Cricket South Africa Structure: How the Game Is Run

Most cricket boards are boring by design. Ours has never managed it. Cricket South Africa has spent much of the past two decades in the news for reasons that had nothing to do with cricket, and anyone trying to understand why a side that produces world-class fast bowlers every few years still struggles to fill a domestic calendar has to start with the organisation rather than the players.

The structure itself is not complicated. What sits on top of it is.

Cricket South Africa at the top

CSA is the national governing body and South Africa's Full Member representative at the International Cricket Council. It runs the men's and women's national sides, the inbound and outbound international schedule, the domestic professional competitions, national selection, high performance, the community game, and the commercial arrangements that fund all of it.

The body in its current form dates to the unification of the game in 1991. Before that, South African cricket was split along the lines of the country itself, with separate administrations for separate populations. The United Cricket Board of South Africa was formed that year as the single unified body, and readmission to international cricket followed within months. The organisation was later reconstituted as a company and took the Cricket South Africa name in the early 2000s, with the old member-board arrangement continuing alongside it for some years before the two structures were finally merged.

That history matters more than it might for a cricket board. The unified body inherited a game with two entirely different resource bases, and every argument CSA has had since about transformation, selection, funding and facilities traces back to it. The longer view is set out in our guide to the history of South African cricket and the earlier chapter in the origins of the game here.

The provincial unions

The load-bearing walls are the provincial cricket unions. There are fifteen of them, each a separate organisation with its own board, staff, grounds, club competitions, age-group programmes and representative sides. They are the members of CSA, and historically they have been divided into two classes: affiliates, which carry first-class standing and run the larger professional operations, and associates, the smaller unions in provinces with thinner cricketing infrastructure.

Union	Base	Home ground
Western Province	Cape Town	Newlands
Boland	Paarl	Boland Park
South Western Districts	George	Recreation Ground
Eastern Province	Gqeberha	St George's Park
Border	East London	Buffalo Park
Free State	Bloemfontein	Mangaung Oval
Griqualand West	Kimberley	Diamond Oval
North West	Potchefstroom	Senwes Park
Northerns	Centurion	SuperSport Park
Easterns	Benoni	Willowmoore Park
Central Gauteng	Johannesburg	The Wanderers
KwaZulu-Natal	Durban	Kingsmead
KwaZulu-Natal Inland	Pietermaritzburg	City Oval
Limpopo	Polokwane	—
Mpumalanga	Nelspruit	—

Some of those names have changed over the years. Transvaal became Gauteng and then Central Gauteng; Natal became KwaZulu-Natal; Northern Transvaal became Northerns. The unions themselves are older than the national body in most cases, several of them founded in the nineteenth century, and their sense of themselves as independent entities is the single most persistent feature of South African cricket administration. Every restructuring fight is at bottom a fight between the centre and the unions, and the shape those fights have taken is traced in our guide to the domestic structure.

Members Council and board

Two bodies sit above the executive.

The Members Council is made up of the presidents of the provincial unions. It is the shareholder body. It elects, it approves the constitution, and it holds the ultimate voting power over the direction of the organisation. Fifteen unions, fifteen votes, and a set of interests that do not always align with what is best for the national side.

The board runs the company. Its composition has been the central governance question of the past fifteen years, because for most of CSA's history the board was drawn from the Members Council itself. Union presidents sat on the board that was meant to hold the executive to account, while simultaneously representing the unions receiving CSA's money. Recommendation after recommendation identified this as the structural fault, and the eventual reform was a board with a majority of independent directors and an independent chair, non-executive members drawn from the Members Council, and the executive reporting into it.

The comparison with Australia is instructive here, because Cricket Australia went through a very similar transition from a delegate board to a skills-based one, described in our guide to how Australian cricket is run. The difference is that CSA's reform came under considerably more pressure.

The governance crises

The bonus scandal and the Nicholson inquiry

In 2011 and 2012, CSA was consumed by a dispute over unauthorised bonus payments connected to the staging of the Indian Premier League in South Africa in 2009, when the tournament relocated because of the Indian general election. The chief executive at the time, Gerald Majola, was found to have received payments that had not been properly disclosed to or approved by the board.

The government appointed a committee of inquiry chaired by Judge Chris Nicholson. Its report went well beyond the payments themselves and into the structure that had allowed them, recommending a fundamental change in board composition towards a majority of independent directors. Majola left the organisation. The governance recommendations were partially adopted and then, in practice, diluted.

The 2019 collapse and the interim board

The second crisis was larger. In late 2019 CSA revoked the accreditation of several cricket journalists, a decision reversed within days but which triggered a wider loss of confidence among sponsors, players and the public. The chief executive, Thabang Moroe, was suspended that December and dismissed the following year after a forensic investigation.

Sponsors withdrew. The players' association and the board were in open conflict. By late 2020 the Minister of Sport had moved to intervene, and after a standoff the Members Council accepted the appointment of an interim board, chaired initially by the retired Constitutional Court judge Zak Yacoob. The intervention carried real risk: the ICC does not permit government interference in member boards, and suspension was a live possibility throughout.

