Last month, India effortlessly outplayed Pakistan in a group stage match at a neutral venue for the T20 World Cup, which is being co-hosted by India and Sri Lanka. The match almost didn’t happen. The India-Pakistan rivalry, long intense, has worsened significantly in recent years—both in the world and on the cricket pitch.
Tensions reached a nadir after the two countries’ short military conflict last May in the wake of a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir. Last September, their national cricket teams met in the Asia Cup, and the Indian team refused to shake hands with their Pakistani counterparts. The Indian captain, Suryakumar Yadav, was fined for breaching the sport’s code of conduct, but the rivals still don’t shake hands to this day.
Cricket is no longer governed by rules so much as by revenue, and as the home of the richest cricket organization in the world and a massive television audience, India now calls the shots. But its jingoism has transformed the sport into a schoolyard where it looks like the bully.
This year’s T20 World Cup, which concludes on March 8, has been more politicized than ever—with India’s rivalry with Pakistan as well as a new dispute with Bangladesh shaping the tournament. Once again, India is in the tournament’s final four. And as long as its cricket board controls the game’s purse and seems unlikely to relent, a sport that enthralls more than a billion people around the world is getting torn apart.
In a drama befitting a Bollywood spectacle, India and Pakistan nearly didn’t meet in the group stage on Feb. 15 because the Pakistani team said it would boycott the match out of solidarity with Bangladesh.
Why Bangladesh? The story begins with Mustafizur Rahman, a valuable Bangladeshi cricket asset and a fixture in the Indian Premier League. The Kolkata Knight Riders, an Indian franchise, acquired Rahman last December for around $1 million for the upcoming season. However, the team quickly released him, citing security concerns for the player amid diplomatic tensions between New Delhi and Dhaka over violence against Hindus in Bangladesh.
There is, of course, a political element at play: India and Bangladesh long had a close relationship, which deepened during the 15-year rule of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Mass protests ousted Hasina in 2024, and she fled into exile in India. New Delhi is smarting from the diplomatic setback, and cricket has become a piece on the chessboard.
After Rahman was released and as the T20 World Cup approached, Bangladesh requested that all the team’s games be played in Sri Lanka rather than India, also citing security concerns. Cricket has dealt with similar controversies in the past. In 1996, during the Sri Lankan civil war, the West Indies and Australia chose to forfeit their World Cup games hosted in the country. England refused to play in Zimbabwe in the 2000s because the United Kingdom opposed Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship.
In those cases, the International Cricket Council (ICC) considered the matches a loss for the boycotting teams. But the ICC acted differently this time—ignoring Bangladesh’s reasonable request to move its matches to Sri Lanka and essentially forcing the eighth-ranked team out of the tournament, replacing it with Scotland. This resulted in a huge financial loss to Bangladesh’s cricket board; broadcast revenues from the competition are distributed among participating countries.
Still, that the Bangladeshi cricket association pushed back against the ICC’s decision reminded the world that such authorities are supposed to administer sport, not foreign policy. The moment of resistance was revealing: It showed how far the global game has drifted from its own rules and how accustomed it has become to India’s muscle-flexing.
The ICC was designed as a multilateral institution that set rules, regulated competition, and ensured fairness among member nations. But that balance began to crumble in the early 2000s, as India’s television market exploded and satellite broadcasting turned cricket into a major content pipeline. Advertisers followed audiences, and broadcasters followed advertisers; the money ultimately followed India.
By the late 2000s, India was generating the overwhelming majority of global cricket revenue, boosting the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Today, estimates suggest that Indian broadcasting and sponsorship account for more than four-fifths of the sport’s total income. The BCCI does not merely outspend its peers—it outmuscles them. Though audience-driven revenue finances all major global sports, cricket is perhaps unique in that the sports body that earns the most is so disproportionately advantaged.
The Indian Premier League launched in 2007 as a tournament designed for television audiences with 10 city-based franchises. It compressed a traditional five-day sport into a shorter spectacle that is more like baseball: a match that ends in three hours, often played in the evenings. The league became an instant financial juggernaut, attracting global stars, massive sponsorships, and eye-watering broadcast deals.
