Cricket Workers – Chasing Tales

No one should have to crowdfund a knee or a parent’s cancer treatment after giving their youth to our sport.

Yet that is exactly what keeps happening. A star fast bowler like Shaheen Shah Afridi ends up paying out of his own pocket for rehab in London, including tickets, hotels and medical consultations.¹ Former players quietly ask friends or sponsors to help fund chemotherapy or a hip replacement. Domestic journeymen who spent fifteen years in first‑class dressing rooms slip into anonymous financial stress as soon as the phone stops ringing.

We rely too much on family, love for cricket and personal sacrifice to cover gaps that should be designed out of the system.

If cricket can centralise broadcast rights, it can centralise worker protection.

Radical? Not radical enough. Cricket revenue is generated by cricket workers and they deserve to have a part of it, because currently cricket is a multi-billion-dollar industry that systematically externalises risk onto the very workers who generate its revenue.

The pillars of cricket-worker safety
When we talk about “safety”, we usually mean helmets, neck guards, concussion protocols, maybe mental health if we are being progressive. But for cricket workers—players, coaches, umpires, grounds staff, analysts, scorers, media and gig workers—safety is bigger.

A realistic model has five pillars:

Physical safety
The ability to work without unreasonable risk of injury or illness, and to get proper treatment and rehab when things go wrong.
Psychological and mental‑health safety
The ability to live and work without chronic fear, humiliation, harassment or untreated mental illness, with real paths to help.
Financial and life‑course safety
The ability to support yourself and your family while you work and after you stop, through fair wages, insurance and lifelong, inflation‑linked income.
Education and second‑career support
The chance to build skills and qualifications so your life does not end the day your cricket career does—or the day your body says “no more”.
Rights, voice and governance
The right to say “no” to unsafe conditions without career suicide, and to be represented in how the game is run.

These pillars feed into one another. You cannot train or travel properly if you are caring for an ailing parent without health insurance. You cannot reach your ceiling if one poor season would push your family back into poverty. You can be incandescently talented—like Mario Ančić in tennis—and still be forced to retire early when your health will not co‑operate.

So, borrowing from the time I worked in an architecture company:

These pillars are not separate projects; they are load‑bearing walls for the same building.
Overdesigning is key to safety.

Physical safety
I’ve written previously about head and neck injuries in cricket: the short version is that traumatic head and neck events in elite cricket are not freak accidents; over twelve seasons of Australian data, they occurred at a rate of around 7.3 per 100 players per season. Post‑2016 helmet regulations helped but did not eliminate risk.²

A safety-first industry looks very different.

Smarter workloads and safer training: Workload research in elite cricket shows that sudden spikes in balls bowled, high‑intensity fielding efforts or match minutes are what really drive injury risk. Prevention looks like:

Treating nets like matches for safety: helmets and neck guards against pace, structured fielding drills to avoid collisions, safety gear for high‑risk catching work.
Tracking overs, high‑intensity sessions and travel across all teams: club, state, franchise, national.
Age‑specific limits for fast bowlers and wicketkeepers, especially around adolescent growth spurts.

Rehab and medical care: A cricket worker’s access to quality medical care should not depend on their agent, their family’s savings, or whether their board happens to be solvent. When Shahid Afridi felt compelled to publicly reveal that Shaheen was paying for his own knee rehab abroad,³ that was less a scandal about one board and more a symptom of a structural gap.

Contracts and league rules should guarantee team‑funded medical treatment and rehab for sport‑related injuries, including overseas opinions where needed.
A central welfare scheme (more on this later) can step in when boards fail or workers fall outside central contracts.

Equipment Safety: Players playing with substandard equipment simply because they cannot afford better should not be tolerated. We need a central fund that can help provide basic cricket shoes, soft leathers, and other protective gear.

Family health: Catastrophic illness in a family is one of the biggest drivers of bankruptcy and debt in lower‑ and middle‑income countries.

A truly safe cricket industry therefore:

Provides comprehensive health insurance that covers immediate family for all contracted cricket workers, not just a player’s own injuries.
Makes coverage portable so it follows the worker across domestic, franchise and national gigs, with each employer contributing to premiums.

No one should be forced to choose between missing a season to care for family and risking that person’s life to stay on tour.

Psychological safety
Cricket has begun to talk about mental health, but mostly in terms of distress and crisis. While research shows elevated rates of anxiety, depression and harmful alcohol use among professional cricketers,⁴ ⁵ ⁶ linked to injury, selection insecurity, travel and workload, psychological safety is not only “not being suicidal”. It is also having the bandwidth to explore the edges of your ability.

