The Cricket War

4 ideas

1. Packer's rebuffed bid becomes rival league

   In 1976 Kerry Packer offered the Australian Cricket Board far more than the ABC for exclusive rights to televise Test cricket on Channel Nine, and the Board refused out of loyalty to its existing broadcaster. Packer then secretly signed about fifty of the world's best players, recruiting through England captain Tony Greig, and in 1977 launched World Series Cricket as a rival competition. By 1979 the Board had settled on terms that gave Nine the exclusive broadcast rights and gave Packer's company the game's marketing rights, largely what he had first asked for.

2. Honorary governance suppresses labour's market price

   Amateur administrators ran cricket as a duty and treated selection for one's country as payment in itself, so leading players earned little more than a tradesman while crowds and gate receipts grew. Because the governing bodies were the only buyers of top-level cricket labour, players had nowhere else to sell their skills and could not test their worth. When a well-funded outside buyer offered several times their wages, nearly all of the elite accepted almost at once, which showed how far below its value that labour had been bought.

3. Restraint of trade against governing bodies

   When the International Cricket Conference and England's cricket authority moved to ban players who had joined Packer, Greig and others sued, and in 1977 England's High Court struck down the bans as an unlawful restraint of trade. A sporting body could govern its own competitions, but it could not stop professionals from earning a living elsewhere to protect its monopoly. The ruling turned the establishment's main weapon, exclusion, into a legal liability.

4. Once broadcast pays, the game follows

   When television rather than the gate becomes the main source of revenue, the viewer at home becomes the real customer, and the product gets redesigned to suit the camera. World Series Cricket brought in night matches under floodlights, a white ball, coloured clothing, cameras at both ends of the ground and a focus on one-day games. The traditional authorities later adopted all of these. The real fight was over who owns the audience, and whoever controls distribution ends up setting the form of the game.

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