Many great ideas, at the time they are conceived, have a tinge of madness to them.
Depending on who you believe, either Thomas Crapper or Sir John Harington invented this thing the flushing toilet – at a time when people were using, ahem, other vessels to relieve themselves into. At the time, the idea of a flushing toilet was considered folly.
Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. ‘What do we need a lightbulb for, we have perfectly-good candles,’ was the cry. The telephone. Birth control. The toaster. All denounced as madness when revealed for the first time.
And when William Webb Ellis, playing in a game of school football, decided to pick the ball up in his hands and run with it, he effectively invented the sport of rugby as we know it today – so important was his madcap idea, the rugby union World Cup trophy is known as the Webb Ellis Cup.
As far as the long-term success (or otherwise) of cricket as a sport goes, perhaps The Hundred will one day be revered in the same terms: hard to fathom in its early years, but in the fullness of time it could yet prove to be a masterstroke.
At the time of writing, the fourth instalment of The Hundred had just been completed. London Spirit won the women’s version, with Deepti Sharma blasting a six to win in a thrilling run chase, while in the men’s game the Oval Invincibles defended their title with a comfortable victory over the Southern Brave.
Final’s Day, with the women’s and men’s games played back-to-back, was a sell-out at Lord’s, with the best part of 24,000 tickets sold. In that sense, The Hundred can be considered a success.
Ticket sales, as a whole, remained somewhat positive, although TV viewing figures were down, which will give the tournament’s organisers a few puzzles to solve.
But how will the success of The Hundred be measured? Is it quantifiable, or merely a feeling that this could be the future of limited overs cricket?
Perhaps one such measure of success will be when, or if, other cricket-playing nations adopt the 100-ball format. So far, none have – maybe that, in itself, is an indicator that The Hundred is doomed to failure.
So, is The Hundred cricket’s lightbulb moment, or a lame duck that will go the way of VHS tapes, MP3 players and ‘scratch and sniff’ as inventions that quickly became obsolete and unloved?
A Family Affair
One of the reasons that The Hundred was originated by the English Cricket Board (ECB) was an attempt to make the sport more accessible to younger audiences and more casual viewers.
One of cricket’s idiosyncrasies is that it is laden with jargon and terms that make little sense to those who haven’t a deep education in the sport – silly mid-off, long leg and no balls just three such descriptors that might raise a giggle, if nothing else.
The Hundred, devised by ECB members in association with advertising executives and business moguls, was born in a bid to simplify cricket. An innings lasts 100 balls, which – happily for a society with a shortening attention span – also leads to quicker games than the T20 style of play that was previously the shortest format of the sport.
Deliberately scheduling the tournament for the UK school holidays, the ECB has pinned their hopes on The Hundred becoming a fun family day out – and the evidence suggests they have pulled it off.
A whopping 540,000 tickets were sold for games at the 2024 edition, with record crowds at seven of the eight grounds that hosted the women’s edition.
What’s more, some 41% of those tickets were taken up by family groups, with 30% going to those who described themselves as being ‘new to cricket’.
The ECB are notoriously guarded on publishing in-depth reports on ticket sales and the like, but from different sources it’s possible to piece together a general overview of the trajectory of the competition.
Ticket sales year by year:
It’s only a small sample size, really, and a data set that is very difficult to draw conclusions from.
Ticket sales in 2024 were down on 2023’s numbers, but conversely up on 2021 and 2022 – so the overall picture is one of positivity, in terms of putting bums on seats, although the loss of some 40,000 fans in 2024 (around 7% of the overall fanbase) from the year prior will need to be scrutinised.
But attendances at the women’s games were up – the total audience at women’s matches in The Hundred has now surpassed the one million mark, and with prize money on a par with the men’s, many female players have been able to turn professional for the first time; that, ultimately, will help to increase the standard of play.
“I can’t speak highly enough of how it’s put the women’s game on the map,” said Heather Knight, the England T20 captain who also skippered London Spirit to their Hundred triumph.
“You look at the crowd and it’s so different to what you’d see at a men’s Test match….it’s brought different people to the women’s game.”
The ECB has a number of documented objectives that it wants The Hundred to achieve; amongst them are enhancing the profile of women’s cricket in England, while attracting a younger and different style of fan to the sport.
In that sense, The Hundred is achieving what it was set out to do.
The Sun Doesn’t Always Shine on TV
Here’s a hypothesis: given that ticket sales were down for The Hundred in 2024 on a year earlier, you might expect the TV ratings to have increased accordingly.
But that wasn’t, for the most part, the case, with the number of armchair viewers down for much of the tournament – only the men’s final saw an increase of around 500,000 watchers to 1.3 million in total (on the BBC, with the game also simulcast on Sky Sports).
Otherwise, the picture is not one of positivity, with viewing figures down in 2024 on the previous year in both the men’s and women’s editions, as well as on both of the broadcasters:
On the left-hand side of the above image, we have the viewing figures for the men’s version of The Hundred. The downturn was pretty much consistent with both broadcasters, with the BBC reporting a 25% decrease in viewers in 2024 and Sky Sports a 28% loss.
More head-scratching is the loss of armchair fans for the women’s Hundred. On Sky Sports almost half of all viewers (41%) were lost, while on the BBC the downturn was only 2%. It’s difficult to really add more context to that, other than maybe viewers without a Sky TV subscription package – those with only terrestrial television or Freeview – are more likely to watch cricket than those with hundreds of channels at their disposal.
In addition, while the viewing figures for the men’s final were strong, for the women’s final they were down 10% on Sky Sports and 20% on the BBC – however, the women’s game was scheduled at the same time as the opening Sunday of the Premier League season, with the Chelsea vs Manchester City fixture an obvious draw for sports fans.
