Betting the House
GH ponders some bad choices
One of the definitive episodes of South Park involves a school election in which the candidates are a giant douche and a turd sandwich. It comes to mind as Australian cricket considers either selling to foreigners or refloating on gambling money. The former proposal, extensively trailed by Cricket Australia, we knew; the latter appears integral to an alternative scheme promoted by Cricket NSW, based on an awareness that the football codes are making out like bandits from ‘data monetisation’ and cricket is not.
CA has set a nominal deadline next week, but it might be time to dust off that Douglas Adams quote: ‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.’ That won’t be a bad thing. CA have failed to make the case they set out to spruik last year by commissioning a confidential report with a foreordained outcome. ‘Whether we can go against the global trend of privatised domestic leagues and continue to grow our Big Bash Leagues is an open question,’ argues CA’s CEO Todd Greenberg while meaning the opposite - that it is a fait accompli compelled by global market forces. But, as friend of Et Al Andrew Jones summarises ably here, ‘we’ aren’t they. The England Cricket Board created The Hundred to sell because the counties were broke which, for all its poor mouthing, CA is not. It had a good Ashes, and an even better Big Bash League, liberally sprinkled at last with elite local talent. Somewhere out there the idea took hold that the BBL is the ‘poor cousin’ of the SA20. In fact, the SA20 is as yet a fraction the size of its Australian counterpart, even in a summer in which South Africa hosted no Test matches; the NZ20 doesn’t exist, and the ILT20 is a money pit in a war zone. Yes, the IPL, where a single franchise, originally the cheapest, is now ascertainably worth more than the entirety of Australian cricket. But the IPL has Indian cricketers and an Indian market, and the BCCI isn’t about to share either.
The lesson of the boy who cried wolf is that those who set out to create a false sense of urgency end up courting distrust. It’s backfired on CA. They brought in Raine Group, the same advisers the ECB used in The Hundred sale, as if assuming consent, but merely aggravated tensions in Australian cricket’s federal system. Cricket NSW’s chair John Knox has now gone to considerable lengths to promote a rival vision, retaining two other veteran investment bankers, Goldman Sachs alumni Christian Johnston and Tim Burroughs, now part of Adara Group.
Knox happens to be local head of the private equity group Ares Credit. He is, therefore, clearly comfortable with external investment in certain circumstances, such as those that led Ares to invest in Trent Rockets. This adds credibility to his resistance of private investment’s enticements, relying on commercial attitudes conditioned by his old career as an opening bat: ‘My approach was defence first and look for runs after that. As an investor I’m always more cautious and I’m very focused on downside protection.’ He senses downside in the CA proposition, including the extreme difficulty in aligning the interests of Australian cricket with that of the Indian plutocracy - because, let’s face it, that’s who we’re talking about as potential buyers. Here the boy who cried wolf meets the scorpion and the frog.
As for the argument that the players must be paid more so as to compete in the global market for cricket talent, how much of that global talent actually moves the dial for fans? Must Australian cricket be sold to ensure that Marcus Stoinis chooses the Stars over the Pretoria Capitals? In any case, if Australia feels the need to pay certain marquee players more, it can: the BBL salary cap is perfectly adjustable; CA’s memorandum of understanding with the Australian Cricketers’ Association is ripe for renewal. Privatisation, in other words, has started to look like the option of a sport too indolent to examine its antique governance, where Boonie provides diversity, and ever-rising cost base, where performative redundancies masquerade as genuine economies.
The argument of Cricket NSW, and those other states privately content to let it take the lead, is that cricket has not exhausted other means of revenue maximisation - ticket prices, for example, have remained conservative, while the game has until recently been a sponsorship also-ran. The perfect schedule is elusive, but the argument for moving the Sydney Test to the start of summer to free January for the BBL make sense. CNSW also, however, bring us a proposal long on wagering, into which cricket has so far hastened but slowly.
These days, of course, live-to-air football has been rendered almost unwatchable by the non-stop hucksterism of betting companies. Why, a man cannot consume even his nightly MAFS without a constant dinning from this matey sleazebag or that.
