What The 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup Shows Us About Hosting Major Events

Last weekend saw the final of the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup play out in England between the host nation and New Zealand. Like any cricket match of this calibre, commentators and keen cricket fans have spent the days since then breaking down every ball, hit and out in the thrilling contest that ultimately saw England win in a Super Over. For any cricket devotee, the weeks since the tournament kicked off back in late May have been sporting bliss.

Many cricket fans globally will have become enticed by the idea of their nation playing host to World Cup games but, while the action on the field has been fantastic, the hosting of a successful tournament requires bat and ball to be accompanied by dollars and cents. We’re now in an era when many major events, like the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup, have drawn criticism for the high cost of hosting them, and the uncertain economic returns for the host nation. 

So what were the numbers behind the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup? And does hosting a World Cup make sense for a nation or region looking to supercharge its economy? 

The Growth of the Game

The Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup have always been major events, but the ICC event has grown to a whole new level since its early days following the inaugural World Cup in 1975. Today the ICC takes approximately US$ 500mn of revenue for the event’s broadcasting rights alone. This year, its premier event received star-billing across 10 UK cities. Hosted at an important time for the UK’s business community, the game is already strong in England and its co-host Wales, but it’s abroad where the future profitability of the World Cup really resides.

India holds the colossal audience of 1.3 billion where cricket is by far the nation’s most popular sport. As the next nation to host the event, in 2023, it has commenced preparations years in advance, and with an intuitive understanding of the game’s evolution. 

Cricket has a unique advantage over the other major grass sport global tournaments of soccer and rugby — the capacity to vary its format in a way that maintains its audience but offers flexibility for broadcasting and fan engagement. While fans of the pure game may love nothing more than settling into a sofa or stadium chair and watching a traditional test match play out over multiple days, Twenty 20 cricket and T10 offer a far shorter format. This is something of which India is keenly aware, with its T20 Indian Premier League founded just over ten years ago and estimated to be worth a whopping US$ 6.3bn last year.

Alongside drawing fans who can’t give up days but can spare a few hours to watch a game, the marketability of these shorter cricket formats makes them social media-friendly, and offers an avenue to market cricket alongside the World Cup in a way that other major events struggle to do.

Driving Data

Due to the red tape involved for a global organisation hosting a major event, few events in recent times have won a reputation for rapid innovation. However, the 2019 World Cup has shown the potential for leveraging technology to gain new audiences and retain current fans. 

Via use of data analysis of cricket fans and a smart ticketing system, 800,000 tickets to World Cup matches were offered via ballot to a mix of old and new fans, and enthusiasts spanning a wide range of demographics. 150,000 tickets were sold to women and 100,000 tickets to under-16 junior fans, with thousands of international visitors interwoven with host nation fans. By ensuring a diverse audience, and that the ideal target audience was in the seats at matches throughout the tournament, there was the certainty that social media engagement and enduring interest in the sport would follow on after this World Cup concluded. 

This alone is an achievement but, given the rapid advance in VR and AR, and the capacity for many fans to access the technology affordably — with just a smartphone and a low-cost headset like Google Cardboard — major events of the future will see greater integration than ever before between the action going on in the stadium, and what the fan watching from afar experiences.

The State of Play

Just as T20 and T10 cricket have made the presentation of the sport leaner and more palatable to the digital generation, so too does the World Cup have a clear-cut advantage from an infrastructure perspective: the logistics of it are simpler. For those who look upon the idea of hosting a major tournament as a guaranteed money drain, this is a critical consideration. 

Just about every country on earth competes in the Olympic Games but this does not apply to the World Cup. For the latter, having enough stadiums to host an event is no small feat although they are all used for just one purpose: playing cricket. This is a far easier mission for event organisers and urban planners to pursue than hosting an Olympics that typically requires grass stadiums, indoor pools for aquatic events, river rapids for kayaking, and more.

The Next Contest

The ICC Cricket World Cup is a leaner major event than the Olympics, so the Caribbean family can look at the idea of hosting it once more without the same fears as held by government accountants in Olympic host cities. Meanwhile, the next major test case in the profitability of global sporting events will be the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. 

As one of the world’s leading tech nations, Japan will seek to showcase its capital city and prove that the nation has the economic mojo to move strongly beyond its ‘lost years’ and into the 21st century. Expect an array of futuristic technology, from artificial intelligence to 8K broadcasting, to draw a new audience and show that a major sporting event can deliver undisputed economic returns.

Tokyo 2020 can be an insightful case study into the merits of hosting a major event in the 21st century. Given the success of 2019’s ICC World Cup, lessons learned from past events, combined with new technology, could see the hosting rights to future ICC World Cups become highly desired as real assets to a nation’s major events calendar. To that we can all say, “Game on!