Sports' structural problem

India's sports administration is top-down, and thus corrupt

The unedifying spectacle of the spot-betting scandal in the Indian Premier League (IPL) underlines again the deeply flawed nature of the Indian sports industry and the urgent need to reform it. Indeed, India has hit new lows on this score over the past decade: first, with controversies in the badminton and hockey federations, then with the expulsion from the International Olympic Committee and then the IPL's never-ending controversies. What's the problem? It's a structural one, to put it in management terms. The West has a large thriving domestic and international market (the fans) that has always been serviced by private sector-led industry in which bank lending and legalised betting are integral to the eco-system. In India, there is mostly one buyer: the state, as the recent controversies over Ajay Maken's Sports Bill demonstrate. Thus sports administration in India has historically been top-down, flowing from state-funded entities focused on "control" (the word that figures in the full form of BCCI - the Board of Control for Cricket in India).

This structure brings with it various interests that have less to do with the development of sport and everything to do with wholesale collusive rentiering. Thus the number of politicians involved in sports federations. BCCI, now under fire for a chairman - not a politician, but a businessman - who is loath to resign despite his son-in-law's involvement in the spot-fixing ring, is nevertheless a case in point. It was recently headed by Sharad Pawar, who doubled as the country's agriculture minister. Now, worthies cutting across party lines - Arun Jaitley, Narendra Modi, and Jyotiraditya Scindia to name a few - constitute the BCCI. The first two remain curiously inert on the question of the chairman's resignation. But cricket is a negligible sport globally. Consider other examples: Yashwant Sinha once headed the tennis federation, K P S Gill and one Vidya Stokes, the latter a notably minor politician, headed the hockey federations, Suresh Kalmadi headed the Olympic association until his ouster on corruption charges. The football body is headed by Praful Patel, who took over from another politician, Priyaranjan Dasmunsi, after he slipped into a coma.

In contrast, consider just one example: English football, which would be fairly standard for the thriving European business. As in the rest of the European FAs, it is headed by a former chartered accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers. The FA is funded via its ownership of the rights to international matches, Wembley Stadium, the FA Cup, and fees from the hugely popular English Premier League (on which the IPL is modelled). It is, thus, the private sector that forms the underpinning for tournaments in which players represent the country. National and local governments provide enabling support, making them one of many stakeholders in the business. Most interestingly, together with the EPL and the lower-ranked Football League, the FA established a self-regulatory body, the Independent Football Ombudsman, to act as the final stage in football's complaint procedure. Indian sports bodies' struggles to replicate this apolitical structure, as the IPL tried, mirrors the problems the Indian private sector in general faces in terms of its relationship with the government. And without a robust multi-stakeholder structure, India will remain a minor player in the fast-expanding global sports industry, prone to the same kind of corruption that is rampant elsewhere in India.