7 - It’s just not cricket: rules and the gentleman’s game

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Cricket is a massive sport. It dominates the attention of sports fans on the Indian subcontinent. It is a national obsession in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal, as well as among these ethnic communities found in large numbers around the world, such as in the Arabian Peninsula. It is also popular in other regions of the former British Empire, such as southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean. Cricket remains the dominant sport of the English summer, despite the encroaching influence of football. To put the scale of the demand and interest in cricket into perspective, a 2019 match between India and Pakistan in the World Cup drew an estimated live broadcast audience of 1 billion. In comparison, the biggest live event in the US annual sporting calendar, the National Football League Super Bowl, attracts around 100 million domestic viewers and fewer than that number again in the rest of the world. Even the 2018 FIFA Football World Cup Final had an estimated average viewership of just over 500 million. In this context, there is a surprising lack of economic literature concerning cricket, at least when compared with the team sports most focused on by economists, such as baseball, basketball, association football and American football (Gregory-Smith, Paton & Sacheti 2019). Like these other sports, cricket is a setting that allows effective economic analysis, with implications not just for this sport, and others, but for our wider understanding of economic behaviour.

In this chapter, we focus on the oldest cricket league, the County Championship (henceforth the CC) in England and Wales. The CC is the premier domestic first-class cricket competition in England, with matches played over several days. The competition can be traced back to the eighteenth century in some form, but it officially began in 1890. From the first match to the most recent, we have complete data not only on final outcomes but also the specifics of what happened within those matches. Despite the increasing popularity of short-form cricket, the CC still makes up most of the professional cricket played in England each season. One reason why the CC is interesting for economists is that its rule makers have continuously tinkered with its design over the past 130 years.