This is the second in a series exploring the future of cricket by Eddie Fitzgibbon, a Wisden board member and strategic advisor specialising in cricket with a focus on the USA market and sports technology. You can read part one here, and read more from Eddie on his Substack and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Author’s Note: Thanks to everyone who commented or DM’d after the first piece. Many asked about Test matches and the “meaning problem.” It’s true this doesn’t apply as sharply to Tests: India, Australia, and England have drawn huge crowds recently, and the likes of South Africa, Pakistan, New Zealand and others remain highly competitive. But beyond that core, context is fragile; hence the growing talk of a two-tier system. My focus here is mainly on white-ball formats, where oversupply has drained meaning. Unless I say otherwise, don’t read this as an argument against Tests, which remain my preferred format.

Cricket’s Great Time Crisis

In our first piece, we diagnosed cricket’s meaning problem. Now it’s time to tackle the most ignored and most essential layer of the entire system: Time.

Not formats. Not franchises. Not fans.

Just time. How cricket uses it. How cricket wastes it.

This is cricket’s calendar problem. And solving it might be the most important act of design in modern sport.

The Value of a Window

What if the most valuable product in global cricket isn’t a player, a team, or a broadcast deal, but a window?

• A window fans can anticipate.
• A window where nothing else competes.
• A window where narratives breathe and player loyalty holds.
• A window that says: this matters.

Right now, cricket doesn’t have windows. It has a spreadsheet of noise.

A Schedule Is Not a System

Here’s the difference:

• A schedule is a list of fixtures.
• A calendar is a design for attention, identity, and value.

The NBA has one. So does the NFL. So does Wimbledon, the English Premier League, and even Eurovision. These aren’t just dates; they’re meaning machines. They tell fans when to care, when to plan, when to hold their breath.

Cricket? It has a jammed Excel sheet and a prayer.

The World Cricket Association (WCA) put it bluntly in their Global Game Structure Report:

“The current calendar is unsustainable and risks diminishing the sport’s long-term integrity.”

That’s diplomat-speak for: we’re cannibalizing ourselves.

The Calendar Is the DNA of Everything Else

Want better fan engagement? Build calendar rituals.

Want healthier player bodies? Build seasonal windows.

Want higher valuations for leagues? Build scarcity into your calendar.

Want broadcasters to bet big? Give them certainty.

Want Test cricket to thrive again? Stop starving it of consistent context.

The calendar isn’t a logistics tool. It’s a leverage point.

You can’t have a sustainable cricket economy without a coherent cricket calendar.

What a Real Cricket Calendar Might Look Like

(A framework proposal, not a silver bullet)

Let’s be clear up front: this isn’t an easy fix and I empathize with the ICC and its member boards. Yes, there are nuances and edge cases. But the bigger failure is that cricket has never even tried to design a calendar with intent. That’s what this framework is about.

An abundance of stakeholders, commercial realities, climate challenges, and entrenched habits make reorganizing cricket’s calendar one of the toughest puzzles in global sport.

But tough doesn’t mean impossible.

With the right intent, buy-in from key players – boards, leagues, WCA, and investors alike – and the application of best-in-class AI scheduling tools, cricket can build a calendar that is fairer, more sustainable, and more commercially valuable for everyone involved.

This is not a manifesto, it’s a framework proposal. One way forward. A starting point for conversation. Let’s dive in.

A Tiered Global Cricket Calendar: Designed with Intent

Cricket today doesn’t give itself room to breathe. Every gap is filled, every window overlapped, every narrative suffocated by the next match. Without space, you don’t get meaning. You don’t get storylines. You don’t get that sense of consequence that makes fans hold their breath.

The first principle of a redesigned calendar, then, is simple: create space. For context. For recovery. For storytelling. For the game to feel like it matters again.

The WCA’s Global Game Structure Report feels about right here. It’s one of the most in-depth, player-driven frameworks we’ve seen. Not perfect, but a very strong starting point. It sketches out four ~21-day Core International Windows, a divisional ladder feeding ICC events, and a Global Growth Fund tied to pooled rights and player revenue share. My framework sits alongside theirs - not identical, but aligned - with tweaks where I think cricket can go further.

1. Global Windows (Four ~21-day blocks)

These are the anchor points: carved-out periods for Test series, ICC tournaments, and the World Test Championship. The WCA is right: Without protected windows, international cricket gets squeezed to the margins.

Player availability here is non-negotiable. Rights could be pooled in part to fund women’s cricket and emerging markets. And while the IPL remains the immovable anchor around which everything else has to orbit, that reality can coexist with a calendar that still safeguards the international game.

