Big Bash privatisation: Before Tasmania and Western Australia vote, the gap between Cricket Australia’s A$81.8m profit and its two-year loss forecast

Let me take you back to a WhatsApp group with eleven members.

Three of them are club scorers — two in Melbourne, one in Hobart. There is a broadcast stats producer who builds a match file for every Big Bash game and keeps an over-by-over sheet for every season. There are two state-association media officers who will stop taking my calls if I print their names. And there are four people who have never typed a single word in that group. They read it every day and never reply.

Last week, at eleven minutes past one in the morning, a screenshot arrived: the agenda for Cricket Australia’s annual general meeting, and on it a single phrase — self-determination. Underneath, someone had typed: “So it’s decided, then?”

I did not publish that screenshot. A group chat is a lead, not a fact. I needed two independent confirmations. The second one landed that same morning, when Cricket Australia’s financials went public. Two lines sat a few pages apart and throttled each other. The first: a group net profit of A$81.8 million, after two loss-making years. The second: chief executive Todd Greenberg’s warning that the organisation expects “significant” losses over the next two years, driven by a cyclical decline in media revenue.

There is only one way to read this story — start with the ledger, not the ground. What is being sold here is not cricket. It is cricket’s financial risk.

After the AGM: four states, four floors

What the board calls self-determination is a plain proposition: each state association decides how much of its Big Bash club it sells, to whom, and when. Cricket NSW opposed the model outright. That opposition is not against privatisation in principle. It is about who chooses the buyer and who captures the proceeds.

Chair Mike Baird’s departure is the end point of that opposition. He had been NSW’s nominated director since 2026 and chair since 2026. When his own state association shifted its position on privatisation, he left the Cricket Australia board. In a member-owned federation this is the system working as designed — the states are the ultimate owners. It also records a fact: a single large state can remove a sitting national chair, and can do it precisely while that chair is overseeing the sale. His exit was announced a month in advance — a negotiated departure, not a snap resignation.

David Boon is interim chair. Baird has publicly endorsed him for the permanent role, which means the succession was seeded in public before any announced process. The full-time decision is expected soon.

A second name surfaced at the same meeting — Ed Cowan. Eighteen Tests for Australia, a fifteen-year first-class career that ended in 2026 with New South Wales and Tasmania, a Cricket NSW board seat from 2026, and now a Cricket Australia board seat. The paper trail is clean: the rule requires resignation from the state board, and he resigned. But he is NSW’s nominee. Governance hygiene here is procedural, not substantive.

Now the four floors, which the headlines flattened into a single staircase.

Cricket Victoria is furthest along. It has begun a process to sell 100% of Melbourne Renegades and 49% of Melbourne Stars. A sales process is live — the question there is price, not a vote.

Cricket Tasmania is different. Its chief executive says the state is “very keen to test the market” — for a 49% minority only. A vote is due within six to eight weeks.

Western Australia is the loosest. Its chief executive had previously flagged interest in testing the market for Perth Scorchers; the current position is that the state has been “very open to talking”.

And Cricket NSW — the largest market, no process started, and the clearest opposition recorded against the model.

The timetable does the talking. A decision in six to eight weeks, with the new structure in place for the 2027-28 Women’s Big Bash and Big Bash seasons. That is roughly twelve to eighteen months of diligence and regulatory process, calibrated to the next broadcast-rights cycle rather than to a sporting calendar.

Greenberg has been careful. He says plainly that he cannot be definitive on which teams, because that is a decision for the states and their clubs. The headline turned that caution into momentum.

Between the profit and the loss

The A$81.8 million figure is large and equally misleading. It was built from two things: a home Ashes, and the ODI and T20I series against India. Cricket Australia does not control the frequency of either. A calendar controls one; the Indian board controls the other. Cricket Australia’s profit currently rests on two assets whose recurrence is not in its hands. Treating it as a baseline assumes an Ashes every year and an Indian tour every year.

The loss side comes off the field. Tests in Perth and Melbourne finished inside two days, and by Cricket Australia’s own accounting that cost roughly A$20 million in revenue. That number is rare in cricket. Usually the link between product quality and broadcast value lives in verbal estimates; here it has a figure. A two-day Test does not merely disappoint a crowd — it eats the broadcaster’s advertising inventory, removes three days of scheduled airtime, and often triggers make-good exposure. Gate and catering are the smallest line in that loss.

I have covered Australian summers from an overnight desk, where the 2 a.m. rewrite is never about the match; it is about the timesheet. Filing eleven quick-turn match files across six overnight shifts during the 2026 World Cup taught me one thing that applies directly here: empty space in a broadcast schedule is a revenue event, not a sporting one. A two-day Test leaves three days of blank screen.

