather than the breed of unimaginative bureaucrats that have long blighted its administration.

But just as important as the identity of the directors is the way their roles are defined, and the way they perform them — by making it their only priority to make decisions that are in the best interest of the game alone rather than entrenched interests, with no personal financial agenda, and to be perceived as making such decisions. With accusations of shady dealings both on and off the field nipping at the heels of cricket’s image, the appearance of transparency is as important as transparency itself.

At ICC level, meanwhile, little changes. The organisation has just appointed Bangladesh’s Mustafa Kamal as its Vice-President, despite there being no clear reason for such a role to exist, given that the presidency — to which it is a stepping stone — is about to become a purely ceremonial position. That change, accompanied by the appointment of a chairman to actually run the ICC, is one of the few recommendations from February’s Woolf Report into cricket’s governance that’s actually been implemented at the top level.

It is, moreover, one of the mildest recommendations in the report, which highlighted, among other things, undeclared conflicts of interest among board members, undeclared loans between member nations, and the complete opacity with which full-member boards — those of the 10 Test-playing nations — report their financial affairs to the ICC. It also recommended independent directors at all levels of the game, but suggestions like that were squarely blocked by boards including the Board of Control for Cricket in India, and sit mouldering on a shelf somewhere in Dubai, the victim of entrenched self-interest.

Everything the report said about conflicts of interest at national board and ICC level remain just as true today. Some boards are moving tentatively towards the sort of governance practices that are standard in the corporate world; others, among them some of the most powerful, are entirely hostile to the idea. It’s not unexpected or even unreasonable for them not to vote against their own interests, and the member-controlled ICC is unable to impose changes on them from above.  Pressure to change might come, however, from the boards’ many corporate partners — sponsors, media companies, advertisers and franchise owners — as they become progressively more disenchanted at dealing with organisations that don’t live up to modern standards of how companies should be run. One thing is for sure: With cricket worth the kind of money it is these days, the current organisational farrago simply isn’t sustainable.

(Source: Wall Street Journal)