Cricket has held aloof for, I suspect, a variety of cultural reasons. Sports betting emerged as an industry even as cricket was licking its wounds from multiple instances of player malpractice and corruption. Nor does cricket serve up content so reliably and regularly as the football codes; the Big Bash League, pitched specifically at children, has also striven for a commendably wholesome vibe. From its various gaming partners, cricket reportedly extracts a mere $15 million - a rounding error.
Cricket, then, has largely escaped the seedy reek enveloping other sports implicated in the infiltration of online gambling into everyday life - captured in You Win Some, You Lose More, the far-reaching report by the House of Representatives standing committee on social policy and legal affairs on the pernicious infiltration of online gambling into everyday life. But now that this report has celebrated a thousand days of government indifference, some believe that cricket should be prepared to hold its nose. The SA20 is out and proud, with a gaming company as title sponsor. Why not the BBL?
This would require a good deal of cognitive dissonance, given what we know of sports betting as a form of sinister and targeted predation on young men. Cricket NSW even has a partnership with Reclaim the Game, based on it having ‘turned down sports betting sponsorship’, committed to ‘eliminating sports betting advertising shown at their home games wherever they can’ and educating their ‘fans, players and staff about the risks of excessive sports betting and gambling harm.’
Cricket NSW believes that CA can extract more in ‘product fees’ from its existing gaming partners. They may well be right. But this, of course, would be an incitement to those partners, strenuously resistant to any check or balance, deepening their inroads. If you want a foretaste of their ideal future, consider the US, where only eight years on from Murphy v NCAA, the Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates to legalised sports betting, punters bet more than $200 billion annually, half the men in the US between 18 and 49 have a betting account, and the slouching towards prediction markets that allow betting on everything is part of the country’s generalised descent into MAGAfied nihilism. I recommend McKay Coppins’s recent panorama of the sports industrial complex in Atlantic, ‘Sucker’, covering the staggering levels of addiction, the proliferating corruption scandals, and the precipitous decline of trust in sport as an institution leading to the worsening harassment of athletes and officials. The killer kick for this piece is that Coppins’s editor gave him $10,000 to bet, in order to study its effects; it turned him, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable sports fan, into an anti-social and slyly compulsive sports hater.
It was now common for my family to catch me furtively tapping in wagers. On one occasion, my 10-year-old son discovered me on my phone in the kitchen pantry, where I’d gone to get snacks for the kids, and announced, “Dad is hiding again!” On another, Annie happened to glance down the pew at church just as I was sneaking a peek at DraftKings. “You’re addicted,” she stage-whispered.
My wife was no longer having fun with this stunt of mine. Having given up on the prospect of a big payday, she was now focused on the more immediately visible consequences of my gambling—like the fact that our 7-year-old daughter knew the difference between a point spread and a moneyline, and that our 10-year-old’s first question whenever I turned on a game was “Who are we betting on?”
Once, Annie overheard me enthusiastically explaining to our kids that if the third leg of my parlay hit, I would win enough money to erase all of my losses for the season. “But gambling is bad,” she shouted from the other room, “and people who do it eventually lose all their money, right?” Her tone of voice suggested that I was bound by marital covenant to endorse this position, which I promptly did.
‘As a society,’ Coppins concludes, ‘we are taking an enormously risky bet: that we can reap the rewards of a runaway gambling industry without paying any price; that unlike every civilisation before us, we can bet the house. What are the odds we’re right?’ These are odds cricket needs to be sensible to. Does it want to align more closely with an industry so grossly amoral? Does it really want a vested interest in turning its fans into gamblers?
Now it’s possible, if not probable, that cricket will muddle its way to something resembling a compromise, such as selling a couple of clubs, or agreeing to explore more revenue raising opportunities - CA and its antecedent bodies have twelve decades’ experience engineering trade-offs. But this also needs to be more than just a pay day. The test is not merely how much money can we generate, but how will we feel towards the game afterwards - I use ‘we’ advisedly, to remind decision makers of their duty towards the public, their history and even their country. If the best they can offer is selling either the game’s sovereignty or the game’s integrity, then the average fan would be entitled to echo Kartman: ‘Screw you guys, I’m going home.’