Clinical pathways: Evidence‑informed recommendations for cricket include:

Specific programmes for vulnerable groups: injured players, fringe or under‑paid domestic players, women’s and associate cricketers.
Routine screening, using tools like the IOC’s Sport Mental Health Assessment Tool 1 (SMHAT‑1) or cricketer‑specific questionnaires, especially at high‑risk moments: injury, selection shocks, retirement, long tours.
Clear, confidential treatment pathways that connect players to independent psychologists and psychiatrists, not only team staff who are embedded in selection politics.

A central anonymous support platform: One practical step is a central Cricket Workers Support Line:

Sessions are paid fully or substantially by cricket money, not by the individual, with hard firewalls separating clinical information from selection and employment decisions.
An ICC‑ or multi‑board‑funded online and phone platform where any registered cricket worker can, anonymously, access mental‑health support.
Verification happens once via the worker’s ID; after that, the system lets them schedule therapy sessions and crisis calls without routing through their team management.

Potential: True psychological safety enables performance. Athletes reach higher ceilings when failure is not existential. Our sport should allow those who bring it to us the freedom to experiment, to adjust technique, to rest after injury, to risk competition for spots, knowing that your life does not implode after one bad season.

A player burdened by debt and family illness cannot afford to fail; every low score may feel existential.
A young cricketer from a very poor background may feel compelled to play through chronic pain to secure a contract.

Financial and life‑course safety
Sporting careers are short, post‑sport lives are long, and without structured pensions and transition planning, many ex‑athletes end up struggling financially. Even in the IPL era, Robin Uthappa’s conversations with Jarrod Kimber carry an undercurrent of unease: a player can go from crores on the auction graphic to feeling financially exposed and professionally lost within a few years of retirement, especially if income was uneven or badly managed. And he’s spoken about this on other platforms too.⁷

Lifelong, inflation‑linked income: Borrowing from pensions and social‑protection models:

Set up a Cricket Workers Pension that pays a modest but meaningful monthly income indexed to local inflation + 1–2% (to protect against slow erosion).
Define eligibility in tiers that respect service, not just fame:
- international players after a minimum number of caps or years;
- long‑serving domestic cricketers after, say, 10–15 seasons;
- umpires, scorers, grounds staff, analysts and physios with similar service thresholds.

This could build on or sit alongside existing national schemes like India’s pension and welfare funds for meritorious sportspersons, which already provide monthly pensions and medical assistance but often need better indexing and broader coverage.

Just because someone never played for the national team does not mean their contribution mattered less. The Ranji seamer who bowled 15 years of hard overs has also given his spine to cricket.

Family‑centred financial security: Financial safety is not just pensions:

Comprehensive health insurance for workers’ families, described earlier, is a central anti‑poverty measure.
Income protection insurance—paying a percentage of salary if a worker is sidelined long‑term by injury or illness—prevents acute crises.
Emergency hardship grants from a central welfare fund can catch those who fall through cracks, especially in countries with weak state safety nets.

The key idea: the system should be designed so that a torn ACL or a parent’s chemotherapy does not push a cricket family into debt traps.

Education, financial literacy and hand‑holding into second careers
The reality is that most cricket workers do not have the time, money or guidance to build a back up.

Education: The moment someone first earns from cricket—stipend, match fee, league contract—they should be brought into a deliberate education pipeline:

Scheme literacy: clear explanation of available pensions, welfare funds, health insurance, education grants and mental‑health services.
Financial literacy: sessions on taxes, basic budgeting, compound interest, long‑term investing, debt, and how to evaluate financial products.

Athlete‑finance work shows that early, simple education significantly reduces the risk of “sudden wealth” problems and post‑retirement financial distress.

Dual‑career and exit ramps: The goal is not to push everyone into higher education, but to normalise dual careers and structured transitions.

Cricket and other sports already offer good examples:

Saurabh Netravalkar⁸ ⁹ – India U‑19 quick who studied computer science, moved to the USA, and now combines a software‑engineering job with playing for USA cricket.
Mario Ančić¹⁰ – top‑10 tennis player whose career was cut short by illness; he later earned a law degree and built a successful career in law and investment banking.
Varun Chakravarthy¹¹ ¹² – qualified architect who worked in that profession before breaking through as an IPL spinner.
Harsha Bhogle¹³ ¹⁴ – chemical engineer and IIM graduate who moved into cricket commentary and media.
Joy Bhattacharjya¹⁵ – engineer who became a key figure in sports broadcasting, IPL team management and grassroots programmes.

A supportive system would:

Offer education grants or low‑interest loans for degrees, vocational training or professional exams, funded by cricket welfare money.
Tie up with universities and online providers for flexible programmes timed around off‑seasons.
Run career‑transition services via player associations: counselling, CV help, networking, introductions, even incubators for cricket workers wanting to start businesses.

