Bite the bullet on BBL private ownership or risk becoming second rate, says Khawaja

Usman Khawaja has declared the Big Bash League risks becoming a second-rate tournament if Cricket Australia does not start planning for the inclusion of private ownership – and he’s told administrators just that.

As Australia’s Test players prepare to face Sri Lanka in Galle, many are under increasing pressure to be involved in the BBL during January, amid CA’s efforts with the Australian Cricketers Association to get the competition trending back up again.

Usman Khawaja is on the attack over the BBL’s ownership model. Credit:Getty Images

The announcement of an overseas player draft, in which the likes of Rashid Khan, Andre Russell and Faf du Plessis can earn as much as $340,000, set plenty of tongues wagging around cricket circles last week, and Khawaja said that private investment in the clubs and the league was the only way to bring in enough capital to ensure all players were paid similarly well.

“I think the BBL needs to be privatised in the future, we need to start aiming for it to be privatised,” Khawaja said in Galle. “For this year the way they’ve done the draft system and the extra money for overseas players is a good initiative, but I don’t think that’s sustainable either.

“You’ve got lots of great local players who also should be on similar amounts to what the overseas are, but they can’t be because of the salary cap. The only way you’re going to increase the salary cap is to privatise it.

“For this year the draft system is alright, but in the long-term I think it needs to be one big salary cap and then you can get your overseas and domestic players, just like it is at the IPL or elsewhere. There shouldn’t be two separate systems for overseas and local players.”

Khawaja, who recently left the Sydney Thunder and is widely expected to be signed up by the Brisbane Heat, has increasingly found his voice as a thinker on the game, and now sits alongside Pat Cummins and Rachael Haynes on the board of the Australian Cricketers Association.

“I’m not saying it for my own sake, I’m only going to be playing cricket for a few more years,” Khawaja said. “But down the track it’s going to be beneficial for the game, beneficial for the league, getting more sponsors come in, start getting better professionals coming into the game, [and] people figuring out how to do things in better ways. There’re so many positives to it. I think it’s time.

”The BBL has been set up as a really good tournament for a long time, but I genuinely think that’s the next evolution. And I’ve had chats with Nick Hockley about this – I literally chatted to him about it two weeks ago, and I don’t think he’s too far … I think he’s on a very similar page, it’ll just be interesting how this goes.

“At some stage CA’s got to let go of the reins a little bit. If that means doing it over a five-year plan, the ball’s got to start rolling sooner rather than later because the UAE’s going to come, other leagues are going to come, that Bangladesh Premier League was stealing players for us. If we’re not careful we’re going to be left behind, and you don’t want to do that because the BBL is a great product.”

Private ownership of individual clubs is only one possible model for additional capital to be added to the league. CA and the state associations have also looked into the model used by New Zealand Rugby, selling a stake of its commercial operations to private equity.

In 2011, CA took a prospectus for minority BBL club ownership to India to test the market, but did not find enough interest based on the terms offered. The issue remains a polarising one for Australian cricket, but Khawaja is adamant.

“Privatisation brings in a lot of great things from outside, because once there’s money at stake for owners and whoever it may be, they’ll try to do their best to give everything for that franchise,” he said. “Right now it’s sort of going and progressing, but I don’t think it’s innovating as much as it should be as far as the franchises themselves.”

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