WITH limited opportunities for major corporate investment in the Caribbean, Cricket West Indies (CWI) Chief Executive Officer Chris Dehring believes tapping further into the North American market could provide significant financial relief as CWI seeks to increase its revenues.

Caribbean Cricket’s governing body is undergoing major restructuring, after revealing major financial challenges in September that have and will continue to affect its operations in the foreseeable future.

Salary cuts for international and domestic players, and the scrapping of several annual competitions are among the measures CWI has implemented so far.

Several stakeholders have called for greater government support but also increased investment from the private sector, pointing to the significant backing previously provided by companies such as Digicel and Sandals.

However, Jamaican Dehring says it’s become more difficult for regional corporate sponsors to commit millions of dollars to CWI’s teams and programmes.

“There’s an infrastructure-type barrier, and that is the scale of the Caribbean. Sports branding works best for new companies trying to establish a brand in a market that they wish to exploit,” he said on the Caribbean Cricket Podcast.

DEHRING… sports branding works best for new companies trying to establish a brand in a market that they wish to exploit (Photo: CWI Media)

“So Digicel was brand new coming into our market, and West Indies cricket as a corporate brand was almost perfect for them to establish a new brand. The Caribbean does not have a plethora of new companies of scale, operating across all markets, that would allow cricket West Indies to exploit it. Sports sponsorship is very scientific. It’s not a donation — it’s people that want to utilise a platform to reach a particular target market. The Caribbean target market for most companies is very small, even when you group us all together.”

Dehring, who has served as CEO for over a year, says not enough private sector companies in the region can afford to provide what is needed to sustain the sport’s operations.

“The Super 50 tournament [for example] costs US$4 million. You need a company that has a US$20-million, at least, marketing budget, and that they would be willing to spend the [US]$4 million on one small, two-week tournament. You can count on one hand the amount of companies in the Caribbean that have a [US]$20-million dollar budget,” he said.

“That is always going to be a challenge for Cricket West Indies because the costs of holding these tournaments have ballooned so much. You are able to attract corporate sponsorship in the Caribbean, but not at the scale that covers these types of costs. It’s no different from our broadcast product. It costs us maybe US$4 or $5 million for a series to produce, and you’re going to generate, maybe, from Sri Lanka US$200,000 just because of the value of the product.”

Dehring added, “All advertising in the Caribbean — on television, radio and so on — have been in decline for a number of years, simply because companies are finding it much more cost-effective to do social media-type advertising.”

Dehring believes partnerships in North America, including CWI’s recent collaboration with Cricket Canada on its T20 franchise tournament, could prove beneficial by opening access to greater corporate funding.

“Because of our foray into the Global T20 (Canada), we’re talking to companies with marketing budgets of US$780 million [from] one company; another company, their marketing budget is US$1.2 billion, because we now have a property that we can offer them that can deliver for them the domestic Canadian market,” he said.

“We’re talking to companies in the Caribbean who are trying to get into the Canadian market through Cricket West Indies and they now have much larger budgets for that market, so that’s one of the strategies that we’re deploying.”