Wages & corruption in cricket

Dileep Premachandran quotes a recommendation from Mohammed Malik Qayyum in 2000:

Pakistani players for all their talent are not as well-paid as their counterparts abroad. As long as they are underpaid the tendency to be bribed remains.

For me, this rings true. There are four aspects to the problem.
1. Comparisons. Mohammad Amir gets a monthly retainer of £1300 from the PCB, and a test match fee of less than £2000. Of course, this is a fantastic fortune by Pakistani standards, and even many high-earning Englishman would be delighted to get such money for doing something they love. However, these sums look paltry compared to the fortunes on offer in the IPL. And it‘s this comparison, rather than the wages of non-cricketers, that probably loom larger in the Pakistan players minds.
In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely gives the reason for this. People, he says, make comparisons that are easiest. And the easiest comparator for a Pakistani international cricketer is an Indian international cricketer. Ariely tells the story of an investment bank employee complaining to his boss about his salary:

“How long have you been with the firm?” the executive asked.
“Three years. I came straight from college” was the answer.
“And when you joined us, how much didi you expect to be making in three years?”
“About a hundred thousand.”
“And now you are making almost three hundred thousand, so how can you possibly complain?”
“Well” the young man stammered, “It’s just that a couple of the guys at the desks next to me, they’re not any better than I am, and they are making three hundred ten.”

We might call this the Ashley Cole effect. When Arsenal offered him £55,000 a week, he felt so insulted that he almost crashed his car. This is because he was comparing himself to better-paid peers.
2. A drawback to superstar economics. Put yourself in the shoes of a Pakistani player. He might ask: why should I earn only a fraction of MS Dhoni’s millions? We might cite Sherwin Rosen (pdf) in reply: MS Dhoni might be only slightly better than you, but small differences in ability can translate into colossal differences in wages. I doubt if the Pakistani players would accept this - would you? Insofar as they don’t - whether they should or not - superstar economics is another source of resentment.
3. Injustice hurts. One message of ultimatum game experiments is that people reject offers they perceive as unfair, even if such offers would make them better off. This suggests that when a sense of unfairness arises, people can behave spitefully in ways which seem irrational from a narrow utility-maximizing perspective.
4. Efficiency wages matter. It’s long been known that, in many firms, wages are higher than can be explained by simple supply and demand. Conventional explanations for this are that bosses want to deter workers from shirking, and so pay over the odds as a way of ensuring that there‘s a big cost of losing one‘s job if one is caught slacking.
Pakistani experience, however, reminds us that there’s another reason to pay over the odds: high wages are necessary to buy goodwill.
This is where points 1 and 3 interact nastily. Workers on even huge pay will feel badly treated if their comparators are even better paid. And if they feel unjustly treated, they might be tempted to behave badly, perhaps even at a cost to themselves. In such cases, huge pay will be needed to buy off such bad behaviour. This - rather than any crap about having to attract talent - is why bankers have been so well paid.
The PCB did not learn this lesson.

Comments

[Jim]

Asif has played in the IPL so would have already made big money there. Amir is (was) a bright up and coming star bowler who undoubtedly would have got an IPL contract next year.

So to say they were not making money is nonsense. And the amount of money they were making should not be compared with what foreign players get, because livings costs are considerably lower in Pakistan. I bet you can live like a king in Karachi if you are a Pakistani international cricketer, not least because of the fame and prestige such a selection brings, apart from the cash.

It is insulting to international sportsmen around the globe to suggest that its OK for players to throw games, or indulge in sharp practices, just because they make less money than other players. Cheating is cheating, whether you are paid peanuts or millions.

Asif, Amir & Butt have lives the vast majority of Pakistanis could only dream of achieving. And they have thrown it all away for pure greed. Hopefully they will suffer the consequences.

[Luis Enrique]

Jim,

I'm not sure the OP argues cheating is OK, more that it's more likely to occur in certain circumstances.

[ortega]

Good article. but it should be better called: the relative poverty falacy. Because, it not only happens to high paid people.

[Alex C]

A lot of the reason that Pakistan players are paid comparatively little is that there is a lot less money coming into their game than other countries. Partly it's because the country is poorer relatively than other countries but a much of it has to do with funding from international matches and their TV coverage, as well as attendances at matches. The reason that they can't command so much for the TV rights etc is that interest is low and that is due to the long term endemic cheating in their sport.
From ball tampering, to drug taking to spot/match fixing , virtually every one of cricket's nasty little secrets has been uncovered there in the last decade, and they don't help themselves by overturning their self-imposed bans as soon as they think no-one's looking.
Part of the reason Pakistan players are not bid on in the IPL auctions has to be that the competition is too big financially to risk players for whom corruption is so endemic. For the chairman not even to be able to say his team were innocent was pretty damning.

It seems, from the point of view of a long term cricket fan, that the only way to get rid of the corruption at the heart of Pakistan cricket is not to feed it.

I had hoped, after the tragic demise of Bob Woolmer, that Pakistan might do the necessary thing and voluntarily step back from test level cricket for a number of years, and believe that this is the only way that they can regain the trust of the rest of the cricketing world, and thereby build a team who knows that cheating of this kind will result in permanent bans and drive corruption from the sport properly.

It's particularly tragic that Mohammed Amir is embroiled in this - his bowling this series has been not just world class but beautiful, considered and shows the promise of a future legend of the sport.

In terms of their commitments I feel that a World XI could complete this series and pass the existing commitments onto Ireland - who have to be the next in line for test status.

[dereck pringel]

Asif has played in the IPL so would have already made big money there. Amir is (was) a bright up and coming star bowler who undoubtedly would have got an IPL contract next year.

Pakistani players are currently banned from the IPL.

The rest of your post falls apart similarly.

[ali h]

That is an interesting take on what has happened, and I think there may well be some truth in it. We are not good at comparing ourselves to those worse off than us, because essentially we are programmed for survival, so we need to always be better than those ahead of us.

[british gp]

I can't belive how lightly some people are accepting the fixing scandal. I'm sure the guys had their own reasons and I don't want to judge them, but match fixing ruins sports and that I can't accept!