Dehring: ICC loan won’t solve long-term financial issues
The global body approved nearly USD 13 million in aid for CWI
CEO Chris Dehring says Cricket West Indies still need to “find a way” despite a USD 12.82 million loan from the International Cricket Council (ICC). The ICC announced the credit under the classification of financial support to members at its Annual General Meeting and conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in July.
Speaking on CVM TV’s Fan Central, Dehring said, “Well, this is just a loan for this fiscal year. The challenge that we have is a long-term scenario that we do have to find a way to re-engineer West Indies cricket based on what is happening now in the world of cricket.”
The ICC previously extended its hand to the board in 2012, providing the then-West Indies Cricket Board, alongside Zimbabwe, with assisted funding.
This is the second time in six years that CWI is receiving repayable financial aid after the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) supplied them with a USD 3 million emergency loan in 2020, which the regional board repaid in full later that year.
This comes after CWI recorded revenues of USD 88 million in 2024 after co-hosting the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup alongside the United States that year. After announcing a net profit of US $23 million, the board stated it was able to clear all its debt.
However, CWI’s audited financial statements for 2025 revealed a net loss of approximately USD 28.5 million. This led to truncated seasons for both the men’s and women’s competitions across formats for the 2025 and 26 domestic seasons. The cutbacks also affected the regional age-group competitions.
“There's a book about ‘Who Moved My Cheese,’ and so definitely the cheese has moved in the world of cricket,” Dehring continued.
“India, for instance, is now going through quite a shake-up in terms of the television market, so countries that would have depended on major television rights deals out of India are struggling at the moment to close any deals out of India,” he added.
“I mean, we see where other boards have had to restructure. Australia laid off a whole number of staff. Various countries are reorganizing and so on because the world of cricket has changed. But generally, you know, you have an entirely new paradigm in the world of cricket that West Indies Cricket, like every other board, is going to have to adjust its operations.”
Another indication of the tight purse is the omission of the much-anticipated Women's Test against Australia earlier this year, which would have been West Indies' first since 2004.
Director of Cricket Miles Bascombe said the decision was made to "prioritize maximizing white-ball readiness" leading up to the ICC Women's T20 World Cup. Although Cricket Australia's head of scheduling and operations, Peter Roach's comments regarding the "importance” of the series being contested at multiple venues suggested a trade-off.
“I always give the example of the sugar industry all the time,” said Dehring. “That's exactly what has happened to West Indies cricket. You know sugar in the Caribbean used to be the premium product. The rest of the world wanted it."
“It was the best in the world. But we produced it in a very manual, labour-intensive way,” he explained. “One man might do a month's work, and machines were doing it in an hour, and we just weren't able to modernize our sugar industry like the rest of the world, and so we lost our sugar product.”
“So we're going to have to do the same thing with cricket West Indies and the West Indies cricket product. How do we produce players, but in different ways, not this sort of labour—flying around the Caribbean playing matches where you're just spending an inordinate amount of money just spent on airlift and on hotel rooms and so on. So we're going to have to modernize,” Dehring stressed.