Fireworks, live music and a sold-out Oval crowd will herald the Hundred's return on Tuesday, but there will be just as much interest in what is happening in the hospitality suites as on the pitch. The ECB plan to use the competition's fourth season as a shop window for potential investors into the eight teams and have invited the "best in world sport" for a look.
The governing body rejected a significant offer from a private equity firm, Bridgepoint Capital, to buy a controlling stake in the Hundred in late 2022 and have spent the past 18 months discussing the tournament's future. Last year, they launched 'Project Gemini' to develop their preferred option: a revamped Hundred, with external investors buying stakes in the eight teams in time for the 2025 season.
"We've seen a huge amount of demand from different kinds of investors," says Vikram Banerjee, who is running the project as the ECB's head of business operations. "I would really hope that we have a level of partnerships with some IPL teams… but at the same time, we've just sent out a document and a video to some NFL owners that explains what cricket is and what the rules are."
The sales process will not start until late this year but informal talks have been going on for months. Banerjee travelled to India earlier this year and has spoken to the owners of every IPL and WPL franchise "a number of times". There is also interest further afield: "Interested parties have contacted us from Australia, South Africa, Pakistan, USA and India," says Andrew Umbers, the co-founder of Oakwell Sports Advisory.
Potential investors watching the 2024 edition will see that the Hundred has a solid base. It attracts strong crowds - around 580,000 tickets were sold last year, across 34 matchdays - and has support from both terrestrial (BBC) and subscription (Sky Sports) broadcasters, while the men's and women's double-headers have proved to be a hugely successful model.
But it also has major issues: the first week of the men's competition will play second-fiddle to England's third Test against West Indies, and squads are further depleted by the final stages of Major League Cricket. "We can see who our competitors are in the English summer and we need to be in a position not just to compete but to win," says Richard Gould, the ECB's chief executive.
"They'll want to demonstrate that this is already a competition that's attracting lots of new fans, and that if you are able to invest more in talent, it could be even bigger," says Omar Chaudhuri of Twenty First Group, who worked with the ECB on the men's high-performance review and the revamp of the women's domestic game. "The pitch has to be: we've got this thing that is already good, and we can supercharge it and turn it into something really great with a little bit of money well spent."
Gould said there are "no active discussions" around changing the competition's format - from 100 balls per side to T20 - but suggested that two new franchises are likely to be added from 2029, when a new broadcast rights cycle starts. "There is an ambition within the game that we would like to see the competition expand at some point," he said.
How will the process work?
The ECB say that the formal process will begin in the first half of September, "building off that momentum that, hopefully, is created from the tournament," Banerjee adds. They have appointed financial advisors in Deloitte, one of the 'big four' accountancy firms, and the Raine Group, the American bank involved in the recent sales of Chelsea to Todd Boehly and a 25% stake in Manchester United to Jim Ratcliffe.
The Hundred's process will be significantly more complicated than recent precedents, such as the BCCI's auction of two new IPL franchises in 2021. First, the ECB will hand 51% stakes to the eight Hundred 'hosts' - seven counties and, in the case of London Spirit, Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). Then, the hosts will decide whether they wish to sell some, all or none of their stake. Finally, bids will be invited from private investors.
"It won't be 'everyone put a big number in an envelope, hand the envelope in, and the eight biggest numbers win,'" Banerjee says. "I'm not going to sit here and say that money's not important, and we don't want money coming in. Of course it is, and it's an opportunity to create fantastic seed funding for the financial sustainability of the whole sport.
"But alongside that, how are they going to support English cricket? We've got a process that will last three months that will ask partners for, yes, numbers and financials, but also all these qualitative things… it's a bit more complicated, but the reason for the complication is to ensure we have the right outcome for English cricket in the long term."
Slow progress
The ECB's ambition is to have the details finalised ahead of next year's draft, but there have already been frustrations with the process from prospective investors. The Telegraph reported last week that interest had cooled due to a lack of clarity; Gould said it was "fascinating" to see potential buyers trying "to negotiate through the media". One source told ESPNcricinfo: "The ECB have screwed up, haven't they?"
Some hosts have already held meaningful talks with prospective buyers but the key question is around control, whether that relates to branding, commercial opportunities, naming rights, or cricket operations. "One of the biggest things for any investor, in any sport, is governance and the route to actually getting things done," Chaudhuri explains.
"As much as you can grow the value of your own club through performance, there's a lot you rely on outside that, with what the league or the governing body is doing. That is hard to do due diligence on: you could speak to people at a county and get a sense of whether you can work with them, but it's very hard to get a sense of what that looks like across every other team."
Some prospective investors are unclear whether they should be speaking more to counties or to the ECB itself. "They need to be clear on the process and explain where the value is in English cricket," Umbers says. "They have to detail how governance will surround these new ownership structures, and that the process of sale is going to be determined by the ECB and not the first-class counties."
The missing one percent
The prospect of owning a minority stake in a franchise - with Surrey among the hosts to indicate they intend to retain their 51% - may not prove attractive to owners. An official at one IPL franchise told ESPNcricinfo that they had no real interest in spending tens of millions of pounds simply to become a "passive investor" with no meaningful control over a team.
