Tim Harcourt

What an amazing time it’s been for Australia and India lately. With talks of a free trade agreement (on the coat tails of agreements with Korea, Japan and China), and “Modi mania” in Australia after the G20 as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took Australia and the world by storm with his mandate to build a new India.

And then we saw India’s cricket fans, the “swami army”, swarming into the newly renovated Adelaide Oval for the historic India-Pakistan World Cup qualifier.

In fact, the India-Pakistan cricket match was beamed around the world and was estimated to have been the most-watched in the history of the game, in terms of TV viewers.

Also, Indian and Pakistani fans travelled to Adelaide, not only from South Asia but from Singapore, too, and some even came from as far away Toronto to be there for the first ball.

More than 80% of match attendees hailed from outside South Australia (SA) with large groups of Australia’s Indian and Pakistani communities making the journey across from Sydney and Melbourne. Indian and Pakistan flags were seen flapping from cars at the Victoria/SA border and Indian commentators thought Adelaide airport temporarily looked like any Indian airport in the middle of an Indian Premier League (IPL) series.

SA Premier Jay Weatherill hosted a key community function for Indian businesses on the Thursday before the match and a historic India-Pakistan business function was held at game. The game itself (which India won comfortably), had everything except the SA Tourism Minister catching a six, which he has done previously at Adelaide Oval.

The huge crowd in Adelaide is indicative of how the Cricket World Cup has been attracting cricket-lovers from near and far and of the related business opportunities, particularly in tourism. According to Cricket Australia’s Jonathan Rose: “Around 825,000 tickets have been sold and we expect to hit one million by mid tournament.”

Rose points out that even cricket newcomers such as Afghanistan played to a sold-out crowd in Canberra against Bangladesh (thanks to many of the Bangladeshi community in Sydney and Melbourne, who travelled to the game) and “that’s even before we count the Australia-England or South Africa-India blockbusters”.

As an economic moneyspinner the Cricket World Cup is growing, partially because the cost of broadcast rights has doubled for the International Cricket Council (ICC) due to the popularity of the game in India – especially the short forms of the game.

It is estimated that 70% of the world’s cricket revenue is generated from India and that’s why having the Indian team based in Adelaide was important to SA and why India is so influential in the ICC.

But how does the Cricket World Cup compare to other international sporting tournaments? It is estimated that it generates the equivalent of about 50% of the revenue the FIFA World Cup achieves, making association football/soccer truly the world game.

But cricket makes about 10-times the revenue generated from rugby union’s premier international tournament, the Rugby World Cup, which is being staged in the UK later this year.

In fact, the cricket-soccer comparison is important in the Australian context as both are local summer sports (given that Australia has three leading winter football sporting codes in Aussie rules, rugby league and rugby union) and Australia has just hosted a very successful soccer Asian Cup, which our Socceroos won in a thrilling final against South Korea.

According to Alison Hill of the AFC Asian Cup Local Organising Committee, the Australian community really took to the tournament as a whole, even in games where the Socceroos weren’t playing.

Hill estimates that “there were 650,446 match attendees, at an average of more than 20,326 [a game], with 380,000 attendees to matches that didn’t involve the Socceroos”. The TV audience was again massive with at least 315 million watching the tournament in China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and ASEAN nations alone.

So with the Asian Cup a success and the Cricket World Cup attracting fans globally to Australia and New Zealand, it’s a big year in the economics of international sport. And the associated benefits in tourism and marketing, not to mention “sports diplomacy” as exhibited by SA business hosting the India-Pakistan match at Adelaide Oval, shows it’s all much more than just a game on the world stage.

Tim Harcourt is the J.W. Nevile Fellow in Economics at UNSW Australia Business School and author of Trading Places and The Airport Economist.