This is the 14th 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. Read part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, part ten, part 11, part 12 and part 13 and get more from Eddie on his Substack and connect with him on LinkedIn.

In the European summer of 2010, I found myself in Bologna, Italy, standing on a soggy patch of grass that was trying its hardest to be a cricket ground for my first World Cricket League event. It was the Associate pathway in its rawest form, with Italy, USA, Tanzania, Nepal, Cayman Islands and Argentina all playing the sort of context-dense cricket that can shape the future of a nation’s program in a single week.

The heavens had opened, the drainage was non-existent, and the schedule was looking dicey, with only two reserve days across an eight-day tournament window. I remember looking out and seeing Ian Gould, then a member of the ICC Elite Panel of Umpires, not in a pristine white coat but hunched over in the rain, using his umbrella to poke drainage holes into the turf.

That image has stayed with me for 15 years.

To the fan in the stands, the umpire is often reduced to a binary switch: out or not out. But to those of us who have sat closer to the engine room of the sport, match officials are something far more important. They are not just adjudicators. Umpires are the gatekeepers of the Laws, the playing conditions, the code of conduct, and the official interpretations that a governing body depends on to make cricket credible.

On the pitch, when the game starts, the CEO disappears and the tournament director fades into the background. The PowerPoint decks, strategy papers, and governance charts stop mattering. The match officials are the people holding the trust of the game in real time. They are cricket's invisible boardroom.

Officiating is not a background function in cricket. It helps safeguard the sport’s integrity, economic value, and long-term investability.

The legitimacy layer

I learned that in a different way in 2015, when I was running cricket and operations for Cricket All-Stars, a three-match series in US baseball stadiums featuring some of the biggest names of the previous two decades: Warne, Tendulkar, Lara, Ponting, Sehwag, Ambrose, Akhtar. These were not players who did anything half-measure.

Before the first ball at Citi Field, several of those legends pulled me aside and made a point that has never left me. If we were going to ask them to play on drop-in pitches in baseball stadiums in the United States, they wanted the best officials in the world. They wanted Simon Taufel. They wanted Marais Erasmus. They wanted Steve Davis.

Why? Because even in an exhibition, elite players still need a source of truth.

They need to know that the contest is legitimate. They need confidence that what is being staged is still recognisably cricket. If the officiating is amateur, the whole thing starts to feel flimsy. The performance loses its edge. The tension drops. The authenticity leaks out of the product.

That is the legitimacy layer. It is one of the least discussed but most important value-protection functions in the sport.

You can sign the stars. You can sell the media rights. You can build a new venue and package it beautifully for sponsors. But if the adjudication lacks authority, consistency, and trust, the value of the product starts to discount itself. Trust is not a soft variable in sport. It is part of the product.

Cricket understood this earlier than people often realise. The ICC piloted neutral umpires and match referees in Test cricket in 1992, and in 2002 created full-time Elite Panels of umpires and match referees. Those structures were designed to strengthen independence, consistency, and professional standards at the top of the game. In other words, the game’s governing bodies recognised decades ago that officiating quality was too important to leave entirely to home-board structures.

That history matters now, because the modern game is asking even more of officiating than it did then.

The steep drop-off beneath the summit

Cricket's problem is not that it lacks a top tier of competent officiating. At the top, ICC Elite Panel officials are highly trained, professionally managed, and supported within a clear performance framework.

The problem is the drop-off beyond that narrow summit.

Once you move below the elite layer, the pathway becomes less resourced, less standardised, and less secure, especially in lower-profile internationals and regional qualification events. That is where a governance gap can become an integrity risk.

This is particularly acute in the Associate game and the tier below the premium spotlight. For a Full Member, a bilateral series may be one asset in a diversified commercial machine. For an Associate Member, a regional qualifier or pathway event can shape the financial trajectory of the entire organisation. Qualification can mean funding uplift, relevance, momentum, sponsorship, and survival. Missing out can mean a hole in the budget, a lost cycle, and years of drift.

