30.07.2026
Capitalism’s compressed game
Cricket was born in rural England and spread globally alongside British colonialism. Nowadays, however, India is the dominant force and, as shown by The Hundred, commercial considerations rule, says Carl Collins
Sport does not exist outside history or politics: it develops within various social and economic relations and cricket is no exception. The sport’s evolution has mirrored the development of British capitalism and imperialism, while its modern transformation reflects the changing character of capitalism itself.
This is evident in The Hundred - the latest and shortest professional format of the sport - whose 2026 campaign started last week. Launched by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in 2021, it reduces each innings to just 100 balls. Matches typically last around two and a half hours - even shorter than the relatively recently introduced T20 format (which emerged in 2003, with each side batting for 20 overs, and lasting three to four hours) and a tiny fraction of test matches (lasting up to five days), which once represented cricket’s highest ideal.
Defenders of The Hundred claim it modernises the game and attracts new audiences, but critics dismiss it, using the widely repeated phrase, “cricket for people who don’t like cricket”. Both views miss the deeper question: why has such a format become possible, even necessary? To answer that requires understanding not only cricket’s history, but also the changing nature of capitalist society itself.
Class distinctions
From its origins in medieval bat-and-ball games, cricket developed into a recognisably modern form in rural England during the 17th century, before being appropriated and institutionalised by public schools. Elite schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester transformed a popular game into an instrument of ruling-class education. Discipline, hierarchy, leadership and the ideology of ‘fair play’ were cultivated not simply for success on the cricket field, but to prepare Britain’s future officers, civil servants and colonial administrators.
Industrialisation simultaneously rooted cricket within the working class. The game flourished in the factory towns and mining villages of industrial Britain. Lancashire’s textile workers, Yorkshire’s miners and the pit communities of Durham produced generations of outstanding professional cricketers. The ruling class and working class competed within the same game, albeit on profoundly unequal terms.
Those inequalities were formalised in the game’s organisation. Until 1962, English first-class cricket maintained the distinction between the amateur ‘gentlemen’, drawn overwhelmingly from the wealthy and educated classes, and the professional ‘players’, who earned a living from the game. The division was more than symbolic.
Although the gentlemen/players divide has formally disappeared, its legacy remains. Private school pupils, who make up only around 7% of the population, continue to be disproportionately represented in England’s team. Cricket remains one of the sports most strongly associated with private education, demonstrating how class privilege continues to shape access.
Even within the game, class stereotypes developed that reflected the wider capitalist division between mental and manual labour: fast bowling, requiring strength, stamina and relentless physical effort, became closely associated with working class players from industrial communities; meanwhile batting, and particularly captaincy, were more often linked to the educated elite.
Harold Larwood - the Nottinghamshire miner whose bowling spearheaded the infamous ‘Bodyline’ tactic1 - and Yorkshire’s Fred Trueman exemplified the tradition of working class fast bowlers, while England’s modern batting greats, Sir Alastair Cook and Joe Root, both emerged from the private school system. These distinctions were never absolute, but they reflected enduring assumptions about who was expected to lead and who was expected to labour.
Perhaps no Marxist writer explored these contradictions more profoundly than CLR James in his classic Beyond a boundary. James famously asked, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”2 His point was that cricket cannot be understood separately from the social relations that produce it. The game reflected imperialism, race, class struggle and, to a limited extent, national liberation.
Cricket was exported with British colonialism. Soldiers, administrators and missionaries took the more codified version across the empire as part of Britain’s wider cultural domination. Yet colonised peoples transformed it into something the imperialists never intended. In the West Indies, India, Pakistan and elsewhere, mastering cricket became a means of attaining equality with the colonial power. Victories against England carried significance far beyond the boundary rope, becoming symbolic blows against imperial prestige.
India perhaps represents the most striking example. Introduced by officials of the East India Company and later by the British Raj, the game sunk deep roots. Indian teams were established, universities and clubs embraced the sport and by the late colonial period cricket had become an arena in which Indians could challenge the supposed cultural superiority of their rulers. As the Indian scholar Ashis Nandy quipped, “Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British” (The Tao of cricket 1989).
This tongue-in-cheek remark captures a profound historical transformation. A sport intended to reinforce imperial authority was appropriated and remade. Cutting across India’s 28 states and nine territories, its 120 major languages, its 19,500 dialects, its mosaic of castes and religions, cricket constitutes an important component of common identity. International victories became moments of collective celebration, while players such as Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli attained a status extending far beyond sporting achievement, becoming symbols of Indian achievement.
Mass participation
Cricket’s popularity rests not simply on television audiences, but on mass participation. It is played on the streets of Mumbai and Delhi, in village fields, school playgrounds, public parks and improvised spaces where a bat, any ball and makeshift wickets are sufficient. Yet this popular culture exists alongside an increasingly sophisticated system of talent identification and development. In many respects India reproduced and vastly expanded the institutional model first developed in England’s elite schools. State associations, academies, schools and private coaching networks now identify promising players from a young age, providing structured coaching, competition and pathways into professional cricket. The scale is unprecedented. A country of over 1.4 billion people can draw upon an enormous reservoir of talent, making elite cricket both intensely competitive and deeply embedded in everyday life.
