The future of India is brighter than that of cricket as a sport

India fans arrive to watch the 2023 ICC Men's Cricket World Cup one-day international (ODI) final match between India and Australia at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad on November 19.

In India, cricket is a religion and cricketers are gods. The religious festival has been on for 45 days and our gods had a great cricketing series with an outstanding performance of 10 wins on the trot before the finals. In sports there are no losers, it’s just a bad day at the game. The better team has the upper hand on that day. It’s the spirit that counts.

Having said that, I couldn’t resist applying my professional analyst skills to analyse India’s sports religion.

The cricket World Cup has been played for over 50 years starting from 1975. Fifty years of cricket means 4 generations of cricketers.

Also read: Australia repeat India defeat with ICC Cricket World Cup 2023 win

Australia has won 6 out of the 13 world cups, a strike rate of 50 percent. No other country has dominated any international sports the way Australia has dominated cricket for four generations. Kudos to them. In comparison, the FIFA World Cup has been played for over 90 years since 1930. There have been 22 FIFA World Cups and Brazil has won the maximum five trophies - a strike rate of 23 percent.

Australia per capita GDP is $60,000 and India equivalent is $2,600; mere 4 percent of Australian per capita GDP. Australia has clearly dominated the game for four generations. But ironically, Indian cricket players are multi-times richer than Australian cricket players. What am I missing? Where is the correlation between performance and rewards? Or are Australian cricket players so underpaid? Why would a rich country underpay their best sportsmen? And yet continue to develop great talent generation after generation?

In no other profession does an Indian professional make more money than an equivalent professional in a high-income country, except cricket. Are cricketing assets grossly inflated in India?

Also read: Cricket World Cup: No straightforward answers to India’s heartbreaking defeat in final

If Australia has dominated cricket internationally and Australia's per capita GDP is 25X India's, why is BCCI the richest cricket body in the world and not the Australian Cricket Board?

India has won two of the 13 cricket world cups. A strike rate of 15 percent is not bad in international sports. But in terms of ROIC – is it a good outcome? We need to evaluate outcomes in the context of national investments in sports. Given that BCCI is the richest sports body in the world, India’s investment in cricket is far higher than any other country in the world and the outcome is far short of expectations. Is cricket a low ROIC investment for India as a country?

Cricket is a colonial sport with its origin in the 17th century. Even after four centuries, it remains a colonial sport being played by countries which were erstwhile British colonies. The countries playing cricket represent less than 10 percent of world's GDP. Do we Indians still have a colonial hangover by treating cricket as a religion and cricketers gods?

It is more than apparent there is a cricketing bubble in India and the bubble is at its peak. The cricketing assets are overvalued, participants overpriced and too much excess capital in the game leading to meagre business, investment, and national outcomes. This is exactly what happens in the business world when a company is overcapitalized. Any other sport in India, even if it were to receive just 10 percent of the emotional, financial, infrastructural, and national support that cricket gets, India will become a global champion in that sport.

India is at a crucial stage of its evolution cycle and on the path to emerge as the global superpower and reclaim our economic glory of the past. The future of India is brighter than the future of cricket as a sport irrespective of the performance of the Indian cricket team. There is a cricketing bubble in India and that bubble will get deflated.

As a country, we need to get over the colonial hangover and focus our energy and resources on ideas including sports that relate to the future of India. Sports can be a crucial and important instrument for nation building but goes without saying not only is cricket overhyped in India, but we as a nation have also over-invested in this colonial-era sport with poor return on invested capital. We need to correct our capital allocation and re-allocate capital to other sports on a massive scale to truly use it as an instrument of nation-building.