Why cricketers have been warned against promoting LA 2028 Olympics: WCA dispute explained – Yahoo Sports

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Why cricketers have been warned against promoting LA 2028 Olympics: WCA dispute explained originally appeared on Cricket News. Add Cricket News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
The WCA wants cricketers to avoid Olympic promotions until a commercial deal is signed.
Cricket returns for LA 2028 after 128 years; Paris 1900 was its only outing.
Amateur ideals clash with cricket's commercial scale, though the NHL agreement offers a template.
Cricketers worldwide have reportedly been warned against lending their names and faces to promote the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
According to Daniel Chern, the caution comes from the World Cricketers' Association (WCA), the global union that represents professional players.
Cricket is due to be played at LA28, which will end a gap of 128 years since the sport's only earlier appearance at the Olympics, in Paris in 1900. There is plenty of excitement within the game about the stage on offer, yet the union believes that enthusiasm should not run ahead of the paperwork.
At the heart of the matter is a tension that has hung over the project for some time. The Olympic movement was built on the ideal of amateurism, while cricket today is a multi-billion-dollar professional business with franchise leagues, broadcast deals and sponsors in almost every market.
The WCA's position is that players should not be asked to help sell the Games before an agreement on commercial terms, participation rules and revenue is in place. National governing bodies have, however, already started approaching cricketers for promotional work, and that is where the friction has begun.
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The union does not oppose the Olympics. Its chief executive, Tom Moffat, has made clear that the WCA understands why such promotion matters to the organisers and to the boards. The objection is about order of events: contracts first, marketing afterwards.
Moffat said the approaches from national bodies had been made, and that the union saw the value of such work.
"It's just a question of process, really, and timing," he said. "It's important that those things are discussed and agreed before that work is asked of people."
The dispute reared its head again after remarks from the top brass of the International Olympic Committee. IOC president Kirsty Coventry, a former Zimbabwean swimmer, said in an interview in New Zealand earlier this year that she was against paying athletes.
She later clarified that she had been talking specifically about prize money. She believes that such payments would benefit only a minority of competitors, which is why she opposed them.
Even so, the comments were read in cricket circles as a reminder that the amateur tradition has not gone away. For a sport whose leading players earn handsomely, that sits uncomfortably.
There is, however, a recent precedent. Last year the National Hockey League and its Players' Association struck a lucrative arrangement that allowed the sport's biggest names to return to the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, at the start of 2026.
Moffat said the WCA was looking for something similar. A negotiated deal between the players' body and the organisers, in other words, rather than a set of terms handed down from above.
The WCA chief argued that cricket brings massive commercial weight to the Olympic table, and that the IOC stands to benefit most in the Indian market. He also felt the game's own stakeholders deserved to know what they would receive in return.
"We know that cricket coming in is going to unlock quite a lot of value for the IOC itself because cricket opens up India with broadcast values and in other areas," Moffat said.
"So there's opportunity there, but also some questions on those kind of things, and on what's coming back to cricket as a whole that it would be good to get clarity on, which we haven't necessarily got just yet."
The second part of the union's concern relates to the players themselves. Moffat described cricket as a professional team sport and said that fitting it into a system founded on amateurism would bring both difficulties and openings.
"Probably the second part of it is just around honing in on the players' side and the player participation piece," he said. "We're a professional team sport and, as you know, the Olympics has very much been built on the idea of amateurism historically, with recent comments out of the IOC reinforcing that, so the merging of a sophisticated professional sport into that system presents some challenges and opportunities."
He then spelt out what the union wants cricketers to be called. "We're really keen for players coming in to not just be seen as participants," Moffat said. "They're actually rights holders and commercial contributors, and want to obviously be partners in the success of the games. That requires modern agreements and participation terms."
The WCA has hit the nail on the head, because a player's leverage is greatest before the marketing machine starts and not after. Once cricketers have appeared in campaigns and promoted the Games for free, any later request for fair terms will sound like an afterthought.
Cricket is not asking for a favour. The sport opens up India's broadcast market for the IOC, and the people who draw those audiences are the players. It is hard to defend a system in which they would be the last to be consulted.
The IOC, however, has a point of its own. The Olympic model has never paid prize money, and Coventry's worry that such payments would reach only a few athletes is not unreasonable.
The sensible middle path is the one the NHL found, where participation terms and commercial rights are settled by negotiation without turning the Games into a pay-per-medal contest.
The boards should also take care. Asking players to promote an event before their union has agreed terms risks souring relations ahead of a tournament that is meant to showcase the sport at its best. A short delay for talks costs very little when set against the goodwill it protects.
Cricket's return to the Olympics should be a proud moment, and it will be easier to celebrate once everyone involved knows what they have signed up for.
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