Expanding Cricket: Can We Follow Soccer Model?

By Adrian Meredith

VICTORIA, Australia (TheSportsNext) August 2, 2012: Not too long ago, Soccer was known as a niche sport. As at the 1980s, soccer was really only seriously played in Western Europe and South America. The same countries competed for top spot all of the time: Brazil and Argentina from South America versus Germany and England from Europe. Occasionally Uruguay from South America won it while France from Europe was also known to win it. But that was it. Everyone else didn't take it particularly seriously. It was played to some extent in other countries but never with the same degree of seriousness.

Around about 1990, FIFA, the body controlling world soccer, decided to expand the game. But they didn't just do it in one way: they did it in every way at once. Firstly, they went into the continents that didn't have established bases, like Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, and they established bases. They didn't try for the whole continent but instead tried to encourage it in individual nations who weren't too far behind the best anyway. Japan in Asia, Russia in Eastern Europe, and I can't for the life of me remember the countries in Africa. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, they let USA host the World Cup.

USA hosting the World Cup was extremely controversial. After all, USA sucked in soccer. USA was not ranked in the top 32 and hence didn't qualify to compete in the World Cup. Yet by hosting, per the rules, they automatically qualified. Many soccer fanatics were up in arms about it. How dare they just gift USA automatic selection into the World Cup?

But what it did was to bring USA into the soccer fold. Granted that it was probably more to do with their women's team winning the Olympic Gold Medal, but nonetheless the men's team gained from that, as well as having hosted the competition. They have made the top 16 a few times now, even the top 8. They are yet to win a World Cup but are now competitive. Americans now care about soccer.

Japan became quite good suddenly and started beating the better teams, as did teams from Africa. While the top teams keep dominating, there are occasionally other teams winning World Cups. And many other teams feel like they have a chance.

So what relevance does this have to cricket?

As of 1990, Soccer was ranked as the 3rd most popular sport in the world, behind Formula 1 racing and Boxing, but ahead of Tennis and Cricket. It is now ranked as the number 1 most popular sport, and by a sizeable margin too. Soccer went from being played seriously in perhaps 6 or 8 countries at most to being played seriously in as many as 50 countries, maybe more. In Australia, who still suck at soccer, soccer is now in the top 5 most popular sports, in spite of Australia being terrible at it! In terms of number of players, it is the number 1!

So could the same thing happen to cricket?

Cricket comes from 5th rather than 3rd, so is further back, but not so much further back really. The popularity they are starting with is half, but with a lot less countries. It just so happens that many of the countries that adore cricket have a lot of people - such as India, with 1/6th the world's population!

Cricket could, of course, simply offer a lesser known country to host the World Cup. But would that be USA? USA's cricket board is in shambles. Allen Stanford, who hoped to bring cricket to USA, is now in jail for life for fraud. So heading to USA might not be a good idea.

China has said that they want to be the next big thing in cricket, so perhaps they are the way to go. If China got involved in cricket, they'd at least get to number 2, if not number 1, in terms of population liking cricket if not number of countries. But perhaps they should go for the baseball-playing countries. Baseball, of course, is outside the top 10 most popular sports in the world and is similar to cricket in many ways - they are related sports! So perhaps all countries that seriously play baseball could be introduced to cricket.

So what if USA has stuffed up introduction to cricket. What about Cuba? Or Japan? If they are that good at baseball surely they would be good at cricket, if they wanted to be.

Twenty/20 cricket, is, of course, a shorter format that is the same basic length as other sports (like soccer or baseball) and hence is a way to expand it but we do need to put more into development in countries that actually want it.

Forget USA. Embrace China. And perhaps Cuba and Japan too.