1980s West Indies versus 1980s VFL?

Eleven years ago, I reacted in what I now recognise as a ridiculous manner to the discovery of an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that discussed the losses suffered by the 1984 Australian cricket tour of the West Indies. Having during the 1990s discovered an apparent pervasive anticorrelation between fast bowling strength and the profitability of first-class cricket, I long assumed the West Indies were an exception. Thus, my discovery that tours there were losing money made me emphasise beliefs established as a teenager, though others around me denied their truth.

Absence of evidence re the profitability of Caribbean tours before Lloyd worked out that spin was an unnecessary luxury precluded refutation of the argument that their extreme fast bowling strength caused the financial losses. Even people outside my family were unable to offer an answer with which I was satisfied — and they themselves never discussed the profitability of previous Caribbean tours.

Today when discussing the issue of how 1980s Wisdens overemphasised how bad England was and did not discuss what the West Indies were doing well, I received an interesting idea. This was that the financial losses of West Indian cricket during the 1980s were due to the increasing financial demands of their star players.

I had never thought of this argument before, but it is eerily similar to the situation faced by [Australian Rules] football during exactly the same era. With the VFL’s zoning and clearance rules declared illegal, and clubs in an era of inflation seeking to gain top players at any price, player costs continued to rise even when governments put the brakes on inflation, with the result that real wages of players increased at an increasing rate. Consequently, declining attendances as more and more people relocated to suburbs remote from the public transport essential to move large numbers of people to grounds produced much heavier losses than occasional attendance declines in previous eras. Clubs could not cut expenses as they previously could because of the demands players were making. These demands were further increased by a greater demand to win at any price (at least by most top football clubs). At the same time ruling classes who formerly patronised football turned to basketball, which was very easy to televise to people remote from public transport. The VFA, the WAFL, and lower leagues suffered even more than did the VFL. Ultimately, football had to reform on basketball’s terms — rationalised grounds and standardised conditions that made the game much easier to televise.

1980s West Indian cricket managers, no doubt, would have liked to reduce payments to star players to lower costs, but the Sydney Morning Herald implied that they knew this to be impossible. Also, exactly like [Australian Rules] football, cricket in the West Indies was struggling to compete with the rapidly growing National Basketball Association — based much closer than the MCC or Kerry Packer. Another similarity was that the West Indies were taking cricket to all grounds although only Queen’s Park in Trinidad was economically profitable, while football was played on unprofitable suburban ovals on which league-fixed ticket prices meant more popular clubs could not generate sufficient revenue from home games to improve facilities. The ruling classes of the West Indies, increasingly linked to the United States, had little interest in patronising better and cheaper accommodation at cricket venues.

A major difference is that the VFL by 1984 recognised for exactly this reason that suburban grounds needed to be phased out, whereas the West Indies Cricket Board was expanding first-class cricket to these very loss-making venues. Nonetheless, the similarities are both interesting and surprising — increasing demands from players and a shift of ruling class patrons to basketball are almost certainly behind the heavy losses of all [Australian Rules] football competitions in the 1980s and may well be behind the financial losses suffered by the West Indies while it dominated world cricket on the field.