The Hundred equity bid | Chairman Richard Thompson speaks out:
After previous week’s news reports which stated that the England and Wales Cricket Board has received a private equity bid by Bridgeton Group for 75% stakes in the Hundred, the English Cricket Board’s recently invented league, the ECB Chief Richard Thompson was asked to comment on the offer during his interview by Sky Sports.
During the interview, which took place during the Lunch break in Pakistan and England’s third day of first match, the chair of the ECB said that it is too early for a league as potentially lucrative as the Hundred to be sold off for ‘something short’. The Chairman, however, did not dispose the idea completely nor did he say that the Board intends to ‘never’ tread down this path. In other words, the door for private investment is closed only for a matter of time or until someone comes up with a more profitable offer. In Thompson’s words, “The Hundred has created an awful lot of interest in private equity markets, Lucknow Super Giants in the IPL sold for nearly $1bn, so I would say a tournament is worth a lot more.”
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“We’ve got a long way to go before we do something. We will not sell the game short. The ECB needs to think very long and hard if we were to sell four or five weeks of the summer to a third party. That would be a huge decision for us to take.” He further said, “We have to take a competition like this very seriously, there is a feeding frenzy around world cricket and private equity so I’m not surprised we had an offer.”
Former English cricketer put a stopper on the notion that the Hundred’s objective has somehow shifted from developing English cricket to financial gains only in the following words, “We cannot create that pathway, create those cricketers for the future just for them to be picked off by a franchise or by private equity that don’t have any of that overhead or any of that commitment to the broader game.”
Although the league has been criticized by a number of official within the board but no one denies the fact that the novelty competition can help the English domestic system overcome its post-COVID financial crisis.
