00:00Cricket Western News is in need of money and it's no small sum.
00:04In their quarterly briefing today, they gave a cautionary note to cricket fans that 2026 may be their toughest year yet.
00:11And it's absolutely no secret that we have a chronic financial situation.
00:18In that the international model at this point, the financial model from ICC,
00:24it is not favorable to a small region like ours.
00:30And so it makes it even more difficult for us to navigate the way.
00:34And it's something we keep championing at the ICC level, of course, myself and Chris, our CEO.
00:40They intended to host over 33 events in 2026.
00:45CWI's CEO Chris Derring says hosting teams like Sri Lanka and New Zealand
00:50is not as profitable as hosting teams like England and Australia.
00:54When we have to host Sri Lanka, Pakistan and New Zealand,
00:58and as much as we enjoy the cricket playing against them,
01:01hosting those teams comes with a financial price.
01:05It's a price that we have to pay to keep our seat at the head table at the ICC
01:09and retain our full membership.
01:12So it's a simple fact of life that we have to host these tours.
01:15It's under the Future Tours Program that we agree to.
01:18But you're not going to be able to recoup even the television production costs of those tours,
01:25much less make a profit to then pay for all the developmental tournaments.
01:29And we host, you know, people maybe don't appreciate the number of events and tournaments
01:34that Cricket West Indies hosts.
01:35Derring added, hosting the Cricket World Cup in 2024 helped them to pay off prior debts
01:41and other expected debts in the near future.
01:45He believes that their problems started when they no longer earned a large sum of money
01:49touring rather than hosting teams.
01:51So we, in fact, used to make more money when we toured than hosting because hosting was a cost.
01:58But when we toured, because countries wanted to host us, we were such an attractive team,
02:03they would pay us a significant piece of the revenues that they were generating.
02:07But the world saw what was happening with television rights,
02:11and every board decided that they wanted to keep those television rights to themselves,
02:16knowing how quickly they were going to be growing.
02:18And Cricket West Indies was caught as the only board with no domestic TV rights at the time.
02:26In the meantime, the West Indian debt piles on,
02:28partly as a result of their commitments to keep their full membership status with the ICC.
02:33Derring is hopeful, though, that the ICC will soften its approach
02:36as other full member cricket boards are also starting to see diminishing returns in world cricket.
02:43Sergio Dufour, TV6 Board.
