Time to cash in: There has been a call to privatise Big Bash teams. Credit:Getty Images "You effectively swap future revenues for a current capital inflow and you pick your moment when the value of that particular asset is at its maximum," Dyer said on Tuesday. "And arguably, in light of this very, very successful Big Bash League summer series, the value to an external investor is as high as its ever likely to be. It's certainly worth a lot more now than it was five years ago just given the success in terms of audience numbers and television viewing and the like. "I would encourage either a complete privatisation or a partial privatisation of the franchises. What it does, it potentially throws off a massive amount of capital ... I say that number can be invested back into the primary sport of cricket. "You use it to develop the women's game, you use it to further develop the men's game from the grassroots up and you use a substantial portion of it to solidify Test and Sheffield Shield cricket, which is what your primary purpose should be.

"It would deliver a massive capital inflow to cricket, which could be used to support the main game. Big Bash and T20 will either be the death or saving of Test cricket and the longer forms." Dyer said a private ownership model would have to include strict franchise relationships to avoid the kind of issues that emerged in the IPL with its corruption scandal in 2013. Unlike the 10-year licences offered initially by CA, he said prospective owners should be offered permanency and transferability. The BBL is televised live into India on Star Sports, but it does not feature any Indian players. CA's opposition to the proposal of the players' chief is multi-faceted. It flirted heavily with the idea of selling off teams when a delegation comprised of Cricket NSW chairman Harry Harinath, Cricket Victoria chair Geoff Tamblyn, CA commercial chief Mike McKenna and then strategy guru Andrew Jones met with prospective buyers in Mumbai and Delhi in 2011. Joining them were reps from Credit Suisse, who had been given the rights to sell minority stakes in the teams.

There were states who were keen to cash in, particularly given the embryonic state of the BBL and the scepticism about its long-term viability, but CA baulked at the idea for various reasons. Principally, it did not want to engage in a revenue-sharing model with owners, as happens in the Indian Premier League, where franchises receive a sizeable ongoing piece of television rights and sponsorship income. It also foresaw other major problems and were wary of franchises effectively becoming offshoots of IPL teams rather than engaging in local development as the likes of the Sixers and Sydney Thunder are required to do. "You can imagine having privatised teams and those owners, whether they have 49 per cent or more, want to take profit from that," McKenna said on Tuesday. "That is money that could otherwise be going back into cricket. There is a risk it could put at risk our not-for-profit status and one of the key factors that helps us run the Big Bash and international cricket side by side is the programming. "You can imagine if you had wealthy owners with a stake in a competition who had different views, how that might compromise what you're doing to help protect international cricket.