The enshitification of cricket

The enshitification of cricket

Rich Clarke
CricketPaper

THIS ARTICLE PREVIOUS APPEARED IN THE CRICKET PAPER, AUGUST, 2024

The rowers of Team GB keep their strategy simple.

This country’s second most successful Olympic sport considers every decision through the lens of seven words – will it make the boat go faster?

Of course, this thought process inhabits the safe, straightforward, if cold, world of precise measurement. Making the best decision for a multi-layered sport is much more complex.

This season I have written on the importance of joy in cricket and its role in shaping the sport’s future. For me, this should be the only reason that the game exists. I accept joy is felt through the heart of the beholder and there is no scale to determine the quality or quantity of warm, fuzzy feelings. But, when you think about it, the immeasurable aspects of life are by far the most important.

However, it appears that sport, especially English cricket, is going in the opposite direction.

The term ‘enshitification’ was first coined by Cory Doctorow and hit such a nerve that the American Dialect Society made it their word of 2023. This business process has three simple steps: lock in the end user, lock in the business user, then exploit them. The result is more money but the product is increasingly crap.

Doctorow’s thesis concerned the degradation of online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and X. They exploded in the mid-2000s by putting the users first—often sucking up huge losses in the name of usability and growth. Having built up a loyal audience, they started prioritising advertisers over customers. Then, with both locked in and dependent, the powerful few in control could sit back and watch their flywheel spit out billions. The only proviso is not to annoy either party so much that they actively leave.

Just think about your own online experience in the last decade. For most of us, it is more about adverts, scams and spam these days than usefulness, let alone joy but, hey, everyone is on it and how else are we going to connect?

Premier League football enjoyed rapid growth during the 1990s. Stadiums got better, the world’s best players arrived and Sky’s coverage changed the game. The dark days of 1980s hooliganism seemed a century ago. But having created a must-have product, respect for the paying spectator has been eroded to almost nothing.

Then they turned to the clubs. The Premier League created 20 rich ones. The primacy of the Champions League then handed six the lion’s share of the revenue. The European Super League was designed to pull up the ladder from the chasing pack.

Now we see overseas owners using teams for ego trips and self-aggrandisement, going on foreign tours rather than playing minnows in the League Cup or FA Cup replays and, most recently, deliberately cutting low-yield season ticket holders to make up for the plateauing of media rights fees. But a mixture of emotion, habit and hype keeps us watching. The majority of long-standing fans I know bemoan the over-commercialisation and all the nonsense. Then they proceed to spend a small fortune to follow their team each season.

Before we move on to the enshitfication of English cricket, it is critical to stress the county game has spent much of its history shaking the tin for change and, despite the joy it creates, exists in a perma-crisis.

The ECB’s chosen vehicle of change has been The H*ndred. The fourth season concluded last weekend. Following the process of enshitification, the early campaigns have been about creating a crowd-pleasing product. Cheap tickets, a huge marketing budget and a return to free-to-air television have been used to create a buzz, with every positive metric PR’d far and wide.

The rationale, we were told, was to support the future growth of the game and keep the 18 first-class counties going, 15 of which were member-owned. It was predicted that television rights for Test cricket would soon shrink and, according to Ben Bloom’s recent book Batting for Time, there was a presentation suggesting that English cricket’s relationship with the IPL would soon resemble that of French basketball to the NBA. A supplier of talent but utterly overshadowed as a league competition.

Image via Craiyon.AI

Whether it was the persuasiveness of these arguments or an annual cash lifeline of £1.3m that sealed their agreement we will never know. But now, the counties need even more money to survive. They are locked in so, despite concerns from the members who technically own them, they have gone with the ECB’s direction of travel’ over franchise sales.

As that process begins, we start the third stage of enshitification. One where a host of private equity funds and overseas owners buy into English cricket. Although history may erase the word “into” from that last sentence.

Reportedly the Delhi Capitals group are eyeing Hampshire. Yorkshire are talking of demutualisation. The days of member-owned counties may be numbered when the first domino topples. No-one spends that much money without an expectation of taking full control of the key asset sooner or later. The tail will not wag the dog and the fleas have long since been fumigated.

This was not the future mapped out all those years ago but the game has been locked in.

Yes, there will be more money to attract more elite talent than we saw in the Hundred this year. The marketers will argue we will have a better product for a new generation of fans..

But can we expect a set of owners whose major money-maker will always play in the IPL to consider what is best for English cricket? Yet we will be relying on their largesse.

Change is hard in a straightforward profit-driven business, let alone a sport with responsibilities from grassroots to international cricket.

Perhaps ’enshitification’ is merely a series of reactions and unintended consequences based on driving ever-higher profits in a new attention-based economy.

The real failure in cricket’s recent governance has been the lack of an agreed goal to guide every decision, a la GB rowing.

Everyone accepts the game needs more money but no one seems able to draw the line and shout “enough”. The lessons from other sports have not been learned and many now fear the game will be forever locked into its pursuit of more money

Which means cricket’s cash-chasing boat will have to go faster and faster, no matter the real cost to the sport.

Because cricketers are worth it. Greed, ego and contract negotiations

Because cricketers are worth it. Greed, ego and contract negotiations
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