The Future Tours Programme and how bilateral cricket is scheduled years ahead

A calendar assembled from agreements

Unlike a league with a central fixture list, international cricket is largely built from bilateral arrangements in which two boards agree to play a series. The long-range programme records those commitments years ahead, which gives boards the certainty they need to sell broadcast rights and plan domestic seasons around them. Because it is an agreement rather than a schedule imposed from above, the content reflects the bargaining position of each board as much as any sporting logic.

Boards able to guarantee a large audience receive more tours and more frequent visits, while smaller boards struggle to attract the fixtures that would fund their game. The document is therefore both a calendar and a map of where commercial power sits in the sport.

Why the host keeps the money

In bilateral cricket the home board sells the broadcast rights and keeps the gate, while the touring board covers its own costs and receives little from the series. That convention makes hosting the valuable act, which is why boards compete to host the most watched opponents and have little incentive to tour smaller nations. It also means a board revenue depends heavily on who visits and how often, rather than on how the team performs or how well the domestic game is run.

Smaller boards consequently rely on the distributions made from global events, which ties their finances to a competition they influence only marginally. Proposals to share bilateral revenue between the two participants recur regularly and struggle for the obvious reason that they would move money from the boards with the most votes.

Three formats competing for the same weeks

International cricket is played in three formats with very different durations, and each series has to specify how many matches of each will be played. Long-form matches consume far more days for the same number of fixtures, which makes them expensive in calendar terms even where their standing is highest. Shorter formats generate more broadcast inventory per day, so a board under financial pressure has a straightforward incentive to weight a tour towards them.

The tension is structural rather than a matter of taste, because a fixed number of touring days can be spent on very different products. Boards resolve it differently, which is why the composition of tours varies so much between destinations.

Franchise windows and the squeeze on the programme

Domestic franchise leagues occupy defined windows and pay players directly, which creates a competing claim on the same weeks the programme wants for international cricket. Where a window overlaps a scheduled series, boards face selections weakened by players choosing club contracts, which reduces the value of the series they have already sold. Some boards have responded by scheduling around the largest windows, which effectively concedes those weeks and shortens the space available for everything else.

Others have restricted the permissions players need to appear in foreign leagues, which protects the international programme at the cost of player earnings. The negotiation between these positions is the central scheduling problem in the sport and is unlikely to be settled by any single agreement.

Why the document keeps being revised

A programme fixed years ahead has to survive changes in broadcast contracts, the arrival of new leagues and shifts in what audiences will pay to watch. Series therefore get shortened, moved or quietly dropped, and the published plan functions more as a strong intention than as a binding schedule. That flexibility is necessary, but it undermines the certainty the programme was created to provide, particularly for boards with weaker bargaining positions.

Attempts to add enforceable commitments have foundered because no board wants to be liable for a series that has become commercially unviable. The result is a planning instrument that everyone relies on and nobody fully trusts.