And yet those are often the exact environments where officiating and adjudication resources are thinnest.

An under-resourced officiating pathway is not just an HR issue. It is an integrity exposure. If you have serious money swirling around the sport through wagering, sponsorship, media rights, and reputational capital, then the quality and resilience of the people applying the Laws matter enormously. The source of truth on the field eventually becomes the source of truth off it too.

This is not about blaming individual umpires. The market is the market. Just as players follow the best opportunities and the best pay packets, officials will increasingly do the same. As franchise calendars expand, elite officiating talent will be pulled toward the most attractive competitions. That is rational. But it leaves the administrators and the wider ecosystem with a serious design problem: who is investing in the depth beneath the top tier, and who is protecting standards in the matches that matter enormously but sit outside the premium commercial window?

There have also been enough examples in the wider ecosystem to show that sanctioning, by itself, is not the same as real integrity. Anti-corruption action linked to the 2021 Abu Dhabi T10 is one case in point. Over the years, cases in franchise cricket and in parts of the wider Associate ecosystem have shown the problem is not isolated. Anyone who has worked around the second and third tiers of the game has seen environments where payment, standards, logistics, and governance are shakier than they should be. That is not a niche administrative problem. It goes to the credibility of the sport.

A source of truth problem

An additional problem facing cricket's officiating is that the sport does not fully own its own eyes.

The adjudication stack is too fragmented. Different series run on different combinations of suppliers, operators, broadcast partners, and budget constraints. Some of those choices are driven by practical realities and commercial arrangements, which is understandable. But the result is uneven standards and too much opacity at the exact moment the sport needs trust most.

The Snickometer (Snicko) failure during The Ashes, when the technology missed an obvious Alex Carey edge at Adelaide, laid this problem bare. Confidence in the edge-detection technology eroded quickly when players, commentators, and fans no longer trusted the tools mediating key decisions.

Mitchell Starc publicly called for the ICC to standardise the technology stack more effectively across the game, while broader debate around Snicko and operator error made the point more clearly than any white paper could: when the technology itself becomes the story, confidence in the decision begins to wobble. That is dangerous territory for a sport built on razor-thin margins, historical records, and a global betting ecosystem that depends on confidence in what has actually happened.

Football’s VAR crisis reinforces the lesson from a different angle. Fans do not just object to errors. They object to the death of spontaneity. Nobody wants to spend three minutes staring at a screen while emotion drains out of the stadium.

Cricket should take note. The goal is continuous monitoring for objective calls where possible, such as no-balls and boundary checks, delivered instantly and quietly to the umpire, similar to how Tennis uses Hawk-Eye Live. The best officiating technology should simply reduce friction.

Cricket was an early adopter of review technology and DRS has improved a huge number of decisions over time. The issue is not whether the technology should be removed, but the technology must remain subordinate to the product. It should be like oxygen: essential, but invisible.

Three pillars of professionalisation

In recent conversations, Simon Taufel has helped crystallise for me what a better model looks like. The future is not anti-human. It is high-performance human officiating, supported by better systems.

The first pillar is technology that serves flow, not theatre.

Cricket cannot allow precision to become a tax on drama. The game should automate more of the objective, repeatable calls in the background, while preserving the authority and feel of the live contest.

If fans are spending more time talking about Snicko than skill, the technology is failing its brief.

The second pillar is minimum standards for conditions and adjudication.

Not aspirational standards. Minimum standards.

Players, fans, broadcasters and umpires all want the same thing here: consistency and a high degree of certainty, so the focus stays on the cricket rather than technology controversies or preventable disputes. That means minimum standards for playing surfaces, light, replay support, camera coverage, communication protocols, and decision tools. The Laws of Cricket remain the foundation, but in a more commercial, data-rich and litigious era, officials also need objective frameworks that reduce avoidable ambiguity.

We see the consequences of failing to do this in debates around poor light, unsafe or unsatisfactory pitches, and inconsistent replay environments. Too often our sport is still explaining its logic after the controversy, rather than designing the system well enough to avoid the controversy in the first place.

