H ERE’S THE pitch: why not make cricket, that most English of sports, free to air on national television? That is what Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition, committed socialist and noted cricket nut, suggested on Twitter a few minutes after England won the World Cup on July 14th. The final, watched by up to 8m people, was the first England international match to be aired on free television since the Ashes in 2005, after which the sport moved to pay- TV and a far smaller audience. Making it free again could help to boost the popularity of the game, which many consider elitist or dull, the argument goes. And it would be a popular expression of Mr Corbyn’s slogan, “For the many, not the few.”

Since the 1950s the government has had the power to ensure that big sports events are free to watch. The Broadcasting Act of 1996 designates certain events that qualify, including the Olympic games, Wimbledon and the finals of the football World Cup and FA Cup. A review of the list in 2009 would have removed some events and added lots more, including home cricket matches. But its recommendations were batted away by the Conservative-Lib Dem government in 2010.

Making cricket free to view would certainly attract a larger audience. But it would also reduce the value of broadcasting rights, and thus the revenues of the England and Wales Cricket Board ( ECB ), the sport’s governing body, which makes most of its money from sponsorship and rights. That in turn would affect its ability to invest in the sport.

There are more practical considerations as well. Lasting anywhere between three hours and five days, a cricket match is a rather more time-consuming affair than a game of football or tennis. For dedicated sports broadcasters, such as Sky, this is a godsend. Cricket provides hours of content. For a terrestrial broadcaster such as the BBC , on the other hand, it can be a headache to fit several hours of cricket into an already packed programming schedule.

Channel 4, which broadcast this year’s final, had to move it to a sister channel, More4, for a period to accommodate the British Grand Prix. “It is an overly simplistic argument to think that the solution for cricket is just to list it and put all the Test [five-day] matches back on free-to-air TV ,” says Paul Smith, an expert in sports broadcasting rights at De Montfort University.

The ECB appears to be willing to sacrifice some revenue to improve the sport’s reach. From next year the BBC will show some Test matches on free television, though Sky will retain the bulk of the live coverage. More important, the BBC has the right to use clips across its digital platforms. Not many Britons can spend all day watching a cricket match and, as media habits shift, the internet is a sensible place to focus efforts to popularise the sport. There seems to be an audience for it: the BBC ’s “live” page covering the World Cup final received the highest number of views in the history of the corporation’s website.■

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