Cricket Has Two Broadcast Markets. We Keep Pretending It Has One.

Issue No 43

India keeps pushing cricket’s media-rights numbers higher. Beneath it, bilateral cricket is struggling to sell. DAZN’s latest move suggests smaller boards may need to stop chasing the biggest cheque and start chasing the cricket customer.

Cricket keeps telling us its media value is growing.

And technically, it is.

The IPL’s 2023-27 media rights were sold for roughly US$6.2 billion.

The ICC’s Indian media-rights agreement for the 2024-27 cycle was widely reported at around US$3 billion.

India’s home international and domestic rights for the September 2023 to March 2028 cycle brought in another ₹5,963 crore, approximately US$720 million at the time.

Those are enormous numbers.

They have helped create a very compelling story around cricket.

The audience is growing.

The value of the game is growing.

Broadcasters are paying more.

Cricket is becoming one of global sport’s most valuable media products.

But move one level below cricket’s premium properties and the picture becomes considerably less comfortable.

South Africa has struggled to secure meaningful UK broadcast value even when England is touring.

Cricket Australia has been trying to find the right long-term UK home for its upcoming international inventory.

And now DAZN has acquired the UK rights to Australia’s two-Test series against Bangladesh.

The actual rights fee has not been publicly disclosed.

But what DAZN did next is arguably far more interesting than whatever it paid.

It made the cricket free to watch.

UK viewers can register for a DAZN account and watch Australia v Bangladesh without purchasing a subscription.

That should make every cricket board below the sport’s very top commercial tier pay attention.

Because maybe DAZN understands something cricket has been slow to accept.

The television rights might not always be the most valuable asset being sold.

The cricket fan might be.

For years, we have tended to use the biggest media-rights transactions as a proxy for the health of cricket’s overall broadcast economy.

The IPL sells for billions.

ICC events sell for billions.

India’s home cricket commands enormous money.

Therefore cricket’s media value is increasing.

But what if those numbers are actually disguising two very different markets?

At the top sits cricket’s premium economy.

The IPL.

ICC World Cups.

India home internationals.

Major India tours.

The Ashes.

The very biggest bilateral series.

These are scarce properties with enough broadcasters, advertisers and consumers competing for them to make exclusivity extraordinarily valuable.

The objective for rights holders in that market is simple.

Maximise the cheque.

Then there is everything underneath.

West Indies home cricket.

Bangladesh.

New Zealand.

South Africa outside its biggest tours.

Associate cricket.

A significant portion of bilateral international cricket.

The economics there look different.

And increasingly, boards in this second market may have to ask themselves whether maximising the upfront rights fee is actually the right objective at all.

Australia v Bangladesh is useful because it shows us another way of thinking about sports rights.

DAZN does not necessarily need to look at the series and ask:

How many subscriptions can these two Tests sell?

It can ask a different question.

How cheaply can cricket introduce a valuable sports consumer to DAZN?

A cricket supporter who has never used DAZN now has a reason to register.

DAZN gets the user.

It learns that the user watches cricket.

It sees where they live.

It understands how often they return.

It can expose that customer to football, boxing and other sporting content.

It can eventually try to convert that registered user into a paying subscriber.

That changes the economics.

The value of Australia v Bangladesh is no longer limited to advertising revenue or subscription revenue directly attributable to those Tests.

It can also be measured through customer acquisition.

And there is an important piece of context here.

DAZN completed its acquisition of Foxtel at an enterprise value of approximately A$3.4 billion, around US$2.1 billion.

Foxtel already holds Cricket Australia’s domestic broadcast rights through 2031.

That means DAZN now sits inside a much larger Australian sports-media ecosystem.

It can potentially take cricket being produced for one market and distribute it into another at a relatively low additional cost.

The marginal economics begin to look very different from those of a traditional broadcaster buying an overseas series from scratch.

The idea of using cricket to acquire digital customers is not new.

India has already demonstrated it at enormous scale.

Reliance made IPL streaming free while aggressively building its digital audience.

The logic was not simply to maximise the amount of money generated directly from each IPL viewer.

The IPL became a gateway into a much bigger digital ecosystem.

JioStar subsequently reached more than 280 million subscribers, approaching Netflix’s global subscriber scale at the time.

That matters.

Because even in cricket’s richest market, the people paying billions for cricket are not necessarily valuing the sport solely on what the matches themselves earn.

They are valuing what cricket can bring them.

Users.

Subscribers.

Attention.

Data.

Retention.

Cross-selling.

Cricket becomes a customer-acquisition vehicle.

And if that is true at the very top of the market, it may be even more important further down.

This is where I think cricket’s traditional broadcast model needs challenging.

Imagine a smaller cricket board is offered a relatively modest amount of money for its overseas television rights.

The broadcaster wants exclusivity.

The cricket sits behind a subscription wall.

Perhaps 40,000 people watch.

The board takes the cheque.

That has traditionally been considered a successful rights sale.

But what if the alternative is a smaller guaranteed payment combined with free digital distribution that reaches 400,000 or 500,000 people?

Which is more valuable?

The answer is not automatically the second option.

Giving cricket away simply because nobody wants to buy it is not a strategy.