The interim board's central task was to force through the governance reform that had been recommended a decade earlier. It did, eventually, after a protracted fight with the Members Council over the majority-independent model. A new memorandum of incorporation was adopted and a reconstituted board took office. That is the structure the organisation runs on today.

Transformation and selection targets

South African cricket operates under formal transformation objectives, applied at every level from schools cricket to the national side. They are a matter of published policy rather than informal preference, and they exist because the game was, for most of its history here, legally reserved for one part of the population.

At national level the men's team has operated under a target expressed as a season average rather than a per-match quota: a stated minimum number of players of colour in the XI across a season, including a stated minimum number of black African players. Averaging across a season rather than fixing each XI is the mechanism that allows selectors to pick on form in an individual match while still meeting the objective over a summer.

The targets are contested, publicly and repeatedly, and the arguments run in both directions. What is not in dispute is the underlying problem they were designed to address, which is that the resources of the game, the turf wickets, the coaching, the school programmes and the club structures, remain very unevenly distributed. The pipeline is discussed in more detail in our guide to the fast bowling tradition, where the schools system does most of the work.

The Social Justice and Nation-Building process

In 2020, following a wave of public testimony from current and former players about their experiences in the game, CSA established the Social Justice and Nation-Building project. It was set up as a hearing process led by an ombudsman, Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza SC, with a mandate to examine discrimination and unfair treatment in South African cricket since unification.

Public hearings ran through 2021. Former players gave evidence in person and in writing. Makhaya Ntini described the isolation he felt within national squads. Paul Adams gave evidence about a nickname used about him in team songs. Ashwell Prince, Thami Tsolekile and others testified about selection and treatment. Some of the testimony was contested by those it concerned, and several submitted written responses.

The ombudsman delivered an interim report at the end of 2021 containing tentative findings, expressly described as tentative, against several named individuals including Graeme Smith, Mark Boucher and AB de Villiers. The report recommended further processes rather than treating the findings as final.

Those processes followed. Smith was cleared by an independent arbitration conducted by senior counsel. CSA brought disciplinary charges against Boucher, which were subsequently withdrawn before the hearing concluded. De Villiers denied the allegation concerning him. The report's broader recommendations, on restorative justice, on record-keeping and on the treatment of players in national environments, were referred to the board.

Both the testimony and the outcomes are part of the documented record, and readers who want the full picture should read the interim report and the arbitration findings themselves rather than accounts of them.

Where the money comes from

Four sources, in roughly descending order of size.

ICC distributions. As a Full Member, CSA receives a share of the ICC's global commercial revenue, which is overwhelmingly generated by the sale of media rights to ICC events. The distribution model is weighted, and South Africa's share is a long way behind India's.

Inbound tours. The home broadcast and sponsorship value of an international summer depends enormously on who is touring. A full-length tour by India, England or Australia is worth a multiple of a tour by anyone else, and this single fact explains more about the shape of the South African schedule than any other. The consequences for the domestic calendar are examined in our guide to the SA20.

Domestic commercial rights. Broadcast and sponsorship for the domestic competitions, and, since the sale of the SA20 franchises, a very different revenue line. Selling the T20 league's teams outright to external owners rather than operating it in-house was a deliberate financial decision as much as a cricketing one.

Gate and matchday. Real money at a Boxing Day or New Year Test, marginal almost everywhere else. Domestic four-day cricket is played in front of very few people, at the grounds described in our guide to the major venues.

That revenue then funds the national teams, the professional player contracts, the distributions to the fifteen unions, the age-group programmes and the administration. The unions in the smaller provinces are heavily dependent on those distributions, which is precisely why the Members Council has historically resisted any restructuring that reduces the number of professional teams.

What the structure has to hold up

A cricket board here is asked to do more than run a sport. It is asked to fund a professional game from a revenue base a fraction of India's, to develop players in a country where the facilities gap is enormous, to hold a Test side together while its best players are contracted around the world, and to do all of that under public scrutiny that treats every selection as a political question.

The record is mixed and the organisation knows it. What has kept the game upright through all of it is the same thing that keeps most cricket countries upright: the clubs, the schools, the volunteers and the provincial unions that were here before the national body and will be here after the next restructure. The rest of our coverage sits on the South African cricket hub, with career records for the players named above in the player index, and the wider international picture in our guide to cricket around the world.

Sources and method

This guide draws on CSA's published constitutional documents and memoranda of incorporation, the report of the ministerial committee of inquiry chaired by Judge Chris Nicholson, the interim report of the Social Justice and Nation-Building ombudsman and the subsequent arbitration findings, ICC membership and distribution documentation, and contemporaneous reporting from South African cricket correspondents. Statements about the SJN process reflect what those documents record, including the express description of certain findings as tentative. Where figures were uncertain they have been described qualitatively rather than estimated.