However, this extraordinary popularity has also made cricket one of the most profitable sports on earth. Like football, the game has been transformed by commercialisation. Billions of pounds are invested in franchise leagues, broadcasting rights, sponsorship, advertising, player auctions and corporate ownership. The Indian Premier League has become the clearest expression of cricket as a global entertainment commodity, with players increasingly circulating through an international franchise circuit.
In this process the Board of Control for Cricket in India has emerged as the dominant economic and political force within world cricket, exercising enormous influence over scheduling, governance and the sport’s commercial direction. Such a concentration of wealth and power has inevitably generated corruption, conflicts of interest and opaque administration. Yet, as with football, commodification has not extinguished the game’s popular appeal. Rather, capitalism simultaneously exploits and depends upon the genuine passion of millions whose attachment to cricket continues to transcend the commercial spectacle built around it.
Long tests
For much of cricket’s history, test matches represented the pinnacle of the sport. Some early tests had no time limit whatsoever, although now they are always five-day affairs at a maximum. Victory demanded patience, endurance and tactical planning over days rather than hours. Cricket rewarded concentration, accumulation and delayed gratification.
Commercial pressures gradually reshaped the game. Limited-over cricket emerged during the 1960s, partly to fit spectators’ changing lives and partly to create contests with guaranteed results. One-day internationals became enormously successful following the inaugural World Cup in 1975.
The Hundred represents the latest stage in this evolution. Every aspect of the competition has been consciously designed to produce a faster, more accessible television product, aimed particularly at younger audiences and families unfamiliar with traditional cricket. This was not simply a sporting innovation: it was a commercial one. The Hundred increasingly resembles not a domestic English competition, but another component of a global network of cricket franchises owned by transnational capital.
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) justified its introduction by arguing that modern audiences have shorter attention spans and demand quicker entertainment. While this claim is often repeated, the evidence is sketchy. Research does suggest that digital technologies have altered patterns of attention and that the average time people remain focused on tasks before switching has declined dramatically over the past two decades. However, rather than focusing on some sort of biological reductionism, we must consider wider societal changes.
People have not suddenly evolved into beings incapable of sustained concentration. Millions still happily watch five-day test matches, attend Wagner operas or read lengthy novels. Instead, capitalism has created what economists describe as the ‘attention economy’, in which every technology company, advertiser and media platform competes relentlessly for human attention. Cricket therefore finds itself competing not simply with football or rugby, but with TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, computer games and countless other forms of digital entertainment. The Hundred reflects the sport’s adaptation to this new economic reality.
The Hundred fits perfectly within this broader trend. Rather than requiring audiences to invest a full day watching cricket, or even just three hours for T20, it compresses excitement into an even shorter period. Boundaries, wickets, music, fireworks and entertainment follow one another in rapid succession. The game increasingly resembles a stream of marketable content rather than a slow-burning sporting contest.
Time poverty
Perhaps the strongest explanation for The Hundred lies not in psychology, but in the material conditions of modern life. Marx argued that the struggle over time lay at the heart of capitalism. Workers sell only part of their day to employers. However, capitalism has always been interested in what workers do in their remaining time and continually seeks to colonise those parts of workers’ lives too.
Many workers experience growing ‘time poverty’. Long commutes, insecure employment, shift work, unpaid overtime, second jobs and permanent digital connectivity leave millions with less meaningful free time than previous generations. Smartphones, rather than liberating workers, frequently extend work into evenings and weekends through emails, messaging apps and expectations of constant availability. Domestic labour has also intensified.
Against this background, asking workers to devote six or seven hours to county cricket, let alone five days to a test match, becomes increasingly unrealistic. The Hundred therefore attempts to occupy a genuine social need. Millions of supporters simply cannot spare entire days for sport, however much they might wish to. A two-and-a-half-hour evening match more easily fits around work, commuting and childcare. In other words, The Hundred is not creating new habits: it is adapting to habits produced by capitalism.
While critics portray shorter cricket as evidence of cultural decline, a Marxist analysis reaches a different conclusion: workers have not freely chosen to sacrifice or compress their leisure time; their leisure time has been sacrificed and compressed because capitalist production increasingly dominates their lives.
Ultimately, The Hundred is neither the salvation nor the destruction of cricket. It is another stage in the commodification of sport. Professional cricket increasingly revolves around television rights, sponsorship deals, franchise branding, gambling partnerships, corporate hospitality and merchandising. Fixture schedules reflect broadcasting requirements rather than sporting considerations. Supporters become consumers. Players become marketable assets. Even club identities increasingly function as brands competing for market share.
A socialist society would not necessarily reject shorter formats of cricket. It might well embrace innovations that genuinely broaden participation, increase accessibility or reflect the wishes of players and supporters. But the difference would lie in who controls those decisions: instead of television executives, marketing departments and corporate sponsors determining the future of sport, those decisions would be made democratically according to social need.