But giving cricket away, or making it free to view, because you have a deliberate customer-acquisition strategy can be very different.

And that is where boards such as Cricket West Indies, Cricket South Africa, New Zealand Cricket and Bangladesh Cricket Board may eventually have to think differently.

For them, the priority may not always be:

Who will pay us the most money today?

It may need to become:

Who can help us build the most valuable cricket audience tomorrow?

I would actually go further than saying smaller boards should simply put more cricket on free-to-air television.

The better opportunity could be free-to-view digital cricket.

Traditional free-to-air gives you reach.

Digital distribution can potentially give you reach plus identity.

That distinction is massive.

If 500,000 people watch a match on television, you know 500,000 people watched.

If 500,000 registered users watch through a digital platform, potentially you can understand far more.

Where are they?

How old are they?

How often do they watch?

Which teams do they follow?

What content keeps them engaged?

Do they watch highlights?

Do they watch women’s cricket?

Do they watch domestic cricket?

Do they return when West Indies play again?

That information can eventually become commercially useful.

But only if the cricket board negotiates properly.

This is the important catch.

A cricket board cannot simply hand its content to DAZN, Amazon, Netflix or another digital platform for very little money and then celebrate because the platform has collected lots of customer data.

That would be very valuable for the platform.

Not necessarily for the cricket board.

If smaller boards are going to trade some guaranteed rights value for distribution, the commercial agreement has to evolve as well.

The negotiation should not only be:

How much will you pay for our rights?

It could become:

Rights fee + distribution + customer data + marketing commitments + advertising share + conversion bonuses + sponsorship inventory.

A board could negotiate for audience reporting.

Geographic data.

Consumption behaviour.

Guaranteed homepage promotion.

Minimum marketing spend.

Revenue share on advertising sold against the cricket.

Bonuses if cricket viewers convert into paying subscribers.

Retained social and highlights rights.

Potentially even the ability, where privacy regulations permit, to build direct relationships with those viewers.

Now the board is no longer simply selling matches.

It is building an audience asset.

This is where the idea becomes particularly interesting to me.

Cricket West Indies has supporters across the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and elsewhere.

We know that diaspora exists.

We know there is interest.

But knowing there are West Indies supporters is very different from having a measurable, addressable audience.

Imagine CWI could say:

We have 650,000 registered viewers in North America.

We know how often they watch.

We know how many consume highlights.

We know how many watch West Indies women.

We know how many watched three or more series in the last 12 months.

We know where the largest clusters of those supporters live.

That changes a commercial conversation.

You can walk into a sponsor meeting with Caribbean Airlines, Republic Bank, Digicel, Sandals or a North American brand and stop saying:

West Indies cricket is popular.

You can start saying:

Here are our customers.

That is far more powerful.

This is also why digital platforms could eventually be more strategically valuable to smaller boards than traditional broadcasters.

Not necessarily because they will pay more for the rights.

They might not.

But their business models are broader.

A traditional sports broadcaster principally needs cricket to justify subscriptions and advertising.

DAZN can use cricket to acquire a sports consumer who might later watch football or boxing.

Amazon can potentially use sport to strengthen a much wider Prime relationship.

A major global streaming platform can use live sport to acquire customers, reduce churn and create habitual engagement.

The economic value of the viewer can therefore become larger than the economic value of the match.

That is a fundamentally different proposition.

And it gives cricket boards something new to sell.

Not simply content.

Customers.

There is also an uncomfortable question cricket probably needs to confront.

Are cricket’s enormous headline media-rights numbers telling us how valuable cricket is?

Or are they telling us how extraordinarily valuable Indian cricket is?

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

The IPL can sell for more than US$6 billion.

The ICC can generate around US$3 billion from its Indian rights cycle.

Indian home cricket can produce another rights agreement worth roughly US$720 million.

At the same time, international boards beneath that premium level can struggle to generate significant money from bilateral rights.

Both things can be true.

Cricket’s biggest media properties can be appreciating dramatically while the market for ordinary bilateral cricket weakens underneath them.

We should not confuse the success of one market with the health of the entire ecosystem.

That is why I find DAZN’s Australia-Bangladesh agreement interesting.

The fee itself may eventually become public.

Perhaps it will turn out to be significant.

Perhaps it will be modest.

But that almost feels secondary.

DAZN bought the rights and then removed the immediate subscription barrier.

That tells us something.

For DAZN, the most valuable part of this transaction may not be Australia v Bangladesh.

It may be the person who registers to watch it.

And perhaps that is where the next phase of cricket’s media economy is heading.

The premium properties will continue fighting for the biggest possible rights cheque.

They should.

But cricket’s second broadcast market may require a completely different strategy.

Spread the game.

Reduce barriers.

Find the fans.

Identify them.

Understand them.

Build a relationship with them.

Then monetise that audience over time.

Because for many smaller cricket nations, endlessly chasing the economics of India may be impossible.

Building their own measurable cricket customer base might not be.

Maybe cricket does not have one broadcast market anymore.

Maybe it has two.

And recognising which one you are actually competing in could be the difference between simply surviving the changing media market and finding a new way to grow within it.