‘Let India play against themselves’ – West Indies should stop playing to challenge ICC’s revenue-sharing model, says former CWI President originally appeared on Cricket News. Add Cricket News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
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Former Cricket West Indies president Dave Cameron has suggested the Caribbean side should be ready to stop playing international cricket in protest against the ICC’s lopsided revenue-sharing model.
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CWI has announced a string of cost-cutting measures, including a 25 per cent pay cut for contracted players, while a US$12.82 million ICC loan was agreed earlier this year.
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Cameron admitted that reserves were drained after the 2007 and 2024 World Cups, and he fears the cuts to development will leave the talent pool bare within a few years.
Former CWI president Dave Cameron criticizes ICC revenue model: Calls for boycott of India bilaterals
Former Cricket West Indies (CWI) president Dave Cameron suggested West Indies should be willing to step back from the game and let India play among themselves if the sport’s richest nation will not share its wealth.
He made the remarks on Tuesday while appearing on the Mason and Guest radio show in Barbados, where he also said he was doubtful about how the regional board could find a way out of its present money troubles.
Cameron made it clear that he would not oppose the Caribbean team pulling out of international fixtures if that was what it took to make the point.
The comments arrive at a difficult time for the board, which has announced a series of belt-tightening steps because of its cash-flow problems. Salaries of contracted international players will be reduced by 25 per cent, while the deals handed to franchise players will be shortened to seven months.
CWI has also paused two domestic competitions, the regional Men’s Super50 tournament and the Women’s T20 Blaze series, which will leave fewer opportunities for players to build their game at home.
Earlier this year, the International Cricket Council (ICC) agreed to lend CWI US$12.82 million. Cameron pointed out that help of this sort from the world body was nothing new and had been offered “multiple times” in the past. According to him, though, the board’s present position is tougher to repair than before.
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Creimas/BCCI
Why the West Indies cricket crisis is harder to fix this time
Cameron said the missing ingredients this time were major tournaments and the money that follows them. With no place in upcoming World Cups (WI will be playing the qualifiers for the 2027 World Cup) and no hosting rights to fall back on, he could not see where fresh income would come from, and he added that broadcast revenue was also heading downwards.
“For the first time, the deficits, I’m not sure how you get out of this if you’re not in any of the World Cups; you’re not hosting any of the World Cups, I’m not sure if there is a path to get out of this situation with revenues from broadcasts going down. That’s a huge item that’s now addressing us,” Cameron said. “If you don’t have a big market for sponsorship, then you are in trouble.”
Cameron, who left office after losing the 2019 election to Ricky Skerritt, linked the board’s current struggles to the way earlier windfalls were handled. In his view, the profits from hosting the 2007 50-over World Cup and the 2024 T20 World Cup were not used wisely, and he was frank about it.
“There are two mistakes we made, and I said if I had the opportunity we would have changed,” he said. “We had a surplus in 2007 World Cup and we made an error of distributing it to the territories – massive error. And I think we did similar again after the 2024 World Cup in the Caribbean.
“What we should have done is invested those funds and then spent the revenues from that money. We would still have had reserves today.”
ICC revenue distribution: ‘The model has to change’
Even so, Cameron did not let the world body off the hook, and he again criticised how the ICC divides its income among members. He recalled that West Indies held both the men’s and women’s T20 world titles in 2016, yet the success made no difference to the board’s earnings.
“We weren’t able to move our revenue needle,” he said.
He then brought up the white-ball series currently being played between West Indies and India, which he used as an example of how skewed the arrangement has become.
“India, they are probably going to make north of 100, 200 million dollars on the series and it’s costing West Indies cricket to go and play in India,” he said.
“It just doesn’t make sense…. You can’t run a business where no matter whether you are the best team in the world you can’t improve your revenues. That’s not a business, the model has to change.”
For Cameron, simply asking for assistance is no longer enough, and he wants the board to take a harder line. He said he would be ready to go as far as a boycott if the situation called for it.
He added: “We need to be more forceful about it, and if it means withdrawing from the cricket, I would be as dramatic as that as to say, well India, play yourself if you’re not willing to share the resources with us… That would get everybody understanding how serious the situation is.
“Once you start cutting back on your development programmes, then where do you find players to go forward? So if you think the cabinet is bare now, wait for three, four years from now.”
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BCCI/Creimas
A boycott is a risky bet, but the grievance is fair
Cameron’s call for a walkout will make headlines, yet it is unlikely to work in the way he imagines. A West Indies withdrawal would hurt the Caribbean far more than it would trouble the ICC or the BCCI, because the board is already short of cash and every cancelled fixture would only widen the hole.
Broadcasters, sponsors and the players themselves would pay the price long before India felt any discomfort.
That said, his core complaint deserves to be taken seriously. When a side can win two world titles in a single year and still see no real change in its income, the revenue model is plainly failing the smaller members. The ICC has leaned on loans to paper over the problem, but a loan is a delay and not a fix, and it leaves the board deeper in debt.
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There is also some irony in the fact that Cameron’s own tenure included the decision to share the 2007 surplus among the territories, something he now calls a massive error.
The board needs to own that history and build a proper reserve fund this time. Pairing that discipline with a united push from the other smaller nations for a fairer distribution formula would carry more weight than any threat to stay home.
Most worrying of all is the damage to the development pathway, since once the pipeline dries up, no amount of money will bring the talent back quickly.
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