Opinion
I have spent the better part of my life in and around Australian cricket — as a player, a captain, a selector, a coach, a talent developer, and briefly as an ACB director in the late 1980s.
I have watched the game evolve in ways I could never have imagined when I first pulled on a Baggy Green. Some of those changes have been magnificent. The push to privatise the Big Bash League was not one of them, and I am greatly relieved that Cricket Australia has stepped back from the edge.
Let me be clear from the outset. This was not about resisting change or ignoring commercial reality. Australian cricket must be financially sustainable. CA reported a net deficit of $11.3 million in 2024-25, even after the windfall of hosting India. Player payments need to keep pace with a global T20 market moving at warp speed. These are genuine pressures, and I do not dismiss them lightly. But selling the BBL was not the answer.
The league is one of Australian cricket’s great success stories. It has brought the game to a new generation of fans, filled stadiums on summer nights, and given our domestic players a stage that simply did not exist a generation ago. It belongs to Australian cricket — to the states, the clubs, the communities that have built it.
The moment you introduce private ownership at scale, you introduce a set of priorities that may not always align with the long-term health of the game. Private investors, however well-intentioned, answer to shareholders, not to Australian cricket.
New South Wales and Queensland showed real resolve in holding their ground. They recognised something important: the BBL’s true value lies not in what it could fetch on the open market — figures of $600 to $800 million were being floated — but in what it delivers to Australian cricket season after season. Sovereignty matters. Once the game’s decisions are being shaped by investors whose primary obligation is a return on capital, things change in ways that are very difficult to reverse.
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So the decision to step back deserves to be welcomed. But let us not pretend the underlying problems have gone away. They have not.
If this moment is to mean anything lasting, Australian cricket must use it to address something that has needed fixing for a long time: its governance. The privatisation debate exposed a fault line that has been widening for years. CA’s board structure has drifted too far from the people who actually own and sustain this game.
The six state associations are the owners of Cricket Australia. They represent the volunteers, the clubs, the grassroots — the hundreds of thousands of Australians for whom cricket is not a commercial property but a way of life. Yet their direct representation on the CA board has been progressively diluted in favour of independent directors drawn from law, finance and corporate management.
I recall arguing this point with Jack Clarke, the then CA chairman, when the push to end proportionate state representation was first mooted. Jack believed the business had to come first. I countered that our business was cricket, and if we got the cricket right, the business would look after itself.
Australian cricket is bigger than any balance sheet. It’s time to govern it that way.
Commercial expertise can always be brought in as needed; what you cannot import is genuine knowledge of the game — the history, the culture, the emotional investment that allows you to understand not just where cricket is going, but where it has come from, and why that matters.
I mean no disrespect to the independent directors who have served. But running a sport is not the same as running a listed company. The BBL privatisation push was, in many ways, a product of importing corporate boardroom instincts wholesale into cricket governance — a solution conceived in the language of investment returns and market valuations, disconnected from what the game actually is and who it belongs to.
The fix is not complicated. All six state chairs should sit on the CA board as directors. They own the organisation; their presence at the table is not a privilege, it is a structural necessity. Alongside them, a small number of independent directors — perhaps three — chosen by the states themselves, could provide genuine commercial and strategic expertise without diluting state authority. The chair should be one of those independents, with the standing to manage tensions between state interests with credibility and impartiality.
On player representation: I know this will attract debate, but I do not believe active players should sit on the board. The players’ interests are legitimate and must be heard, and the Australian Cricketers’ Association does important work in advocating for them. But there is an inherent conflict in having active players govern the body that employs them. Keep those roles distinct.
This kind of governance reform would do more to future-proof Australian cricket than any injection of private capital. It would rebuild trust between CA and the states. And it would ensure that when the big decisions are made — about the BBL, broadcast rights, player payments — they are made by people with a genuine stake in the game’s soul, not just its balance sheet.
Australian cricket is bigger than any balance sheet. It’s time to govern it that way.
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Greg Chappell is a former Australian captain. He led Australia in 48 of his 87 Tests, scoring 7,110 runs at an average of 53.86.