Policy should assume that every cricket career will end earlier than planned.

Governance
None of this is possible if workers have no voice and all the money is trapped at the top.

Player and worker associations: Countries with strong player associations, like the PCA in England and Wales, show what is possible: collective bargaining, mental‑health programmes, education initiatives, hardship funds.

At a global level, projects on athletes’ social protection argue that unions and social dialogue are essential for securing pensions, healthcare and fair contracts.

Cricket needs:

Stronger, more inclusive associations that represent women, domestic players, associate‑nation workers and, where possible, non‑playing staff.
Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that bake in minimum wages, welfare contributions, insurance and safety standards.

Shift ICC money from Boards to workers: Earmark a small, rule-based share of ICC revenues for worker protection before other allocations. The financial backdrop is stark:

ICC annual income in the 2024–27 cycle is estimated at roughly US$600 million per year, mostly from media rights.¹⁶
Under the new distribution model, BCCI alone is projected to receive about 38.5% of ICC’s net earnings (yes I know we generate most of the money, but like Pakistan demonstrated successfully- we do that because others also play us. An IPL is a money spinning machine, but we don’t know how long it will last without international fixtures)—around US$230 million per year—while 90‑plus Associates share only around US$67.5 million per year.¹⁷

This is a multi‑billion‑dollar ecosystem.

The Cricket Workers’ Welfare Fund
I propose a Cricket Workers Welfare Fund:

Funded by AT LEAST:
- 5% of ICC central revenues;
- 5% of the distributions full members receive;
- 5% of domestic broadcast deals from major boards.

Even at conservative estimates, a 5% allocation across ICC revenues and major broadcast deals would create an annual fund in the tens of millions of dollars. That is sufficient to finance pensions, insurance subsidies, mental-health services and education grants at scale without destabilising existing board finances.

Crucially, the fund should have direct payment capacity:

A central registry of verified cricket workers, maintained with board input but audited independently. This requires administrative capacity — which the ICC already possesses in managing revenue distribution and event logistics.
An escrow‑like system where pensions, education grants, family‑health subsidies and hardship payments go straight to workers’ accounts or mobile wallets, not just via national boards.

This does not replace domestic responsibility, but it reduces the distance between ICC cheques and the people whose labour generates ICC’s broadcast appeal.

Unequal welfare states and deep poverty: One uncomfortable truth needs to be said clearly:

Cricket workers in England, Australia, New Zealand or Scotland live under stronger welfare states (public healthcare, unemployment benefits, pensions) than workers in India, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Namibia.¹⁸
Many current and recent stars come from abject poverty, from families living on daily wages, informal housing and unstable work.

A fair system would therefore:

Weight welfare‑fund support more towards workers in countries with weaker social‑security systems.
Require boards to pass a defined share of their welfare allocations to grassroots workers—district coaches, grounds staff, scorers, women’s domestic players—not only centrally contracted men’s internationals.

More money in grassroots does not just increase dignity; it widens the talent funnel. Talented kids whose families live on the edge can stay in the game because cricket, not their parents, carries the risk.

A global sport cannot rely on personal sacrifice as its social-security model. The ICC has successfully centralised commercial rights to grow the global game. The next stage of governance maturity is to centralise baseline worker protection. Cricket has the revenue, the data and the administrative capacity. What remains is the decision to redesign the system.

Annexures: worked financial model
Here’s a worked example for the above 5% proposal (beware, mathematics ahead).

Estimated Annual ICC Revenue

Item	Estimated Annual Figure (USD)	Notes
Total ICC central revenues	$600M	ICC 2024–27 rights cycle¹⁶ ¹⁷

Pillar 1 — 5% Levy on ICC Central Revenues (Pre-Distribution)

Levy Base	Rate	Annual Fund Contribution
ICC central revenues ($600M)	5%	$30M

Applied before any distribution to members.

Pillar 2 — 5% of Total Board Distributions

Step	Figure
ICC central revenues	$600M
Share distributed to Full and Associate Members (assume 80%)	$480M
Welfare levy (5% of distributed amount)	$24M

The 80% distribution assumption is illustrative. The actual levy applies to whatever the ICC’s verified distribution percentage is in a given cycle — this table updates automatically if that figure changes. Individual board contributions are not tracked separately; the levy is applied at the point of ICC disbursement, before funds reach boards. This matters: no single board can be singled out for a particular dollar figure, and no board can quietly underpay.

Pillar 3 — 5% of Domestic Broadcast Deals (Major Boards)

Unlike Pillars 1 and 2, domestic rights are not centrally reported, so estimation is unavoidable here. Two scenarios are shown to account for what I imagine might become the most contested variable: the IPL.

