Shane Warne bowls in the Ashes in 2005 – a series that caught the country’s attention on Channel 4. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Did moving behind Sky’s paywall 20 years ago save or stifle Test cricket?
The decision to leave free-to-air TV has become English cricket’s Brexit. But what could have been done differently? By Wisden Cricket Monthly
As Rudi Koertzen and Billy Bowden removed the bails at The Oval and celebrations began across the country after a grandstand finish to an epochal Ashes, it signalled not only the end of England’s 18-year wait to claim back the urn, but the last rites of live Test match cricket on terrestrial TV in the UK.
In December 2004 the ECB had announced a landmark four-year deal worth £220m that gave Sky exclusive rights to show live cricket, with Channel 4 – which had been showing home Test matches since 1999 – left with nothing.
“We understand that the decision to place all live cricket coverage on satellite and cable television is an emotive issue,” said David Morgan, the ECB chair, who argued that a new deal to show primetime highlights on Channel 5 would help fill the terrestrial void.
For Giles Clarke, who led the negotiations in his role as chair of the ECB’s marketing committee, it was a simple case of economics. “The alternative was a significant decline in income,” said Clarke at the time. “Major cuts would have had to have been made in the funding of the England team, the support structure and to county cricket clubs as well.” Channel 4 released a statement saying they hoped the ECB “would not come to regret its decision to turn its back on the hundreds of hours of terrestrial exposure that Channel 4 was offering”. Their innovative coverage had been widely lauded since they had usurped the BBC to win the broadcasting rights alongside Sky in a two-pronged deal that involved the latter showing one home Test match each summer between 1999 and 2005.
Assisted by England and Australia producing perhaps the greatest Test series ever played, Channel 4 had delivered on their promise to “help reconnect cricket with a younger and diverse multicultural audience”. But after engaging that audience, the new broadcasting deal would take the game behind a paywall, out of many people’s reach.
More than 20 years later, it remains one of English cricket’s most divisive and controversial decisions. Did taking live cricket off free-to-air TV secure the future of the English game, or hold it back at exactly the moment it was ready to fly?
A BBC cameraman broadcasts the fifth Ashes Test from the Oval in 1938. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images
“We innovated in areas that had never been touched before,” says Mark Nicholas, Channel 4’s frontman across their seven years as the home of Test cricket in the UK, leading a commentary team that included Richie Benaud, Geoffrey Boycott, Clare Connor and Simon Hughes in his role as “The Analyst”. “We made the game more accessible by the way that we styled it, so it didn’t feel too elitist or too difficult.”
Having won the broadcasting rights before the 1999 season, the same summer that England were defeated by New Zealand on home soil to become officially the worst Test side in the world, Channel 4 brought viewers the team’s subsequent rise under Nasser Hussain and then Michael Vaughan, culminating in the Ashes triumph of 2005 when a peak audience of 8.4 million tuned in to watch Ashley Giles and Matthew Hoggard clinch a nail-biter at Trent Bridge.
When England sealed the deal at The Oval just over a week later, Channel 4 reported their highest-rating day ever – at 23.2%, the channel’s total share of all TV viewing broke the record set by the Big Brother final three years earlier. By then the ink had dried on the ECB’s contract with Sky.
“The music, the graphics, the commentary team, the public’s love of it – it had become really rather special,” recalls Nicholas. “It was a bit of a cult. The coverage in 2005 was probably universally appreciated more than any other at that stage, so much so that even Kerry Packer in Australia was saying, ‘How come they’re doing it better than we’re doing it?’ When you give something such a deep dive, and you’re going so well with it, and you feel like you’ve got so much left to do, it’s difficult to stomach that the rights have moved on.” Speaking now to the key figures involved at the time, it’s clear that passions still run high. There remains a sense of animosity between the different camps, accusations of underhand PR campaigns, and a refusal to accept that the other side may have a point. There are legacies to protect. In a sense, it’s English cricket’s Brexit.
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“We were faced with a horrendous situation but there was no doubt in the minds of all of us who were involved, and there was no doubt in our minds 15 years later, that we did the only thing we could do,” says Giles Clarke, reflecting on the deal he struck with Sky 22 years ago. “There have been a lot of lies and rubbish said about this. Channel 4 did not bid for all the Test matches – they only wanted the second series each summer. The BBC said they were not going to bid two days before the due date for bids. Sky had bid for absolutely everything.”
Clarke, who went on to be appointed ECB chair in 2007, says that if Channel 4’s bid had been accepted it would have meant a shortfall of “at least £40-50m”, and there was no guarantee that Sky, having had their original offer rejected, would accept a significantly watered-down package that didn’t include the Ashes and other marquee Test series.
“Don’t forget who owned Sky,” says Clarke. “I had two telephone calls with Rupert [Murdoch]. He didn’t make his money by being nice. You can’t sit in a room with him and say, ‘You’ve got to think about the national sport’. Well, you could say it, but the ear is cloth. You’ve got to be just as hard-nosed as they’re being.”
