Devangshu Datta: Time zone dictates love of game

The expectations of Indian cricket fans include watching their favourite game at the time most convenient to them. It doesn’t matter where a match is played. If the Blues are in action, schedules must be shuffled to give desis their fix at times when they are most likely to be relaxed and receptive to advertising.

This is a natural function of being the major market. By some estimates, India produces close to 80 per cent of cricket’s global revenues and if you add in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, that share rises further.

The concentration of the fan-base in three contiguous time zones may be a key reason why cricket is unlikely to expand its mindshare elsewhere. In the 21st century, more than cultural barriers, time zones are a deal-breaker for propagating sports. Before you learn a game, let alone love it, you need exposure to its best practitioners. If you are normally asleep or at work when that exposure is available, you will never get it.

Time zone differences explain why, despite Bart King, millions of cricket-playing immigrants and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, most Americans don’t have a clue about cricket. It is also why few Indians are fanboy-ish about Nascar, World Series baseball, basketball, ice hockey, etc. The best live footage is aired at inconvenient IST.

This is a 90-degree inversion of anthropologist Jared Diamond’s assertions in Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond postulated civilisations spread easier along East-West axes and hence, across “wide” landmasses (assuming North as “up”) such as Eurasia, than on “long”, thin landmasses, such as South America.

This is because climates are similar in the same latitude. So, innovations in terms of farming and animal husbandry translate easily. Rice cultivation for example, may have started in south China. It was adopted across Asia along with the use of domesticated water-buffaloes to do the grunt work. But Inca crops and animal workforce (llamas, vincunas, etc.) could not be adopted by other South Americans due to climatic differences.

In contrast to climate, time-change occurs from East-West. So, it isn’t easy to cater to two audiences that are far apart in East-West terms. Two places are more likely to watch the same game if they lie along the same longitude, or relatively close, even if the North-South separation is large. This is probably somewhat true for other information-heavy entertainment. But sports audiences demand live services, which may not be quite so critical, for movies or soaps.

It wasn’t always this way. Pre-TV and Internet, global sports consisted of many fragmented, isolated markets. The inter-connections were strongly cultural. We live with that legacy. Ashes watchers in UK-Australia are inured to eight-hour time differences. Latin Americans watching the European football leagues and vice versa also tune in at equally weird hours.

But the new dynamics are inescapable. If a sport is to be popular and economically viable in the 21st century, it must generate revenues through live, electronic viewership. Think of any given sport as a business vertical, which delivers real-time feed across 360 degrees of longitude. Different global regions have different penetration (physicists define this as anisotropic). Time schedules are skewed to accommodate the biggest markets. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to increase penetration in under-developed markets.

There are relatively few sports that are isotropic in the sense of having more or less even global penetration. Football definitely. Perhaps tennis and golf, though neither has the same levels of mass popularity as football.

Unless somebody finds a creative way to crack the time-zone barrier, or the world switches to being much more flexi-time in its attitude, it is unlikely that any new sport will ever challenge football. This is why, on a personal note, I’m thankful that South Africa is close in terms of time zones.