Cricket Australia (CA) chair Mike Baird and Cricket New South Wales (NSW) chair John Knox met informally on Monday to discuss the ongoing BBL privatisation dispute while CA chief executive Todd Greenberg has admitted CA should have done a better job explaining the reasons for privatising the BBL to the public.
Tensions have been high in Australian cricket on a number of fronts after NSW and Queensland rejected CA's initial proposal to sell stakes of the BBL clubs to private investors. South Australia is also unconvinced by CA's initial proposal while Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia are keen to push ahead to the next phase which is testing the market to see what valuations they could get for percentages of their respective BBL clubs.
CA is pushing ahead with a hybrid plan of selling stakes in a handful of teams but Greenberg has admitted a number of times that his preferred model was to have all states on board before testing the market.
In the wake of the states being split on the privatisation deal Australia's players have made their frustrations clear on the stalling of the project with five senior players rejecting the initial CA contract offers they received last week while a dozen BBL stars are also considering playing overseas during Australia's summer if there are not significant pay increases. The large gap between salaries for local stars and overseas players has been the main source of frustration over a three-year period.
Greenberg did two lengthy radio interviews with the ABC and SEN on Monday and Tuesday to discuss all the issues. He admitted CA had not done a good job of explaining to the public why they were privatising the BBL.
"There's no doubt we could have, and should have, done a better job of the public narrative of why we're doing private capital and why the concept of private capital is valuable for Australian cricket," Greenberg told SEN on Tuesday. "I do think it's easy to run the other argument. Because ultimately people don't like change in any form of life, cricket particularly. Change comes hard. So on reflection, we probably could have and should have done a better job of that.
"In saying that, we have desperately tried to run this project with our stakeholders, with our members, with our players, and have a good natural discourse through that.
"One of the things I am proud of is, despite some tension in the system, relationships are really strong. We've got alternate views, but those views are well heard. They're well understood. I maintain really good relationships, as does our board, with all of our counterparts, and that's fine, because healthy debate is a good thing for cricket. We should be debating these issues. These are big conversations to have, so we've got to be having them together. We just should be having them in the right tone, which we are."
The meeting between Baird, a former NSW premier, and Knox is significant as NSW are understood to be frustrated about how they have been publicly positioned in the debate.
It is understood that NSW and CA are aligned on a number of issues including the need to better remunerate Australia's stars and raise player salaries in the BBL to bridge the current gap in earnings between the best local players and the overseas players. But NSW believes those aims can be achieved without the need to sell percentages of BBL to private investors.
They presented an initial plan to self-fund the game to CA at a state executives meeting in late March. The details of the plan are not well-known but NSW did write to its members stating that it believed CA could optimise revenue better through "line items, including broadcast, ticketing and commercial partnerships" and "receiving fair value for its [wagering] product fees". It is understood they are chasing a more formal meeting to discuss their proposal in further detail and Greenberg suggested that the conversation between Baird and Knox went well.
"I think there's good rapport between two of them," Greenberg said. "Obviously they are private conversations, but the two gentlemen have known each other a long time though. I expect that we'll make some progress over the coming weeks."
Knox holds a very unique position in that he is a private investor and board member of Trent Rockets in the Hundred, but is against private investment coming into the BBL. Knox is a partner and head of Australia/New Zealand at Ares Management, one of two private equity firms who agreed a A$75 million deal to buy a 49% stake in Rockets.
Meanwhile, Greenberg downplayed the decision of five CA players to query the initial CA contract offer presented to them.
"I think there's some posturing at this time of year, but that's probably not uncommon when contracts are offered," Greenberg said. "We've still got several months until that sort of unfolds with the new contract year. So I'm I'm less concerned about that."
CA's new contracts kick in on July 1 but Greenberg was certain that all of Australia's best Test players would be available for a two-Test series against Bangladesh in August despite skipper Pat Cummins voicing his concerns over players potentially forfeiting more than half-a-million dollars by missing the Hundred for Test duty.
"I've had some conversations with players about that," Greenberg said. "We'll have a really strong Australian team.
"We've got an amazing group of players now who literally will sacrifice lots of money in order to play for their country.
"But I keep saying this, and I'll keep saying it again, will the next generation have that same level of stickiness to want to play a Test match against Bangladesh in the top end while there may be half-a-million dollars available to them for a month or more to play in a T20 franchise league? That's the open question on us in the future."
Greenberg, who was CEO of the Australian Cricketers' Association (Australia's player union) prior to his role at CA, is gravely concerned about losing players from the BBL to the ILT20, the SA20 and the proposed NZ20, which is due to start in January 2028, if the BBL can't raise player pay in the immediate future.
"If those salary caps are significantly higher than ours over the coming years, and players can earn more in those areas, then players will follow those. That's a real risk to us," Greenberg said.
"I want to make sure that for Australian cricket, our ambition is to have a league that runs at the key part of the year for us, which is the December-January window, and it's the best T20 league in the world at that moment in time. To do that, we have to have a significant amount of money in our salary caps to attract not only the best players from overseas, but to retain and attract our own best players. Without those levels of investment, we will not retain those players in the future."