After the ECB auctioned off shares in its Hundred franchises this week, Mark Butcher has predicted that nothing will be the same again for English cricket.
The ECB have sold shares in several of their eight franchises in The Hundred, with multiple investors submitting bids for stakes in an auction process that began on January 30. Parties from India and the United States have bid for shares, with London Spirit, Oval Invincibles, Birmingham Phoenix, Welsh Fire, Manchester Originals and Northern Superchargers all accepting multi-million pound bids for stakes in each respective franchise
The six sales which have so far gone through have collectively raised over £400 million, with Southern Brave and Trent Rockets still to go under the hammer. Northern Superchargers was the first side to be sold off in its entirety, with Yorkshire County Cricket Club opting to sell it's 51 percent stake in the side alongside the ECB's 49 percent. IPL franchise Sunrisers Hyderabad bought the franchise for just over £100 million. Lord's based franchise London Spirit is so far the top valued franchise, after a Silicon Valley consortium led by Nikesh Arora buying 49 percent of the side for £145 million.
Money raised from the auction will be distributed amongst the counties and invested into grassroots cricket.
Speaking on the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast, Butcher said: “It’s been an extraordinary week, there are a lot of holes in the balance sheet for English cricket and a lot of enterprises kept alive by revenue that doesn’t come from themselves. So this amount of money kind of shores all of that up.
“The question is whether or not that was the intention, you put something that was very much on life support and you’ve prolonged the contract for that life support for 20 years and kept a status quo that perhaps you weren’t all that interested in keeping in the first place.
“My feeling is nothing will be the same again from here, the money that has been put into the game and the people who have put it in, it means wildly different things to the two people. To English cricket it’s kind of a sigh of relief and my goodness haven’t we done well, for the people that have invested it isn’t a lot of money, and the question is what are they going to want? These are not charitable organisations; they expect a return for their buck and what is that going to look like?"
Butcher also theorised that the sale could mean changes to the format of The Hundred, and a change to the makeup of the English cricket summer.
“It could go from The Hundred to T20," he said. "It wouldn’t surprise me if that happened, which some would love some would hate. I don’t really have a view on it.
“It’s the impact it would then have on the rest of the English summer. Ours is very short in comparison to most others given that summer is only three months of the year for us, and we try and get the best out of the other three. People don’t put these sums of money into something in order to take a back seat and say you carry on the way you were there is a price to be paid for this down the line, and what that is we don’t know yet."
“I don’t know whether I should be jumping for joy and thinking this is the greatest thing to happen to English cricket, but what gets done with the money? I guess some debt gets written off with it, and there will be clamours for new grounds to be built in various locations, facilities to be upgraded. Then what?”
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