Scenario	Domestic Rights Pool (USD)	5% Contribution
Including IPL (Star/JioStar + Viacom18 blended, 2023–27)	~$1,735M	~$86.75M
Excluding IPL	~$495M	~$24.75M

Whether IPL revenues should be included in the levy base is a legitimate policy question. The BCCI is likely to argue that the IPL is a franchise tournament rather than an international cricket revenue stream, and therefore outside scope. As can be seen, even if the IPL is excluded, the fund remains large enough to be meaningful, as the totals below show.

Total Annual Fund — Two Scenarios

Funding Pillar	With IPL Included	Without IPL
ICC central revenues (5%, pre-distribution)	$30.0M	$30.0M
Board distributions (5% of 80% of $600M)	$24.0M	$24.0M
Domestic broadcast (5%)	$86.75M	$24.75M
Total Annual Fund	~$141M	~$79M

The conservative scenario — excluding the IPL entirely — yields approximately $79 million per year. For context, that is more than the total annual allocation currently received by all 90-plus Associate members combined.

ILLUSTRATIVE Fund Allocation

Proportions below are illustrative. An independent governance body should determine final allocations based on a formal needs assessment. Support is weighted toward workers in countries with weaker state social-security systems.

Programme	Illustrative Annual Allocation (USD)	Rationale
Pensions (domestic and international workers)	$25–30M	Indexed monthly payments; the highest-priority obligation
Family health insurance subsidies	$15–20M	Portable coverage across formats and employers; weighted toward low-income cricket economies
Mental health services	$5–8M	Anonymous support platform plus embedded clinical programmes
Education grants and career transition	$8–12M	Scholarships, vocational training, dual-career support
Emergency hardship grants	$5–7M	Fast-disbursement fund for workers in acute crisis
Equipment access fund	$3–5M	Protective gear for underfunded domestic environments
Fund administration and independent audit	$3–5M	Not routed through boards
Total	$64–87M	Matches the conservative (ex-IPL) scenario

A Brief Note on the Pension Numbers
$25–30M sounds large in the abstract. It is easier to evaluate with a concrete model.

Assume 5,000 eligible workers (there may be more or less, this is just an assumption) — a combined pool of long-serving domestic players, umpires, coaches, grounds staff and scorers across Full Member countries. A pension of $400 per month (inflation-indexed, and already significant purchasing power in most cricket-playing economies outside England and Australia) costs $24M per year. What matters most is how eligibility is defined — specifically, ensuring that service thresholds capture the domestic journeyman who gave fifteen years to first-class cricket, not only the player who earned fifty caps.

A Note on Long-Term Self-Sufficiency
The allocation is deliberately conservative. In years where the fund’s income exceeds its disbursements the surplus should not sit idle or be returned to boards. It should be invested, in low-cost, diversified index funds that track global equity markets.

The logic: a fund receiving $79M annually but disbursing $70M in its first years carries a $9M annual surplus. Invested at a long-run real return of, say, 5–6% per year (broadly consistent with global equity index performance over multi-decade horizons, or get a fund manager), a corpus begins to build. Over ten to fifteen years, the investment income from that corpus starts to contribute meaningfully to annual disbursements. Over a longer horizon, it is entirely conceivable that the fund becomes substantially self-financing — reducing, and eventually eliminating, its dependence on annual levies from the ICC and boards.

This is not a novel idea. Sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, and large pension schemes all operate on exactly this principle. There is no reason cricket’s welfare fund cannot do the same. The difference is between permanent dependency on cricket’s administrators and genuine financial independence. The workers who build this game deserve the latter.

A Note on the Escrow Principle
Escrow is a legal and financial arrangement where a neutral third party holds funds, property, or documents on behalf of two transacting parties until specific conditions are met. It acts as a safety mechanism, ensuring that payments are only released after obligations are met.¹⁹

The fund is not useful if it is simply an additional line item in board budgets. The central registry and direct-payment mechanism proposed in the main text is what separates a welfare fund that exists on paper from one that actually reaches a groundskeeper in Harare or a domestic spinner in Sylhet. Administration costs — approximately 4–6% of fund value — are built into the allocation above. That cost is not a reason to avoid the system. It is the price of accountability.

Final note: I do not expect this proposal to change a single vote at the International Cricket Council. Administrators will protect institutional power, as they always have. This is not written in the expectation of immediate reform. It is written as a marker in time. So that if, one day, someone searches for a serious model of cricket-worker protection, a structured proposal already exists. Worker welfare is not “too expensive.” It is a design choice. I don’t expect this to move the needle forward, but perhaps it can help ensure it does not move backward.

Sources

Tag: Cricket Workers

Let’s Make Cricket Better: Holistic Worker Safety in Cricket

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