Marketing W.I Cricket: The Dilemma

What's wrong with West Indies cricket? Okay, let me be more specific: what's wrong with the way West Indies cricket is run and marketed?

I've spent the last few days reading all the answers and suggestions on the CaribbeanCricket.com message board. Some of them make their way to the CC front page, but most of them pile up on the message board where they are praised, ridiculed, and 'given licks'. Then they accumulate dust and eventually disappear only to be resurrected weeks or months later.

Just like the armchair umpires, the armchair administrators know just what's wrong with West Indies cricket and how to fix it.

You can't really fault them - they are almost without exception well-meaning people who are passionate about cricket in the region. They put time and effort into coming up with ideas to address our ailing institution. The proposals are often well thought-out and well presented.

Most often it seems that re-making our cricket in the mould of American sports is The Answer. Franchising, marketing, privatization, and "corporate strategies".

A word of caution, though.... as simple as it seems, it's not just a case of copying the NBA model or the NFL model and voila, instant rags to riches. Many of the ideas that work in the USA and North America simply won't work in the Caribbean.

Some will, but there are cultural, geographic, and economic factors that come into play and prevent things from working the just the way they will in the US or Europe or in any other society.

For better or for worse, the English-speaking Caribbean is a unique entity like no other. Or perhaps more accurately, it is a unique collection of entities with a culture unlike any other.

Taking another culture's way of doing things and trying to fit West Indies cricket into it would be like trying to tell a West Indian he can only have one item of carry-on luggage - it just won't work. Any strategy for running an institution like West Indies cricket has to be as unique as the region itself.

Which doesn't prevent it from borrowing and adapting ideas -- in many ways this defines West Indian culture itself -- but it does mean that some serious thought has to be given as to what to adopt and how to adapt it.

I give you, as an example, the Canadian Football League. Apparently the Canadian version of the degenerated form of rugby is in some way different from that played in the US. Don't ask me how, I don't know or care.

The point is, many Canadians are passionate about it and the CFL has been around for eons. There are constant questions about its future despite the best efforts of more competent administrators than the WICB (granted, that's not saying much). The CFL basically follows the American model of franchise sports and continually implements ideas from that model much like CC's message board
members suggest the WICB should.

The trouble is, things are different for "football" in Canada.

It has a fan base of maybe a couple million. This fan base is dispersed over a large geographic area. There are few places that are singularly accessible to a large number of any of these fans, so for most it means a day or a weekend trip to actually see a game.

There are TV deals, but they are never quite as lucrative as the CFL would like and it's always a question of whether the numbers can support it in competition with all the bigger sports like ice hockey, baseball, and basketball. The CFL is always the junior partner in any negotiations with the broadcaster.

Players aren't paid anything like what they are in the US so anyone with any real talent opts out to the US to warm a bench there for a few gazillion Canadian dollars a year.

Each region views the other with a bit of suspicion. The West is convinced that the East controls everything, and the East thinks that they are supporting the West. Neither of them can make it without the other.

Any of this sound familiar?

All the best efforts to take American answers to a Canadian problem don't seem to be getting them any further ahead. The CFL is still stagnating.

I'm afraid I have no answers of my own to the problems, I'm just pointing out that while most of the ideas I've seen on the message board warrant a closer look, don't think that just adopting the American (or European for that matter) model will solve our problems. Someone with a very good understanding of marketing and economics needs to weed through all the ideas floated and
pick out what will work from what won't. Then they need to figure out how to put it all together in a uniquely Caribbean way.

Good luck to him or her, God knows they'll need it.

** John Richardson is a Canadian-based West Indies cricket fan.