One Calendar, Two Ledgers: The Arithmetic Inside Asian Cricket

In June 2026 the ICC Board approved the revenue distribution model for the 2026–27 cycle. Reported figures put India's share at roughly 38.5 per cent.

Some week in that same month I spent a morning at a side ground of an Asian Cricket Council tournament. The scoreboard was still being turned by hand, by an elderly employee of the host association. Before the first match a team physiotherapist took a roll of tape out of his bag and laid it on a small table — no physio room, no team doctor, a table and a chair. Two matches were scheduled that day. The cameras were on one.

That image has followed me for forty-seven years: Asian cricket does not lack money; it lacks a way to sell the same afternoon twice.

The Council has 25 member associations, five of them full members — India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The other twenty are affiliates, running from Nepal, the UAE and Oman across to Bhutan, the Maldives and Japan. Not one of them has a domestic broadcast deal that covers a single week of an Asia Cup.

Revenue comes down three pipes. The first is the ICC's cyclical distribution. The second is the Council's own tournaments, built around the Asia Cup with qualifiers and challenger-level events clustered beneath it. The third is each board's own commercial contracts.

For the smaller members the first two are pocket money. In June 2026 the IPL's 2026–27 media rights sold for ₹48,390 crore, about six billion dollars — one figure a full order of magnitude larger than every other cricket rights package in Asia combined. The Asia Cup is the only product the Council owns that can command that bracket, and one edition is usually six to eight teams over two or three weeks.

That is the structure: the money sits in a few weeks, a few teams and a few broadcast windows, and the other eleven months are carried by the member boards themselves.

The ledger gets more honest at player level.

Most players turning out for Nepal, the UAE or Oman have no central contract. Their income comes from domestic leagues, clubs and — there is no point softening this — other jobs. Thirty-six days in the same hotel and you learn which player pays his own physio and which one doubles as the team's kit manager. None of that surfaces at a press conference.

In 2026 Royal Challengers Bangalore paid $1.55 million for Kevin Pietersen, joint-highest price of that auction day. I was in the room in Goa, and then I spent thirty-six days in the franchise's team hotels in South Africa. Pietersen left for England duty; Anil Kumble dragged a side that had been written off all the way to the Johannesburg final, where they lost by six runs. Those thirty-six days taught me to read the man at the other end of the ledger, not the ledger.

So my position in this argument is plain: Asian cricket should be measured not by what the Asia Cup rights fetch, but by how many players sign a first contract that covers a full year of living. The first number is settled in a room in London. The second is typed line by line in a club office in Kathmandu or Sharjah.

Outside the region there is a familiar read: Asian cricket's problem is that India is too strong, and the resources have pooled in one place. It sounds reasonable and it does not survive a check.

The Council works on one member, one vote. Twenty affiliates could assemble the votes for a dedicated broadcast package for smaller members any time they chose. The obstacle is not votes; there is nothing to sell. Nepal against Oman does not fetch a price in the Indian market, not because India will not buy, but because on that afternoon India is showing something else.

The real constraint is the ICC Future Tours Programme window and the number of tournament tiers. The international calendar is full across three formats, and smaller members must cut their window out of that crowd. The Council's events then sit three deep inside the cut — Asia Cup, qualifier, challenger level. More tournaments, thinner windows, lower rights value.

None of this is an argument for letting anyone off. You cannot find the lever until the frame is visible, and the lever here is not in how the money is split. It is in the scheduling.

The 2026 Asia Cup and the Asian qualifiers for the 2026 T20 World Cup both sit on that already crowded calendar. If you want a single thing to watch, skip the final. Watch how firmly the Council ties the smaller members' matches into the main broadcast contract.

That old man on the side ground turned two scoreboards that day. If he turns two again next time, the arithmetic has not moved. If he turns three, the question worth asking is who added the third one.

My notebook holds more names than the record books, and I prefer it that way. But every name needs a date and a figure beside it — otherwise it is not reporting, it is memory.