I don't think cricket fans truly understand how boring a sport cricket is for new comers or those unfamiliar with the game. We might not realise it because it is the only game we were truly fed growing up. Sure we might have followed tennis or football but those sports don't have your national team or players competing in it at a top level, so naturally cricket is the one sport we are inclined to. But it's not the same case for the people who haven't heard of the game. Cricket is an inherently slow game, where you have wait patiently for the good bits of the game, sometime stretching to days in case of test cricket. It is not a fluid game like football or rugby where the action is dynamic, in cricket, the action happens in intervals which can be off putting for the uninitiated.
I know a lot of cricket fans have a dream of cricket becoming a global sport like football, but cricket will always be a niche sport due the inherent nature of the game. The true success of a sport in a country is not by whether you're able to field a decent team for the sport, but what percentage of the population is actually interested in the sport. You should have read the memo when the two countries where cricket was played the earliest have switched cricket for other sports as the most popular game, football in the case of England and AFL in the case of Australia. I have lost count of the number of times I've seen Brits calling cricket a boring game, it's seen as a posh private school sport over there and it's only the immigrants and their children who are interested in the sport.
It's all well and fine blaming the BCCI for everything wrong with the game but the cold hard fact is that cricket is a sport where 80-90% of the interest comes only from one country. Cricket is the most popular sport only in the third world countries and that too only because of colonisation, the western world has moved on to other sports where the entertainment is guaranteed in a short time. Cricket in many ways is an archaic game and even the shortest version played in international cricket takes twice as long to finish as the average football game.
Yes the BCCI is powerful because it generates the most revenue. And revenues are decided by how many eyes you can put in front of a screen for a series so that the advertising companies and tv channels deem it worthwhile in shelling money for broadcasting the series. West Indies cricket is dead because their population is no longer interested in cricket and have switched to other sports like football and basketball. Rugby is more popular in countries like New Zealand and South Africa. Therefore, for New Zealand cricket board, since few of its people are interested in cricket, most of its revenue comes from an Indian tour because an India series would put a lot of Indian eyes in front of the TV and hence increase their revenues as opposed to a series against West Indies or South Africa which would mean they would lose money to host a normal test series.
India is the centre of cricket world because it generates pretty much most of the amount to run the game. The only two other countries with a high enough population and a high enough interest in the game are Pakistan and Bangladesh. But one has a decent team with a stumbling economy and the other has a decent economy with a poor team and so they have their own set of problems. If the people living in the Caribbean, South Africa, New Zealand and other countries actually put their money where their mouth is, cricket would be a profitable sport in those countries but since only a miniscule population of those countries actually follow cricket as a primary sport, cricket in general is a loss making venture for them unless it's against India or Australia to some extent. As I understand, according to the current revenue sharing agreement, even though India gets the highest pie, it is still subsidising the sport because it doesn't get the same share of the money it generates. This gap would only keep increasing in future because the share of money generated by India would keep increasing as India moves into the middle income countries threshold and more poor people are able to afford to watch the game on TV while I can see more young people falling out of favour with the game as time goes on in countries like England. And you can't blame Indians for being more interested in the game than others. Even if you spread cricket to the European and South American countries, it would still remain only a minority sport and would never be able to challenge the supremacy of football. And hence, cricket would be a loss making sport in those countries as well unless it's played against India. In short, status quo.
