FIFA World Cup vs ICC Cricket: How two giants make billions with opposite playbooks

The tournament is one of the few events capable of capturing audiences across every continent simultaneously, drawing billions of viewers and transforming football into a month-long cultural phenomenon. It is also the financial engine of FIFA, the governing body of world football and arguably the most powerful sports organisation on the planet.

Over 100 million fans tuned in to watch the FIFA World Cup on Zee in the opening weekend, as per data shared by the company on Monday (June 15). This is in India alone, a country where the broadcasters were announced after a last-minute deal.

Cricket’s equivalent governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), oversees a very different ecosystem. While FIFA governs the world’s most popular sport, the ICC presides over a game whose commercial influence is concentrated in a handful of markets, led overwhelmingly by India and South Asia. Yet despite operating on vastly different scales, both organisations face the same challenge- how to convert fan attention into sustainable revenue.

Their solutions could hardly be more different.

As the FIFA World Cup unfolds across North America, it is worth examining how the two governing bodies have built contrasting business models. FIFA generates the bulk of its income from a single showpiece event held once every four years. The ICC, by contrast, has steadily expanded its calendar to ensure that a major global trophy is rarely more than a year away.

The financial outcomes reflect those choices. FIFA expects to generate a record $13 billion in revenue during its 2023-26 commercial cycle, with nearly $9 billion forecast to arrive in 2026 alone, the year of the World Cup. The ICC’s most recent media-rights agreement for the 2024-27 cycle, meanwhile, is worth approximately $3.2 billion, making it the richest broadcast deal in cricket history but still a fraction of FIFA’s commercial scale.

The contrast raises an intriguing question: how has FIFA built a $13-billion business around one trophy every four years, while the ICC has chosen to create a world where there is almost always another trophy to play for?

FIFA sells the world’s attention

The World Cup remains one of the few events capable of stopping the world. The Olympics comes close. Perhaps the Super Bowl dominates a single market. But very few sporting events command simultaneous attention from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, from Lagos to London.

That global reach is reflected in FIFA’s finances.

According to FIFA’s revised 2023-26 budget, the organisation expects $13 billion in revenue, including approximately $3.9 billion from broadcasting rights, nearly $3 billion from sponsorship and marketing partnerships, and more than $3 billion from ticketing and hospitality.

What makes the model unusual is its reliance on scarcity.

A player may only participate in three or four World Cups during an entire career. Fans wait four years between tournaments. Broadcasters know they have only one opportunity every cycle to secure the rights. The result is an event that functions less like a tournament and more like a global media phenomenon.

Scarcity, in FIFA’s case, is not a limitation. It is the product.

The ICC cannot afford scarcity

Cricket’s commercial geography is entirely different. While football enjoys meaningful audiences across almost every continent, cricket remains heavily concentrated in a handful of markets.

More importantly, cricket’s economic centre of gravity sits overwhelmingly in India. According to ICC chairman Jay Shah, the Indian market accounts for nearly 90% of the ICC’s commercial value, a reflection of the country’s dominance in broadcast audiences, sponsorship spending and media-rights demand.

The ICC’s most recent global media-rights cycle for 2024-27 was won by Disney Star for approximately $3 billion, with the overwhelming majority of that value tied to the Indian market. Meanwhile, India’s domestic league, the Indian Premier League, sold its standalone media rights for ₹48,390 crore ($6.2 billion) for the 2023-27 cycle, underlining the scale of the country’s cricket economy.

The concentration is unlike anything seen in football. FIFA derives commercial value from dozens of major markets across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. The ICC, by contrast, operates a global sport whose financial engine is overwhelmingly powered by a single country. That reality has inevitably shaped how cricket’s governing body structures its competitions and commercial calendar.

Unlike FIFA, the ICC cannot disappear for four years and expect global anticipation to build naturally. Instead, it has spent the past decade creating a near-continuous sequence of global events. Recent years, for instance, have been more packed with ICC tournaments than ever before.

A T20 World Cup in 2021, 2022, 2024 and 2026. An ODI World Cup in 2023. A Champions Trophy in 2025, a World Test Championship final in 2021, 2023 and 2025, all of these are in senior men’s cricket alone.

The objective is to keep premium cricket inventory flowing through the system. Broadcasters need marquee content. Sponsors need regular visibility. Fans need reasons to stay engaged. The ICC’s business model is therefore built around continuity rather than scarcity.

Two governing bodies, two forms of risk

The contrast creates very different vulnerabilities.

FIFA’s dependence on the World Cup means the organisation is extraordinarily exposed to the success of a handful of major events. When the World Cup succeeds, the financial rewards are enormous. If (and there is always a risk) a cycle underperforms, the consequences are magnified.

The ICC, meanwhile, faces the opposite challenge. Its tournaments generate regular commercial returns but frequency creates the risk of dilution. The more often trophies are awarded, the harder it becomes to preserve a sense of occasion which is why perhaps why the ODI World Cup still feels the biggest prize to play for, something that cricketers like Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli have also agreed o

This is a balancing act cricket administrators have wrestled with for years. Every new event creates additional inventory for broadcasters and sponsors. Every new event also risks making the previous one feel slightly less special.

One owns the world. The other owns depth.

The simplest way to understand the difference is this. FIFA’s power comes from breadth. Football’s governing body owns the world’s most universal sporting event and monetises a truly global audience.

The ICC’s power comes from depth. Cricket may not command football’s worldwide footprint but it benefits from one of the most passionate and commercially valuable fan bases anywhere in sport, led overwhelmingly by India.

As a result, FIFA can wait four years for its biggest payday while the ICC cannot. Effectively, one sells anticipation and the other sells continuity. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are featuring in their sixth FIFA World Cup and have never come up against each other even once simply because FIFA can afford to keep the schedule the same. But even before the schedules have been released fans know that India and Pakistan will play at least once in the World Cup, perhaps the match that helps the broadcasters and ICC earn majority of their revenue from.

Both models have produced billions of dollars in revenue. But they reveal two very different answers to the same question confronting every sports organisation: how do you keep fans coming back?