The recent passing of Tony Greig, a natural leader of men who played a significant part in the creation of World Series Cricket in the 1970's, attracted much comment about the man himself, and his sometimes fractured relationships with the English cricket establishment. Born in South Africa with an accent to match, qualified for England only by virtue of his Scottish father, tall, commanding and charismatic, Greig was probably always going to be an iconoclast in many people's eyes, but his determination that players should be better rewarded for their work led him to eventually become the "go to" guy for World Series Cricket in the UK, where he worked to recruit players for the World XI team. Later in life he moved to Australia, where his genial nature, enthusiasm for the game and iconoclasm were embraced, and he could forget his bruising collisions with the English cricket establishment.
Lost in many of the the generous tributes was any detailed examination of the significance of World Series Cricket, in terms of the financial opportunities that it gave to leading cricketers of the era. It allowed several South African cricketers to appear on an international stage, from which they were disqualified due to the isolation of South Africa over its apartheid social policies. However, the back story (not generally talked about) was that even english cricketers playing for their country were appallingly badly paid. I remember watching a tv interview with Alan Knott, the incumbent English wicketkeeper, a fine all round player, where he revealed that he was signing on as unemployed during the winter in the UK, since he had no other source of income apart from his county salary and the limited amount of money that he earned playing for England. At the time, cricketers had next to no commercial opportunities in terms of sponsorship deals in the UK. Some of them were given benefits in kind by supporters of their county clubs, such as cars, but in general, they were treated as indentured servants, with pay scales to match. The one mechanism that they could use to make serious one-time money was a "benefit season", a peculiarly English process whereby a player, once during his career, could participate in a number of activities, the profits of which went entirely into his bank account. This odd convention, financially welcome though it was, remained a painful reminder of indentured servitude, since the benefit rules required a player to have played for a county for at least 10 years, reinforcing the life servitude nature of the relationship between player and county.
World Series Cricket, artificial though it might have been in many of its features, offered players sums of money in their playing careers that they would never have been able to earn while playing for county and regional teams in their own countries.
It is important to note that, like Henry VIII's creation of the Church of England, World Series Cricket was not set up as a financial boondoggle for players. Kerry Packer had been rebuffed in his bids for television rights to cricket in Australia, despite offering many times more money than the incumbent network ABC. There was an element of tilting at establishment windmills in many of Packer's actions. The final cost of WSC has never been revealed, but it probably did not make any money back on Packer's original investment.
WSC did make a number of cricketers much more financially comfortable than they would otherwise have been. However, there was not exactly a quantum jump in cricketer remuneration, at least not in the short term. The publicity for the 1980 Australian cricket team tour of the UK trumpeted their record tour pay - just under $5000 australian dollars per player, which sounded like chicken feed even in 1980 for top-flight professional sportsmen. The real changes came in the 1980's and 1990's, with a massive jump in television revenues, driven by a surge of interest in cricket in India and Pakistan, fuelling significant increases in the salaries of cricketers, along with personal sponsorship and commercial endorsement opportunities in their home countries. Cricketers today are much better paid in real terms than they were in the past, even though their salaries still pale into insignificance when compared with top-flight practitioners in other professional sports.
Every professional sport reaches a point of inflection where the athletes and practitioners eventually start to be properly rewarded for their efforts. Tony Greig was not entirely responsible for the positive change, but he helped to start a trend towards a more equitable relationship between professional cricketers and their employers, beginning a trend that has led to them ceasing to be treated as indentured servants and more as important athletes.