Financial reports urge County Cricket to look at Rugby counterpart with their private-equity experience model.
County cricket can learn from rugby’s private-equity experience, says new financial report.
As county cricket tries to manage the £520 million windfall that it is entitled to from this year’s sale of Hundred stakes, “tensions” will arise. However, a recent comprehensive analysis on the financial health of the domestic game in England and Wales found that it is well-positioned to avoid the difficulties that Premiership rugby suffered after receiving its own infusion of private equity cash in 2018.
A group of sports business journalists, current and past cricket players, advisors, and academics studying sports finance put together the 89-page Leonard Curtis Cricket Finance Report, which was unveiled at the Kia Oval on Tuesday.
Three counties, Surrey, Warwickshire, and Lancashire, all of which hosted Ashes Tests in 2023, accounted for 44% of the £306.1 million made by domestic cricket that year, according to the research, which also highlighted a “yawning gap” between the seven counties that host a Hundred franchise and the eleven that do not. In comparison, the combined contributions of the three worst clubs—Leytonshire, Derbyshire, and Northamptonshire—were only 5.56%.
The report’s co-author, Professor Rob Wilson, admitted that “three or four” counties may already be in bankruptcy if the expected Hundred money hadn’t been received. He was, nevertheless, generally hopeful that the windfall would offer the “medium-term relief” required to support the county game’s long-term sustainability.
“English cricket really is on the cusp of a transformational injection of capital,” Wilson said. “That represents an extraordinary opportunity for the game. But it has to be managed with real prudence, long-term thinking and probably a degree of creativity.”
Michael Vaughan, the former England captain who wrote the report’s foreword, added that the Hundred money will allow the 18 first-class counties to “look to the future rather than simply survive from one summer to the next” and called on the smaller counties to invest in player pathways and facilities to generate homegrown talent, rather than seek to compete directly with the bigger clubs.
“There needs to be a strategic plan of how to create a sustainable county cricket club,” Vaughan added. “I would like to see counties being transparent with each other and sharing knowledge about what works for them. Sometimes petty rivalries prevent that from happening and divisions between the Test host counties and the others develop.”