Cricket West Indies has announced a temporary 50% reduction in salaries and funding across the region from July 1.
CWI has kept players, staff, umpires and coaches on full pay since the outbreak began, but the lack of any international matches recently and in the near future means the governing body “is facing a significant loss of income.”
The financial cuts were taken in consultation with all stakeholders, CWI said in a statement and added it “hopes that these temporary measures will only be in place for not more than three to six months.”
Cricket West Indies (CWI) chief Ricky Skerritt himself admitted couple of weeks back that the COVID-19 pandemic has put the region’s already ailing cricket body into “Intensive Care Unit” and it will have to go for cost cutting measures to ride out the financial crisis. With no broadcast rights deal as yet, the biggest source of revenue for the CWI, the situation looks grave.
“The broadcast rights money expired in December last year and we still do not have completed negotiations with most countries …,” he said. “One, you should really enter the market about two years before the end of the [deal] to start negotiating and trying to cajole and to convince the broadcasters to do business with you. We didn’t go to the market till around the same time I became president last year so we’ve not had enough time in the market and to make it worse, the market has become very, very uncertain. So revenues which under normal circumstances we would have already begun collecting from broadcast rights, we have not done as yet.” said Skerritt a couple of weeks ago.
If the T20 World Cup does not happen the board is set to lose their cut of the tournament profits. We understand CWI gets 7.2% of the total surplus of the ICC revenue shares.
“Revenues continue to decline, expenses are fixed and even when you try to reduce some of the administrative or operational costs, you still have payrolls that exceed US$1.5 million dollars per month to cover players, etc and other fixed costs that just won’t go away.”, added Skerritt.
John Stephenson
john@cricketinvestor.co.uk
#Cricketnews #CWI
