Unlocking cricket’s levers
Also in the newsletter: China's FIFA bet and a profile of the IPL's most prolific advisory firm
Good evening,
Before we dive in, two quick notes. First, another stop-start week for The Left Field — the aftermath of our first event in Mumbai on May 7 has been…energising, but also exhausting. Second, The State of Play has now crossed 250 paid subscribers. It’s a modest number, but for something I launched in October 2025, it feels significant. Thank you to everyone who showed up in Mumbai for our debut event (in partnership with SI), and to everyone who has believed—and keeps believing—in The State of Play and what it’s trying to build.
Welcome to the Monday edition of The Left Field, a twice-weekly sports business newsletter from The State of Play. It lands in your inbox on Monday and Wednesday evenings (IST), always free to read. Think of it as a short, sharp desk briefing designed to be read in one sitting. The deeper dives and long reads still live at The State of Play every Friday.
On that note, here’s today’s edition 👇🏽
The Signals
• Cricket’s underused engine room
Cricket’s governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), posted a $543 million surplus in 2025. Its CEO still thinks the sport is leaving money on the table.
At SportsPro London last week, Sanjog Gupta called cricket “deeply under-leveraged” — a sport with two billion fans and 72 million concurrent streaming viewers for the T20 World Cup final that still behaves like a niche product.
The diagnosis: Gupta framed matchday revenue and fan data as chronically under-monetised. Gaming is the most glaring gap. Official cricket simulations have barely existed for years, even though the sport enjoyed a decade-long head start over football (or soccer). The ICC has now opened a tender for gaming rights, with EA Sports and Reliance Jio among the bidders.
The dependency: The surplus masks a deeper vulnerability. Media rights — led by a $3 billion deal with JioStar in India — account for most of the ICC’s income. In December 2025, the ICC publicly denied reports that JioStar wanted out. Gupta, who joined the ICC from JioStar last year, probably understands this exposure better than anyone in the game. “Media rights revenue will see structural shifts going forward,” he said.
What to watch: The gaming tender is the first serious test of whether the ICC can build a business beyond broadcast. Gupta expects those new streams to show up only in three to five years. That’s the catch: the JioStar contract runs to 2027. The next media cycle arrives well before the diversification does.
In early May, The State of Play had a detailed lowdown on the ICC’s gaming ambitions, drawing on cricket’s gaming past, and the familiar problems that it will likely encounter in the future.
• The sponsor and the screen
China Media Group finally signed a World Cup broadcast deal with FIFA on May 15, less than a month before the tournament kicks off on June 11. The agreement covers 2026 and 2030 for a reported $60 million, a steep climbdown from FIFA’s original ask of roughly $250–300 million. The distance between the sticker price and the final cheque is the story.
The sponsors’ dilemma: China has two Tier 2 World Cup sponsors (Hisense and Mengniu Dairy) and a Tier 1 FIFA partner, Lenovo. Together, Chinese brands are spending well over $500 million on this tournament. FIFA may have accepted a heavy discount on media rights, but that sponsorship spend only makes sense if there is an audience on the other side of the screen.
The India contrast: India still has no broadcast deal. FIFA launched its rights sale in July 2025, initially asking for $100 million, and has since cut that to $35 million. JioStar has offered $20 million, and the negotiations remain stuck. The reason is rather simple: more than 87% of the 104 matches will kick off after 10 pm IST, a schedule that shreds the advertising case for any commercial broadcaster.
Extra time: Unlike 2022, when the now-defunct edtech firm BYJU’S had enough at stake as a sponsor to push FIFA, India has no Chinese-equivalent presence at this World Cup to force a solution. Without that leverage, a likely outcome may be the state broadcaster Doordarshan stepping in, as some reports suggest. If India reaches kickoff without a broadcaster, the 2026 World Cup will become the first major FIFA tournament not shown live in the world’s most populous country.
• Cricket’s banker
In most cricket business stories, the deal is the headline. What usually stays offstage is the person — or firm — sitting quietly in the room every time.
A&W Capital is a ten-year-old boutique advisory firm based in London and Mumbai (with a presence in New York), with no press releases and almost no public profile.
Yet it has been behind some of the biggest transactions of cricket’s franchise era: CVC’s $750 million bid for the Ahmedabad IPL franchise in 2021 (Gujarat Titans), Charterhouse’s £250 million acquisition of Two Circles, the ICC gaming rights mandate it won against Deloitte and BCG, and David Blitzer’s $1.78 billion purchase of RCB in March.
In late April, the firm’s co-founder was in Mumbai, pitching the Big Bash League to an Indian franchise owner. Officially, Cricket Australia’s privatisation process is on pause, even as it “tests the waters”. Unofficially, people like A&W show up before the process restarts.
The full profile of the firm – and what it reveals about where cricket’s money is heading next – is for subscribers.
The Position
◀️ U-turn: India’s Central Information Commission (CIC) has now decided that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is not a “public authority”, keeping it outside the Right to Information Act – and overturning its own 2018 order that the board had challenged in the Madras High Court.
⚽ Hot seat: As Europe’s season winds down, the dugouts are spinning. Xabi Alonso is back in the Premier League with Chelsea, Manchester United are set to make Michael Carrick’s job permanent, and Jose Mourinho is on the verge of a sensational Real Madrid reunion.
⬆️ Going north: The UK government is exploring an Olympic and Paralympic bid for the north of England in the 2040s. UK Sport, The Athletic reports, will now run the numbers on what a northern Games – and all the politics that come with it – might be worth.
The Stack
🏏 Rishabh Pant: The grip problem that is unravelling his white-ball game (Indian Express)
⚽ How Tottenham went from football’s shrewdest club to the brink of disaster (Financial Times)
🏌️ He Plays Golf With Two Gloves – and This Oddball Just Carried Off a Major Title (Wall Street Journal)
That’s about it for this Monday edition of The Left Field.