Hot on the heels of Australia announcing multiyear contracts for their best men’s players, England have followed suit. The difference? Pat Cummins has signed up to play for his country until the next Ashes series in Australia and Ben Stokes, his opposite number as Test captain, has not.
This is an eye-catching move by Stokes, regardless of the comparison with Australia and Cummins. Amid the swell of domestic Twenty20 leagues, the England and Wales Cricket Board has rejigged its annual contract system to tie down the premier talent for longer. But despite an offer of three years sitting on the table, and a knee injury that remains shrouded in mystery, Stokes has agreed terms for just the next 12 months.
Timing appears to be the main factor. With a fresh memorandum of understanding between the ECB and the players due next year, in line with the next broadcast deal, Stokes is waiting to see how things pan out; whether the money on offer and his own market value will increase in the meantime. He has, it should be said, stated recently that England’s next bid to regain the Ashes in 2025-26, when he will be 34, is very much on his radar. Rob Key, the team director, sounds reassured here.
There are a couple of rumoured developments at play which could strengthen Stokes’s hand further should one or both come to pass. Firstly, there is talk of Indian Premier League franchises starting to offer year-round deals to play in both their main team and their satellite sides around the world; essentially becoming a player’s primary employer. Then there is a widely held belief that Saudi Arabia is looking to set up its own T20 league, the money for which could blow the Indian Premier League sums out of the water.
The ECB has stressed that every player offered a deal signed on the dotted line but in the case of Stokes – and Jos Buttler and Jofra Archer in the two-year bracket – shorter terms have been requested. Regardless of length, the money is handsome for the 26 players on main deals, with salaries ranging from £150,000 to £900,000 before match fees enter the equation. On top of this, the ECB is unlikely to block any bids to play in the main IPL, an unofficial window for which now exists.
The three players handed three-year deals highlight how the new multiyear approach varies. For Joe Root it recognises his remarkable body of work to date – 11,416 Test runs – and lasers the 32‑year‑old Yorkshireman’s focus squarely on that next Ashes tour. Harry Brook is an acknowledgment of his all-format potential, the 24-year-old having flown out of the traps in a manner that makes his appeal to T20 suitors obvious.
Mark Wood is the third and, approaching 34 with a patchy track record as regards fitness, may raise some eyebrows. But the 95mph pace that lit up the Ashes this summer endures and England fancy it need not necessarily dip if managed well. An eye‑watering sum of money in the awful UAE-based ILT20 has also been trumped, marking it down as an early win for the concept of locking down players – particularly fast bowlers – for longer.
Similarly, the distribution of two and one-year deals further down gives an indication of a player’s standing in the eyes of the selectors, their age, and appeal to the domestic T20 market. That said, even as a red-ball specialist, Ollie Robinson may be wondering why 76 Test wickets at 22 did not bring more than 12 months, not least now Stuart Broad has retired. England, having stockpiled 13 seamers in total and shown patience with Archer, may feel Robinson, 29, needs the motivation.
Times have certainly changed since 12 central contracts were first handed out in 2000, ending the days, as Nasser Hussain once put it, of players returning to their county after a Test and listening to the radio to discover if they had made the next squad. Though worth little more than a county deal, their strength lay in managing player workloads, improved fitness and creating an England-first mentality.
Like the money, the number of deals on offer has swelled since and they were briefly split by way of format during England’s rise in white-ball cricket. But this latest reshuffle is the most significant overhaul, underlining the alternative career path now on offer to players, even if it may prove little more than a holding pattern while a new system is thrashed out over the next year.
Certainly Stokes believes it is, the Test captain still keen to win back those Ashes but bullish enough to see how the wider landscape changes first.