Nicholas argues that Channel 4 were “squeezed into such a corner” that they couldn’t afford to bid for both Test series each summer, but acknowledges that stronger action could have been taken to try to hold off the challenge of Sky. “I don’t think those running the show understood just how realistic the threat was. They thought we were going so well, we were winning awards, cricket was having a moment. So when cricket had its moment in 2005 that was even bigger, they thought, ‘Jesus, what have we done here?’
“Could they have paid a little more, been better prepared, offered more to the surrounding game in terms of initiatives to bring people in? I think they would say that if we had our time again, we could have had a better crack. Not to say I think they’d have won, because I think perfectly reasonably Sky would have just added a bit more to the top line.”
No one disputes that Sky’s bid was comfortably the most lucrative on the table, but was it an offer the ECB couldn’t afford to refuse? Speaking to the Unofficial Partner podcast in 2021, Terry Blake, the TCCB’s marketing manager and then ECB’s commercial director between 1989 and 2003, argued it was shortsighted to take the extra cash at the expense of the exposure the game would have received from continuing to be on free-to-air TV.
“When they did the deal in 2004 for 2006 to 2009, they actually only got £55m per year,” said Blake. “So for £10m per year more, which no doubt helped Giles Clarke secure his chairmanship for years to come, they moved it off free-to-air television altogether. I would turn it round and say: imagine the audiences we would have grown and the interest we would have had at the grassroots level had we stayed on free-to-air, even if we’d had to take a slight drop from the £45m per year [received from the 2002-05 deal with Sky and Channel 4]. Whatever money was put into the grassroots because of additional money from Sky, it could never replace the top-down approach.”
Clarke insists, however, that the ECB’s financial modelling presented a bleak picture if they were to accept Channel 4’s bid. “We worked out that at least seven counties would have to close, and I’m being very serious here. We would have had to cut back on our youth programmes and we couldn’t see what we could fund. We were really concerned about it. The game as we knew it, in the opinion of the guys who did the financial modelling, would not exist.”
In negotiations with Vic Wakeling, Sky’s head of sport, Clarke insisted the ECB would need more money if they were to justify the decision to take live cricket off free-to-air. “We sat Vic down and said, ‘If you don’t [increase your offer], we aren’t going to consider doing this with you. You’ve got to give us a better reason.’ We got Sky to increase their bid by £30m. I think we did a bloody good job on the money.”
The Channel 4 steadicam on Shane Warne in 2005. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
There remains, though, a lingering sense of a missed opportunity. That having hit the mainstream over the course of the 2005 Ashes, with the heroes from that series suddenly becoming household names, the game slipped out of the wider consciousness when it became exclusively housed on a platform that a large section of the country cannot afford.
“Giles Clarke’s mission to take it away from Channel 4 was completely misguided,” says Nicholas. “He can say, ‘Look at all the money we made’, I would say look at where you were then and where you are now with engagement in cricket and with the coverage of the game. We had massive figures. If we had two million for a day’s cricket, it was normal. And now 400,000 is normal.
“The game was going really well. Chance to Shine had started, the parks were full of kids playing cricket, and within two years all of that had stopped. It became incredibly difficult for Chance to Shine to raise money. There weren’t kids just playing in the park, picking up a bat and ball. The evidence is everywhere. It was self-defeating.” Barney Francis, Sky Cricket’s executive producer between 2000 and 2007 and later MD of Sky Sports, insists the ‘lost generation’ argument “doesn’t stand up” and highlights the wholesale cricket coverage that Sky has provided over the last 20 years. “Mark [Nicholas] and Aggers [Jonathan Agnew] would constantly peddle that argument and my response would be, what makes you think children live in non-paid-TV homes? This idea that young children couldn’t access Sky is making an assumption that they don’t live in paid-TV homes when the evidence of our subscriber base is that it was family homes. The notion that kids suddenly lost all touch with cricket is utter nonsense.
“Take KP [Kevin Pietersen] as an example. Five of his 100-odd Test matches were on free-to-air. Alastair Cook never played on free-to-air television. I just don’t buy the argument that these guys disappeared, because they were miles more famous than many of those that preceded them. We were never going to match the free-to-air audiences but there was a lot around the sides, support programming, Sky Sports News constantly talking about cricket, the website, Cricket AM, Cricket Writers on TV. There was one period in that first summer where I think over 67 days there were four days without cricket on Sky TV. It was wall to wall, and we were doing it in HD for the first time.” Like Francis, Clarke refutes the suggestion that putting live cricket behind a paywall led to fans drifting away from the game, or potential fans never finding it. “There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of a lost generation,” he says. “It’s just that people who didn’t like the deal decided there was. Why are the Test grounds always full? Why do crowds consistently increase? It’s a fallacy and there’s no clear evidence that people stopped playing cricket. You might have to pay to watch it, but you do have to pay for your pleasures. Why should they be free? There was a lot of shouting and screaming, but what have we been able to do as a result?” Clarke cites investment into drainage systems and floodlights at the first-class grounds, just as T20 was gathering momentum, as a defining legacy of the Sky deal. “Those capital investments came to something like £17-18m. It transformed county cricket and Test cricket, and nobody talks about it.” He also insists that the explosion of women’s cricket would not have been possible without the financial heft of Sky. “Half the country was not being encouraged to play cricket, they were being asked to make tea. That was wrong. We were the first sport [in the UK] to pay a national women’s team. The women cost us money for 10 years, but so what? Look at what they’re doing now and what it’s done for the sport.”