2. League Windows (Illustrative placements)

The commercial machine needs its engine room. That means giving explicit, protected space to the major domestic leagues: IPL, BBL, PSL, The Hundred, CPL, SA20 (with MLC, ILT20 and others pushing for relevance). Here’s the hard part: some of these leagues clash. Do we let free-market forces decide who survives, or does cricket need a negotiated hierarchy? Perhaps limited overlap is inevitable, but designing with intent means choosing which leagues anchor the calendar and which must adapt around them.

Other domestic leagues are still relevant - they sustain pathways, local fanbases, and national boards - but the global calendar has to prioritise the competitions with gravitational pull. Think of these windows as scaffolding: they don’t prescribe exact months (climate and ICC events make that impossible right now), but they acknowledge the reality of where the money and attention flow.

3. Free Market & Bilateral Windows: The Innovation Sandbox

Here’s where things get interesting. The gaps left between global and league windows shouldn’t just be filler, they should be the playground.

• Could the long-mooted Champions League model (which failed to fully grab hold of the cricketing public in the early 2010s) finally find a home here, with top franchises facing off across borders? If done right this could be incredible.
• Could hybrid formats live here—like a cricket-baseball crossover event, gully cricket for television, or street-inspired formats that pull in audiences beyond the traditional three formats?
• Could emerging market leagues use these slots to experiment without cannibalising the big windows? The Nepal Premier league is a great example of a league with all the right elements e.g. a passionate fan base and talented local cricketers that could thrive with the right support.

These are the places where investors and innovators should be encouraged to experiment. The sandbox won’t work for everything—but it’s where the next wave of cricket’s formats, stories, and fan cultures might be born.

4. Rest & Storytelling Periods

This is the exact opposite of what cricket does today. Instead of constant noise, these periods create pause.

• Select weeks in June or December could be deliberately quiet. In Australia, for instance, the Boxing Day Test is immovable – a cultural landmark around which the summer narrative builds. The rest of December could breathe so that the match could shine.
• Other markets can find their own equivalents. The key is intentional downtime. The NFL thrives not because it plays constantly, but because scarcity makes every Sunday feel like an event. Formula 1 stretches anticipation between races, building drama around every stop on the calendar.

Cricket can do the same. Stop filling every cell in the Excel sheet. Start creating rituals. Give fans something to wait for, not just something to scroll past.

Why This Works

• Protects the integrity of international cricket while still acknowledging league economics.
• Recognises the IPL as the big cheese without pretending it isn’t.
• Gives bilateral tours and new formats room to innovate instead of collide.
• Restores breathing space for stories, rivalries, and cultural landmarks to matter.
• Moves towards AI-driven, data-led scheduling, so stakeholders can balance climate, logistics, and narrative in ways humans never could.

The WCA has built the scaffolding. The task now is to design the stage around it, one that values scarcity as much as abundance, and story as much as schedule.

A Path Forward (If We Want It):

This framework only works with collective will: ICC, WCA, member boards, leagues, and private investors need to collaborate. The technology/AI solutions are ready. The commercial potential is significant.

The real question cricket faces is: do we have the collective ambition and courage to make it happen?

But Won’t This Limit the Market?

Only if you believe the myth that more is always better.

Let’s be real: cricket’s problem isn’t demand. It’s discipline.

More leagues won’t make more fans. Better-timed leagues will.

Fans don’t want everything all the time. They want the right thing at the right time.

Scarcity builds value. Predictability builds habits. Cohesion builds culture.

Cricket isn’t over-supplied. It’s under-designed.

Final Thought: Time Is the Last Great Cricket Asset

We’ve mined formats. We’ve juiced media rights. We’ve launched enough leagues to choke an algorithm.

But time?

Time is the only thing we haven’t sold yet.

And it’s the one thing we can never make more of.

Cricket’s calendar has been built top-down for too long by layering chaos on chaos, hoping tradition will hold it together.

If cricket is serious about the next billion, the next broadcast boom, the next generation…

It won’t just need a better product.

It will need a better calendar.

Next Up:

We “fixed” the when. Now we tackle why it pays. In Article 3: The Cricket Investment Curve, I map how meaning and cadence become cash flows – what to build, what to buy, and what to skip.

This is the second in a series exploring the future of cricket by Eddie Fitzgibbon, a Wisden board member and strategic advisor specialising in cricket with a focus on the USA market and sports technology. You can read more from Eddie on his Substack and connect with him on LinkedIn.