The city and the state association: two maps of the same cricket country

The older map

Domestic cricket in most countries was organised around regions, states or counties, each with an association that ran competitions and selected teams. Those boundaries came from administration rather than from cricket, so they follow lines drawn for entirely unrelated historical reasons. The system produced deep local rivalries and an unusually clear pathway, since a player progressed through age groups within a defined territory and knew exactly which side stood above them.

It also concentrated power in associations that controlled facilities, selection and access, which is a considerable amount of influence over a career. Any new structure laid over that arrangement was always going to create friction, whatever its merits.

The newer map follows people

Franchise competitions are organised around cities, because cities contain the population, the stadiums and the commercial market a franchise needs. That produces a map with large gaps, since regions without a major city have no representation regardless of how much cricket they produce. Supporters in those areas attach to a franchise elsewhere, which breaks the assumption that a team represents the place its players come from.

The older structure never had that problem, because every region had a team by definition rather than by commercial viability. Two maps of the same country now exist simultaneously, and a player belongs to both at once.

What this does to a young player

A player still progresses through the regional system, since that is where age group cricket and first-class selection are organised. Franchise selection then draws from that same pool using entirely different criteria, valuing a specific and unusual skill over the general accumulation of performances. The result is a career with two ladders that do not always agree about who is worth promoting, and a player can be climbing one while stalled on the other.

That can be liberating for a player whose skills suit one format and are undervalued in the other, which happens frequently. It can also be confusing, because a young player receives contradictory signals about what they should be practising.

Comparisons with football's arrangement

European football has clubs that are commercial entities and national associations that run competitions, with a broadly settled division of responsibility. That settlement took a long time and involved considerable conflict, most of it about who controls players and who controls the calendar. Cricket is at an earlier stage of the same negotiation, which is why its equivalent arguments feel unresolved and are conducted in public.

The football outcome suggests the two structures can coexist, though only after each accepts limits it initially refused to consider. Nothing about the cricket version guarantees it will settle the same way, since the sport's revenue is distributed very differently.

Why both maps survive

The regional system produces players and holds the sport's presence in places no franchise would ever locate itself. The franchise system produces revenue and attention on a scale the regional competitions have never approached. Neither can replace the other, since one supplies the raw material and the other supplies the money that increasingly funds it.

That mutual dependence is why the arguments are heated and why they never conclude with either structure being dismantled. The interesting question is which map a young player will consider their real home in a generation's time.