What T20 Cricket Teaches Every Sport About The Race For The Global Fan.

Mike Jakeman joins Richard for Inside Edge, the business of cricket series.

Guests:

Finn Bradshaw, Head of Digital, ICC

Edward Fitzgibbon, Managing Director, NYZ Consulting.

Twenty20 cricket is one of the great product innovations in modern sport. Compact, volatile, accessible to anyone with three hours and a phone signal, it has done something fifty-over cricket never managed: it compressed the development timeline for nations outside the traditional power base.

But here is the lesson other sports should be studying carefully: a brilliant product and a functional structure are not the same thing. Cricket has the former. It is still negotiating its way toward the latter.

The current ICC T20 World Cup is a further proof of concept, if any were needed. The shorter form has lowered the barrier between the established test nations and the rest. But the structure of the game, its calendar, and the allocation of central resources remains wedded to the previous world. So what are the lessons of this event for other sports as the race for the global fan intensifies?

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