The Pakistan Cricket Board lost out on between $80m (€74m) and $90m in media-rights revenue during its last five-year rights cycle because it was unable to schedule home matches against India, according to media reports.
The PCB had a joint deal with Pakistani state broadcaster PTV, covering rights in Pakistan, and pay-television broadcaster Sony Pictures Networks, covering rights in the rest of the world including India, worth around $150m over a five-year period between 2015 and 2020 that has now expired.
The fee is reported to have been predicated on there being two home series against India during the contract period, but due to diplomatic tensions between the two countries these were not played.
The Press Trust of India reported that this meant a reduction of $90m in the fees paid by PTV and Sony. ESPNCricinfo reported the reduction at $80m.
The PCB is reported to be now speaking to potential broadcast partners about its rights for this year onwards. Its chairman Ehsan Mani said this week there were no plans in the pipeline for home matches against India and admitted that the organisation expected to receive bids for its media rights that were lower in value than in previous cycles.
The PTI reported that Mani said: “We have good cricket content until 2023, with home series against Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa also in the works. But marketing and monetising them is a challenge for us because we have to understand even broadcasters are going through economic pressures.”
Mani, who has been critical of the Board of Control for Cricket in India in the past, said the PCB could survive without matches against its neighbour. ESPNCricinfo reported he said: “Definitely [not playing against India] is a loss but we are not thinking about it…
“We don’t need to survive on it. I am very clear about planning on the basis of the fact that we are not playing them. Because in the past they had promised twice, thrice that they will play but pulled out…so they are unreliable.
“We cannot rely on them for resuming against playing India anywhere in the foreseeable future. If it happens, let it be like in Asia Cup and ICC events. We are interested in cricket and we always kept sports and politics separately, unlike India, so it’s the same this time.”
PCB chief executive Wasim Khan told ESPNCricinfo that the board would have to get “creative” in the next rights cycle to maintain its revenue, and would seek to exploit the demand in its large diaspora communities in the UK and US. “We need to be innovative and creative on how we look at our next rights cycle,” Khan said. “India is not on the table so we’re going to have to look at other ways. But you know we’ve got good international markets, a huge diaspora in the UK, huge in the US and I think we really need to think differently about how we sell our rights.
“We’ve been focusing without India for a while now. We won’t really know the impact in terms of the values that we can get until we get into the marketplace. But we’re looking at what we need to be doing differently rather than just going out in your conventional way in terms of selling your broadcast rights. So many different platforms, different players out there now. We’ve been planning very hard over the last 12 months. We started our contingency planning a while ago, looking at what the broadcast deal might look like, what we might lose on that and looking at what we need to do internally.”
Also this week, Mani said the board would look after its players and staff as a top priority during the pandemic, and that it currently had no plans for pay cuts or layoffs.
ESPNCricinfo reported that, alongside the revenue from its media-rights deal, the PCB earns $15.65m per year from fees from the six franchise teams in its PSL Twenty20 league and $25m per year from sponsorships in deals that run until next year. It is also reported to be earning $115m-120m from International Cricket Council revenue in the 2015-23 period.
The PCB’s main sponsorship deal is with soft drinks brand Pepsi. It runs out next year.