As revenue dependence on India grew, the ICC’s center of gravity shifted. Decisions on scheduling, formats, and commercial rights increasingly aligned with what India wanted. In 2014, India, England, and Australia formally reshaped ICC governance to give themselves greater authority. Though the new arrangement was modified under criticism, the principle remained: Influence followed income.
Cricket’s world order now seems simple: Those who bring in the money decide who plays, where, and on what terms. The BCCI, flush with unprecedented wealth as a result of favorable revenue distribution models, has turned that leverage into a sledgehammer. Whenever India wants a rule bent, the ICC and the cricket community bend it. Ahead of this year’s T20 World Cup, of the 16 members of the ICC voting on the venue change issue, only Pakistan joined Bangladesh in dissenting.
No country illustrates the consequences of India’s cricket world dominance more starkly than Pakistan. For nearly two decades, India has refused to play bilateral cricket with Pakistan, dating to the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Indian franchises have stopped bidding for Pakistani cricketers.
These decisions have cost Pakistan hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. Cricket boards depend on predictable income to fund youth academies, domestic leagues, women’s teams, and infrastructure. Remove their biggest earning opportunity, and the whole system starts to fall apart.
India has also refused to play international cricket in Pakistan, citing security concerns long after other teams returned to the country. It has objected to stadiums, insisted on neutral venues, and used its clout to reshape tournament logistics to suit its preferences. Each of India’s demands have been met along the way. Pakistan—nominally a full ICC member with equal rights—can only play cricket in India during multinational tournaments in which India cannot easily withdraw without penalty.
Even then, the Indian team has engaged in juvenile behavior, from not shaking hands with their opponents to refusing to accept a trophy from a Pakistani official. When the two teams met in the 2023 ICC World Cup at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, India, emboldened fans hurled jeers and Islamophobic insults at the Pakistani team. Pakistan protested, but the ICC did nothing.
Going further, India has delayed or denied visas to cricketers with Pakistani backgrounds playing for Australia, England, and the United States. In 2024, Pakistani British player Shoaib Bashir had to return to the U.K. to complete paperwork and missed the first five-day test match during England’s bilateral tour to India that year. The England team meekly complied. (In contrast, when apartheid South Africa objected to England selecting “colored” cricketer Basil D’Oliviera in the 1960s, the team canceled its tour in the country.)
India has faced no meaningful sanction for hollowing out Pakistan’s cricket economy, and it may be about to do the same to Bangladesh. The Rahman episode is not an aberration but the latest symptom of what money has done to the sport of cricket. Bangladesh’s protest mattered not because it could change the outcome, but because it exposed India’s abnormal position within the cricket world.
India has become an unaccountable power that extends its domestic political priorities over an international sport. The team’s refusal to engage in basic courtesies with Pakistan undermines the spirit of the game. Cricket survived tensions over war, dictatorship, and apartheid precisely because it maintained those rituals; India now treats them as optional. Such postures serve Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and the politics play well at home. (That India has an excellent cricket team certainly helps.)
However, there is some irony lurking in the country’s ambitions: India has made no secret of its desire to host the 2036 Olympic Games, a bid that rests on claims of openness, inclusivity, and global engagement. The Olympic charter is explicit about nondiscrimination. If India persists with its current approach to cricket—and particularly its delay and denial of visas to players—its bid is as good as dead. The ICC may tolerate this behavior, but the Olympic movement won’t be so easy to capture.
The question is not whether India should have influence—it will—but whether the rest of the cricketing world should kowtow. New Delhi may want to see Rahman’s absence from the Indian Premier League as a footnote, but it has a much larger meaning, as observers worry that the cricket world is on the brink of a major fracture.
None of this diminishes India’s genuine cricket achievements. Its players are brilliant, including the women’s team, who won the Women’s World Cup last November. Its fans are passionate, and its contribution to cricket’s popularity is undeniable. Yet cricket was never meant to be governed by the size of a television market—and the current state of play has undermined the shared understanding that the game is bigger than any one board, nation, or league.
