West Indies cricketers should receive all of their outstanding match fees by the end of this week, but players in the domestic four-day competition will have to wait a bit longer, Cricket West Indies (CWI) chief executive office Johnny Grave has disclosed. He said CWI has started processing payments for the international male and female cricketers.
Due to the financial crunch, the men had not been paid their match fees for the home series – three ODIs and three T20Is – against Ireland in January or the February-March Sri Lanka tour which included three ODIs and two T20Is. The women were owed for the four matches they played in the T20 World Cup in Australia between February and March.
“As of the start of this week, we were able to email and contact the international women’s players and confirm that their T20 World Cup match fees will be paid in full this week. We’d already paid the prize money, as I confirmed a few weeks ago, back in March,” Grave said on the Mason and Guest radio show.
“We’ve also confirmed to the men’s international players that their outstanding match fees from both the Ireland series and Sri Lanka series will be paid this week as well. So the international players are being brought up to speed.”
However, Grave added: “We’re not yet in a position to do that with the franchise players. We’re working hard to try and resolve that and as I’ve assured all the players and the franchises, it is our number priority from a financial point of view, for us to clear that, and I hope to do so sooner rather than later.”
In March, after eight rounds of the 10-round competition, CWI ended the competition and declared point leaders Barbados Tridents the winner of the 2020 tournament. A large percentage of those match fees – for January to March – are outstanding. The delay in paying players has been blamed on CWI’s cash flow problems which have worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Grave said the primary reason behind CWI’s cash flow problem was the huge losses the board suffered while hosting Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in 2018.
“When we hosted Sri Lanka and Bangladesh we made a US $22 million loss. The media rights contract paid us less than a million dollars for those two tours”.
CWI is still struggling to secure the next cycle of its media rights. The previous contract with Sony-Ten expired in late 2019.
John Stephenson
john@cricketinvestor.co.uk
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