View: The last thing the game of cricket needs is Saudi money
cricket. Bloomberg News reported that Saudi Arabia proposed making an investment worth as much as $5 billion into the Indian Premier League, cricket’s most popular and lucrative event.
It’s a tempting offer, but one that the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the IPL’s owner, should turn down if it values the future of the sport.
The problem is climate change. More than almost any other sport, cricket has already been affected by the extreme heat, precipitation and storms associated with a warming globe.
Without drastic changes to emissions and the sport, the consequences for cricket will be dire. With its active support for expanding fossil fuel use, the Saudi government is the wrong partner for the IPL and global cricket to achieve these goals.
It might seem frivolous to worry about whether sports can survive climate change. It’s not.
Economically speaking, it’s a trillion-dollar business that directly and indirectly employs millions. Culturally, they provide exercise, entertainment and community to billions. A world in which sports are more difficult to play, watch and enjoy due to a degraded environment is a less affluent, healthy and pleasant one in which to live.
Just ask India.
Over the last month, it’s had the honor of hosting the Cricket World Cup, a quadrennial event akin to the better-known soccer World Cup. It should be a proud moment for the cricket-mad country, where informal matches sprout up in parks, lanes and fields at all hours of the day, and the sport’s stars are among the country’s biggest celebrities.
Unfortunately, suffocating air pollution in several host cities, including Delhi, has caused practices to be canceled and some players to rely on inhalers. For India, it’s not just an