"It's going to be a massive challenge for any of these investors not to have a majority stake," says Adam Sommerfeld, the managing partner of Certus Capitals who advise private equity firms on sports investments. "The question will be, can private equity get the returns that they need from these assets? They're not going to get five-times returns on it."
But hosts could also propose a model where a 49% stakeholder still takes a significant level of control, whether that be over cricketing operations or naming rights and branding. There is recent precedent for this in England's Premier League: Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his company Ineos own 27.7% of Manchester United, but control the club's football operations.
"You are going to see some different structures of first-class counties separating commercial and economic control," Umbers says. "You are less attracted to invest in any company or franchise if you are not able to influence where the monies are being spent. That's why there will be different structures: you see this all the time in private equity in sport, for example with CVC in rugby."
What is a franchise worth?
There will be a significant disparity between the prices of the eight franchises depending on where they are based: clearly, there will be more parties interested in owning a team based at an iconic venue in London which seats 30,000 people (London Spirit) than at a stadium half the size in Cardiff (Welsh Fire). Umbers estimates that the franchises - taking a 100% valuation - could be worth anywhere between £30-120 million.
Yet in the short term, teams' revenue will come primarily from central broadcast income and the draft will ensure that costs are fixed. It means that the smaller teams could prove to be the shrewdest investments. "There's a big difference between 'open' and 'closed' leagues," Chaudhuri says. "In a closed league, revenues are generally distributed pretty evenly and there's no potential downside of relegation.
"That means if you acquire a smaller brand, you have the opportunity to turn it into a much bigger one: there's no real downside to getting things wrong if you experiment a bit more. A really smart investor could buy Welsh Fire or Southern Brave for a lower price and say, 'we are really going to double down on performance here, because our brand is not going to carry us globally' - and that could prove to be quite profitable."
The early indications are that around half of the eight Hundred franchises could have investment from IPL owners, with Reliance - who own Mumbai Indians - said to be early favourites to buy a stake in London Spirit. "Ideally, you'd want a group of owners that not only have the ability to invest in and grow their own teams, but also have the desire to work together and collaborate," Chaudhuri says.
The ECB are also conscious of avoiding a single franchise becoming too dominant and powerful, with Banerjee citing the example of Manchester City in the Premier League. "We can learn from that and go, how do we put those protections and controls in place now to make sure that those [things] don't happen? That's the work I'm doing at the moment... we can learn from all the different sports around the world."
The women's Hundred
Even the Hundred's harshest critics would not contest that it has accelerated the growth of women's cricket in England and Wales. "The Hundred has helped provide an outstanding platform to boost the visibility of the women's game, and given more opportunities to showcase exceptional female athletes," says Tammy Parlour, the CEO of the Women's Sport Trust.
The Trust's research found that 1.3 million people - around one-fifth of the Hundred's total TV audience in the UK - only watched games in the women's competition, and indicated this could be even higher with access to primetime slots. "Games broadcast in the evening have received more viewers than those shown in the afternoon," Parlour says. "Visibility drives engagement, so it's important that women's sport is given access to more of these prominent platforms."
Umbers believes that the double-header model is "incredibly appealing" to prospective buyers. "The investors we have been speaking to are absolutely interested in, and want to back, the growth of women's cricket within the Hundred," he says. Chaudhuri, meanwhile, believes that a genuine interest in the women's competition must be "a red line" for potential owners.
Why now?
Within three seasons, the Hundred has gone from competing for talent with one other men's short-form league between July and September to three, with MLC and Canada's relaunched Global T20 joining the pre-existing CPL. "We need to be able to ensure that we retain our best players," Gould says. "If we were to delay too much, others may end up stealing a march on us that would be to our disadvantage."
Banerjee believes cricket is experiencing "a moment" that makes it particularly attractive to investors. "If you take a step back, globally, cricket's in a really great place… we need to move - and move relatively quickly - to make sure that we have that truly world-class, global tournament. That comes with investment into tribalism and investment into those players."
England's home international season also underlines why the ECB invested in the Hundred in the first place: in both the women's and men's games, the relatively weak line-up of touring teams has seen English cricket struggle to attract much interest outside of its core fanbase, particularly while competing against European Championship football and, next month, the Olympics.
"If there aren't meaningful narratives in the international game then it is hard for fans to stay engaged," Chaudhuri says. "In the domestic game, you have more ability to engineer things by attracting top talent through salaries, ensuring competitive balance… you can make sure that your product stays healthy. It's much harder to do that in the international game if it's not a summer where India or Australia are here for a Test series."
The ECB have also watched other boards miss opportunities to attract private investment. "The Hundred is going to be ahead of every other tournament outside the IPL," Shane Watson, the former Australia allrounder, tells ESPNcricinfo. "Good on them for having the foresight to try and get some of the smartest people in world sport involved who really know how to grow it."
Watson has been hugely frustrated by Cricket Australia's reluctance to follow the same course of action with the Big Bash League. "They should have done it six years ago, minimum," he says. "Things were going incredibly well, and then the powers that be butchered it by putting too many games on and extending the season. They're trying to reel that back, but the horse has already bolted."
English cricket has already had that experience with short-form cricket once before: the ECB brought T20 to the professional game in 2003, but lacked the vision for it that India showed in launching the IPL five years later. The Hundred's sale process is not only an attempt to raise funds, but to avoid repeating the same old mistakes.