Some have also tried to explain away the loss of viewers as a result of the Olympic Games. However, if people are switching off The Hundred to instead watch skateboarding, dressage or archery, it’s perhaps a damning indictment of the entertainment provided by the cricket.
Does The Hundred Make Money?
When you look at the achievements of The Hundred over its initial four-year stint, the ECB are right to applaud the fact that its driven interest in women’s cricket and attracted a new audience to the sport – the evidence is there, albeit rocked slightly by the performance of the 2024 edition.
But The Hundred, to have any kind of future, also has to be a financially viable business model – if it isn’t, eventually that lack of commercial appeal will bring it down.
To answer the question of profitability, well, it depends on who you believe.
According to the ECB themselves, The Hundred turned a profit in each of its first three years (the 2024 data was not known at the time of writing):
However, there are those that are willing to question the accuracy of the ECB’s reporting. Fanos Hira, the Worcestershire Cricket Club chairman and chartered accountant by trade, investigated The Hundred’s accounts and claimed that the competition actually made a £9 million loss in its first two years.
Whichever set of figures is correct, the financial viability of The Hundred will surely be helped by the switch to a private equity model of team ownership, which is set to kick in during the 2025 season.
As with the flagship short-format competition, the Indian Premier League (IPL), the ownership rights to each team will effectively be sold to the highest bidder, who in turn will have the power to change the franchise’s name.
It’s thought that some of the owners of IPL franchises will also look to buy their way into The Hundred, while other investors have also been rumoured to be looking at a takeover – Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, Hollywood actors and co-owners of Wrexham FC, are said to be considering a bid for the Welsh Fire franchise.
That would see millions of pounds pumped into The Hundred and English cricket as a whole, and as long as these wealthy owners aren’t allowed to use their teams as a plaything – look at football for reasons of why that is a disaster – then the financial viability of the competition will surely be on the up and up.
The Legacy of The Hundred
One of the challenges facing the ECB in terms of the longevity of English cricket is getting more people playing the sport at a recreational level.
Because the picture is somewhat gloomy in that regard: around 428,000 people classed themselves as recreational cricketers in 2009, but that had dwindled to just 292,000 a decade later.
However, The Hundred is seemingly playing its part in reversing that trend. In 2023, the number of people playing recreational cricket had risen to 340,000. It would be hard to say, definitely, that the popularity of The Hundred was the root cause, but it’s surely a contributory factor.
The legacy of The Hundred delves deeper than that, too. According to 2023 data, some 700 new cricket teams exclusively for girls or women were created in the UK, while the number of games played by girls/women’s teams increased by a considerable 22% in 2023.
As for junior cricket, participation numbers are also on the rise – despite the fact that access to the sport in state schools remains a ‘real problem’, and that’s from the mouth of ECB chief executive Richard Gould.
If getting more people – youngsters, girls and those from typically under-represented communities – playing cricket is an outcome of The Hundred, that truly is a feather in the cap of the competition.
The Future of The Hundred
One of the upshots of private equity investment in The Hundred is that, in theory, each franchise should be able to pay their players more – which should attract domestic and international stars whose heads have been turned elsewhere.
Crowded Market
A number of big-name players have opted to play in Major League Cricket in the United States, a money-spinning T20 format that overlaps with The Hundred in terms of scheduling. In 2024, some competed in the American event before heading back to the UK to play in The Hundred – arriving late and, in the case of some of the international players, unable to produce their best form.
Others, including Pakistan superstar Shaheen Afridi, have chosen to play in Canada’s Global T20 instead – despite being offered a contract by a Hundred franchise.
Some of England’s key players in other formats were resting up after a summer of test and/or ODI action. Ben Stokes, perhaps England’s most recognisable player, played just three Hundred matches in 2024 – facing a mere nine balls in bat – before being carried off the pitch at Old Trafford after tearing his hamstring.
Convincing more stars of the game, both domestic and international, will be vital in securing the future of The Hundred, as well as improving the ticket sales and TV viewing figures back towards those highs of 2023.
Team Identity
Another issue that needs to be solved is in creating a solid, long-lasting fanbase for each team. As it stands, the auction system means that there’s no guarantee of which players will play where in any given season – everyone in the draft is up for sale.
That doesn’t exactly foster a tight bond between player, supporter and franchise. And it’s hard to create loyalty amongst fans when the teams are regional in nature. In football, for example, the majority of fans support their local team.
But in The Hundred, such feelings of tribal locality aren’t really a thing; it’s hard to have feelings of impassioned loyalty about the Northern Superchargers or the Southern Brave, even if you live in those general areas of the country.
Instead, the private equity system should create more of a team feel – based upon identity, rather than geography. And being able to sign players on multi-year deals will also help to ignite the supporters over a longer term period, rather than from one season to the next.
Nationwide Interest
It will be vital to engender more support for the competition outside of London too. Lord’s and The Oval, the capital’s premier cricket grounds, hosted 29% of The Hundred’s games in 2024 but accounted for 46% of its total attendance. Igniting the passion of the rest of England and Wales will be crucial.
More entertainment is needed: not musical performances and fireworks, but excitement on the pitch. Scores were far too low during the 2024 edition, with unpredictable summer temperatures, slow pitches and a swinging Kookaburra branded ball all contributing to making batting much more difficult than in recent years.
In reality, for the audience the Hundred is targeting, big scores and huge sixes being hit are the key to ramping up excitement levels.
The Hundred will be played until 2028 at the earliest; that’s when its broadcast deal runs out. After that, who knows what the future holds for one of modern cricket’s most madcap innovations.