The International Cricket Council (ICC) is the international governing body of cricket. It was founded as the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 by representatives from England, Australia and South Africa, renamed the International Cricket Conference in 1965, and took up its current name in 1989.

The ICC has 105 members: 10 Full Members that play official Test matches, 35 Associate Members, and 60 Affiliate Members. The ICC is responsible for the organisation and governance of cricket's major international tournaments, most notably the Cricket World Cup. It also appoints the umpires and referees that officiate at all sanctioned Test matches, One Day International and Twenty20 Internationals. It promulgates the ICC Code of Conduct, which sets professional standards of discipline for international cricket, and also co-ordinates action against corruption and match-fixing through its Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU). The ICC does not control bilateral fixtures between member countries (which include all Test matches), it does not govern domestic cricket in member countries, and it does not make the laws of the game, which remain under the control of the Marylebone Cricket Club.

There was no formal structure of international cricket until the early twenty first century. It had long been traditional for countries, without any intervention from a body such as the International Cricket Council (ICC), to organize for themselves the various cricket matches. The ICC later committed the Test cricket playing nations to play each other in a programme of matches over a period of 10 years. This system was set up to encourage some of the better-established countries to play the lesser nations more frequently.

Most Test matches and One-Day series take place in the form of "tours". In a tour, one nation travels to another and plays warm-up matches, first-class matches against domestic teams such as county or state teams, a series of Test matches against the host nation, and either a series of one-day matches against the host nation or a tournament involving the host nation and another touring nation. The "triangular tournament" format is often used when one tour is about to conclude and the other has just begun or may include one team only for that tournament. In the tournament, the three teams play each other either two or three times. The two teams with the most points (usually two points for a win, one point for a no-result or tie, and no points for a loss) qualify for the one-game final; the bonus point system is also sometimes used in a triangular tournament, including the Commonwealth Bank Series and the NatWest Series.

Aleem Sarwar Dar (Urdu:علیم سرور ڈار) (born June 6, 1968 in jhang, Punjab) is a retired Pakistani first-class cricketer and a member of the ICC Elite umpire panel. He won three consecutive ICC Umpire of the Year awards 2009, 2010 and 2011, after being nominated twice in 2005 and 2006. Aleem Dar and Simon Taufel are the only umpires to have received the award since its inception. He has played for Allied Bank, Gujranwala Cricket Association, Lahore, and Pakistan Railways as a right-handed batsman and a leg-break bowler. Since his retirement as a player, he has gained prominence as one of the leading umpires in international cricket. He was educated at Islamia College, Civil Lines, Lahore.

Dar is best known as an international cricket umpire. He made his international umpiring debut in an ODI between Pakistan and Sri Lanka at Gujranwala on February 16, 2000. In 2002 he became a member of ICC's International Panel of umpires. He impressed the ICC with his accurate decision making, and was chosen to umpire at the ICC Cricket World Cup in early 2003, where he was one of the better-performing umpires. His high standard was again rewarded when he was appointed to stand in his first Test match in October 2003; the match between Bangladesh and England at Dhaka. Over the next six months he was appointed to stand in several more Test matches, and as a neutral umpire in ODI matches away from Pakistan.

Haroon Lorgat (born 26 May 1960) is a South African, of Indian origin, businessman and chartered accountant. He was appointed Chief Executive of the International Cricket Council in April 2008 and assumed office on 4 July 2008, succeeding Malcolm Speed, an Australian. His office at the ICC is based in Dubai.

He was raised and schooled in Port Elizabeth, South Africa during the apartheid years and as a result was fortunate to graduate from Rhodes University with a B.Com, CTA. In 1985 he completed training with a Big 4 firm and qualified as a Chartered Accountant. After working at IBM for a year he started his own professional practice in Johannesburg and Cape Town which, through a series of strategic mergers, finally integrated with Ernst & Young in 2002.

Prior to his appointment at the ICC, Lorgat had founded in December 2006 a private equity investment firm Kapela Investment Holdings, based in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Before then he was a senior partner at Ernst & Young (2002 until January 2007).