What is being sold is not growth capital. It is risk transfer. The T20 licences are going to market in the same season the seller has publicly forecast a media-revenue decline. When a seller writes a loss into his own forecast, the buyer anchors to that forecast — not to the A$81.8 million headline.

And self-determination is a revenue-distribution dispute, not an ideological one. A model that lets each state sell for itself favours states with large markets, strong balance sheets and direct access to buyers. That is why the smallest market, Tasmania, is keenest — external capital is its only route. And why the largest, NSW, is least needy and most opposed — central redistribution pays it more.

The 100% Renegades sale will be the first genuine price discovery for an Australian T20 asset. It is the comparable against which 49% of the Stars, 49% of the Hurricanes and any future Scorchers stake get priced. Buyers are being offered a scarce set of monopoly-positioned Australian sports IP at a moment when the seller has said the market is heading down. That combination always favours the buyer.

If the Renegades go fully private while the Stars stop at 49%, one city will host two clubs with fundamentally different capital structures and investment horizons. Overseas recruitment, support-staff numbers, analytics depth — all of it follows that gap. Competitive balance is the unaddressed risk of partial privatisation, and no statement has touched it.

The binding constraint on Big Bash commercial growth is internal federation politics, not market demand. Cricket Victoria trademarked three names — Rangers, Magic, Blazers — for a potential Melbourne identity, effectively a Stars rebrand. The process started and was paused after interstate pushback. Filing three names at once means resources had already gone in, and that sunk cost sharpens Victoria’s appetite to finish the sale. If the veto survives privatisation, a Victorian buyer will own an asset it cannot fully commercialise. That is the due-diligence red flag bidders will price.

And the least-reported clause: the 2027-28 structure covers the WBBL as well as the BBL. Women’s licences are transferring inside the same transaction as the men’s teams, with no stated protection for WBBL funding, season length or broadcast share. An owner whose commercial case is the men’s club will control the women’s club’s schedule — the most under-priced item in the deal.

The clearest conflict nobody raised: state associations are simultaneously the sellers of the licences, the nominators of Cricket Australia directors, and the beneficiaries of the board’s redistribution. The seller picks the regulator. Cowan’s resignation created a paper separation; NSW’s interest still sits in that seat. No independent valuation or director-recusal protocol has been disclosed. Without it, every bid carries an open question about whether the market set the price or the seller did.

Momentum in the headline, hesitation in the body

The headline — two more states poised to vote — turns three different conditions into one wave. Victoria has a live process. Tasmania is keen to test the market. Western Australia is open to talking. Greenberg himself refuses to be definitive. Three floors presented as one staircase.

And read it knowing where it was published: cricket.com.au, Cricket Australia’s own platform. The facts are accurate, the quotes are full, nothing is distorted. But the framing belongs to the institution that needs privatisation normalised before the state votes. Published straight after the AGM, with a six-to-eight-week deadline named, it is information and deadline pressure at once.

The outside misreading is that growth capital is arriving. Whatever capital arrives first covers the loss the seller forecast himself. And if the two-year loss window collides with the 2027-28 completion target, the seller may have to revise stake sizes upward, from 49% to 100%, to close the funding gap. That scenario is not in any statement, and it is not out of reach either.

If one thing decides whether this is a national programme or a Victorian experiment, it is Perth. The Scorchers are the league’s strongest commercial brand and most reliable attendance base. A Hurricanes minority sale validates the market modestly; a Scorchers transaction validates it nationally. If WA abstains, this stays one state’s experiment, and prices will be set accordingly.

This ground is familiar to me. Across two days inside the 2026 IPL mega auction in Bengaluru I tracked ten franchises, 600 shortlisted players and 204 sales, and filed 38 squad notes. That week I changed how I wrote about auctions: from who is most expensive to who is picked for which job. The same question applies here. The Renegades price will not tell you how big Australian T20 cricket is; it will tell you how much of the structure a buyer is allowed to own — schedule, overseas slots, broadcast placement.

Thirty-four phone calls during the 2026 shutdown taught me that the story is never in the loudest voice; it is in the person nobody calls. Here that person is a WBBL player whose salary cap and season length will be decided over the next two years — not in a cricket boardroom, but in a private owner’s business plan.

Watch three things over the next six to eight weeks, not the headlines. First, the Renegades clearing price and the buyer’s identity; that sets the reference multiple for everyone else. Second, the permanent chair; letting an interim chair with no confirmed mandate take the decisive privatisation decisions is an avoidable sequencing error. Third, whether the WBBL gets a written funding and scheduling guarantee, or a promise.

The beat is not the noise; it is what keeps time underneath it. Right now Australian cricket’s beat is one question: will the owner who buys these clubs be allowed to fully commercialise what he bought, or does the interstate veto travel with the asset? The answer will set the Big Bash’s next decade, not this season’s.