England fans face minimum five-year wait for West Indies Test tour

England are poised to deliver a crushing blow to West Indies cricket and their own travelling supporters with no men’s Test tour of the Caribbean scheduled for at least the next five years.

According to a draft of the future tours programme for the period May 2023 to February 2027 – seen by the Guardian and due to be finalised at the ICC’s AGM in Birmingham this month – the England men’s team are scheduled to play just eight white-ball fixtures in the Caribbean during this time.

These come in a single tour early in the cycle – straight after the 50-over World Cup in India next year and thus likely to involve a weakened squad – with England’s only other visit thereafter being the T20 World Cup in 2024. It leaves a minimum five-year gap between Test tours of the Caribbean for England after their 2-1 defeat in March.

This is likely to dismay the hordes of England supporters who flock to the region for the trip of a lifetime – around 10,000 were present in Barbados this year, with about 3,000 for the Tests in Antigua and Grenada – and the financial knock-on effect to Cricket West Indies will be significant.

England Test tours are worth at least $10m (£8.4m) to CWI (nearly double when combined with limited-overs cricket). There is also a larger impact, with recent visits to have featured both Test and white-ball cricket estimated to have been worth up to $100m to the region’s economy.

While bilateral internationals can be loss-makers for West Indies, England tours remain a significant revenue source for CWI in a global cricket economy that is skewed heavily against such a high-cost, low-income part of the world. West Indies have more than proved their strength as opponents too, with England registering just one Test series