The Channel 4 director’s suite during the fifth Test in 2005. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Richard Gillis, the host of Unofficial Partner, a podcast focusing on the business of sport, questions whether it really was a case of all-or-nothing when it came to Sky’s 2004 bid, and highlights the ECB’s ongoing Hundred deal with Sky and the BBC as the type of broadcasting model that could have been adopted if the will had been there to do so.
“You’ve got this happy medium where the bulk of the stuff is on Sky for the avid fan but the top of the funnel is a BBC slot where it gets a good airing on public television. I think that’s quite a nice hybrid and they could have done that in 2005. The personal incentive to do that deal and to frame it as the saviour of county cricket, it’s such an easy political move, and Giles Clarke is a very smart bloke and could see that straight away, and I think that’s underplayed in this conversation.”
Gillis does concede, though, that his attitude towards the Sky deal has softened as he’s seen the tectonic plates of broadcasting shift in the years since. “Initially I thought it was the end of the world. As a cricket fan I felt that I’d been betrayed and the barbarians were at the gate, they’d taken the crown jewels, all of these cliches. But actually I don’t think that is borne out over time. I’ve changed my view because the market’s changed.
“The romance of the Channel 4 era is all around 2005. But that really wasn’t normal. It wasn’t normal in the sense of national occasion. It also wasn’t normal in terms of the numbers and the reach of the game at that point. The Ashes blew up and we have kept that story going for 20 years now. It’s so embedded in the psyche but we probably have to let it go at some point.”
Sky’s current four-year deal with the ECB expires at the end of 2028 and, while they remain firmly committed to covering the game in the UK, the shifting landscape has led to some tough decisions. Since 1990, Sky had been the home of England’s Test series overseas but the recent men’s Ashes was the third consecutive tour of Australia shown instead on BT (or its new guise as TNT). This winter’s tour of South Africa, the reigning Test champions, is still up for grabs.
“Sky don’t do England overseas now because, when BT came into the market in the early 2010s, we had this period of rabid inflation in the rights market which took six years to settle down,” says Barney Francis, recently appointed as chief business officer at IMG. “At that point I was MD and we had to make some rational decisions. There was a point where the value of the Cricket Australia deal in the UK market went to extreme numbers. For the 2017-18 Ashes, BT paid 100% more for the four-year bundle of Cricket Australia’s rights than Sky had in the previous term.”
Francis says the value of those deals has “collapsed”, with bilateral international series considerably less attractive from a commercial perspective. He predicts that in a decade’s time the game will be dominated by global franchise T20 leagues, with international cricket reduced to a few key rivalries. As gloomy as that sounds for fans whose love of the game centres around the longer format, could the diminishing commercial value of Test cricket open the door to its return to free-to-air TV?
“You never say never, but it’s been a long time,” says Francis. “People have this misguided notion that cricket used to be wall to wall in the summer on free-to-air. It just wasn’t. During Botham’s Ashes in 1981, on the Monday at Headingley the BBC left the cricket six times to go to other programming. It’s misguided to think the free-to-airs are waiting for cricket to fill eight hours on any given day.”
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For Gillis, it’s time to call stumps on the conversation around Test cricket returning to free-to-air. “If you’re looking at the world today, it’s really hard to see a free-to-air argument in terms of major sport. The clip economy has completely changed people’s relationship with sport.
“Free-to-air television is irrelevant. It’s a YouTube conversation. I can absolutely see Test cricket on YouTube. I can see Sky doing a deal and saying we’re going to get the rights and some of it will be live on YouTube. It’s not about the BBC and Channel 4 any more, it’s about YouTube, Amazon, Netflix. That’s the game now and that’s good for cricket. If the objective of a cricket board is to make as much money from the media market as it can, that competition is there now.”
This is cricket’s new reality, with fresh opportunities and avenue streams to be explored as it scraps for its piece of the broadcasting pie. But that’s perhaps little consolation for the fans who fell for the game in that heady summer of 2005, who yearn to be transported back to the days of Nicholas, Benaud and Mambo No 5. This is an article from Wisden Cricket Monthly Save £10 on an annual digital subscription