The third pillar is human capital pathway investment.

This is the area our sport still underfunds most relative to its importance. When I was at the ICC, one of the best things we did at World Cricket League events was pair local and regional umpires with high-performance ICC officials on the ground in real time. It was practical coaching, exposure, and calibration in the middle of meaningful competition. It worked because development was not abstract. It was embedded in the event itself.

That model should be expanded, not treated as a nice-to-have. The next phase could include structured exchange appointments, ICC-funded development pools, stronger regional coaching systems, specialist TV umpire accreditation, and much more robust performance review. Assessment drives behaviour. If the TV umpire role is now one of the most technically demanding officiating jobs in the sport, then it should be treated as a specialism, not just a rotation.

As Taufel puts it, “You would not put a touring car driver into an F1 cockpit without specialist preparation and then ask them to jump between categories every week.” Cricket should stop treating its most technologically exposed officiating role as though it does not require the same kind of specialist preparation.

Toward mission control

If cricket wants to future-proof trust, it should seriously consider a more centralised replay and adjudication model. Think of something closer to mission control.

The NFL already operates with a version of this logic through its Art McNally GameDay Central Officiating Center in New York, where league-wide officiating support and replay infrastructure sits above the venue itself. It is not a perfect one-to-one comparison with cricket, but the principle is powerful: when the same system, the same tools, and the same specialist support sit behind multiple games, consistency becomes easier to build and easier to audit. Sony’s Hawk-Eye virtual measurement system is also operated from that central officiating environment and integrated into the league’s existing replay setup.

A centralised replay hub would not just improve consistency in the moment. It would create a common operating system for training, assessment, auditability, and continuous improvement. Every decision becomes reviewable data. Every error becomes teachable data. Every pattern becomes governable data.

That is the real upside.

Centralising parts of the replay and review process would reduce venue-by-venue variability, lower the pressure on isolated in-ground setups, and build a stronger audit trail across competitions. It would also allow cricket to match the best officials with the best technology more deliberately, rather than hoping that fragmented local arrangements somehow produce a globally consistent standard.

Consistency is the product.

The next five years

If cricket is serious about protecting its legitimacy infrastructure, the outline of the next half-decade is clear enough. Our sport needs to standardise minimum officiating and technology requirements for all international cricket. Not every market needs the same bells and whistles, but every match should meet a credible baseline.

It needs to professionalise compensation, contracts, coaching, and support across a much broader layer of the pyramid, especially in pathway cricket and regional qualification tournaments. It needs to treat the TV umpire and replay-official role as a distinct craft with dedicated accreditation, assessment, and development. It needs to centralise more replay capability and performance review so the game can build a stronger operating system for trust. And it needs to automate objective calls in the background wherever speed and confidence can coexist, while publishing more transparency around key decisions so debate shifts from suspicion to understanding.

If you are pricing a media rights deal, or underwriting a franchise valuation, or assessing a betting market’s reliability, the integrity of adjudication is not a footnote. It is a variable in the model.

And above all, our sport should remember a simple truth Taufel has made often and well: umpiring is everyone’s business. A successful cricket match does not just require two good teams. It requires three.

The takeaway

Cricket has spent years investing in what fans can see: players, leagues, venues, graphics, content, distribution. It has spent far less time investing in the people and systems that determine what counts as true.

That balance needs to shift.

If you are pricing media rights, underwriting a franchise asset, or assessing the reliability of a betting market, adjudication is not a footnote. It is a variable in the model.

That is why officiating should be treated as core infrastructure. Not as an administrative cost to be squeezed, but as part of the trust architecture that allows the whole sport to function.

The future of cricket will still be human. But it will be humans supported by better tools, clearer standards, and better system design.

And when the rain is falling in Bologna, or the legends at Citi Field are asking for the contest to be real, the person holding the game together is not in the boardroom. It is the one standing in the middle.