The ECB has warned of the potentially cataclysmic impact of the rising power of overseas franchises such as the IPL while the appeal of Test cricket declines.
English cricket’s governing body said the “emergence and growth of global franchise leagues” and “the status of Test cricket globally” pose major risks to its business model in its latest accounts, published on Wednesday.
With the ECB expected to overhaul its central contracts system – introducing multi-year deals and significantly increasing match fees in an effort to retain the loyalty of leading players – it also draws attention to the “pressure on player wage inflation in a highly competitive market” as a potential threat.
The owners of several IPL teams are known to want to tie players to 12-month contracts and it was recently reported that several English cricketers had been approached to see if they would, in principle, be willing to accept such a deal.
Venky Mysore, the chief executive of the Kolkata Knight Riders, said last year: “If we were able to have ‘X’ number of contracted players, and were able to use them all in different leagues, I think that would be nirvana. Hopefully, someday it will happen.”
The ECB’s spending on salaries has massively increased in recent years – more than doubling from £25.8m in 2018-19 to £57.4m in 2022-23 – and the need to increase payments to top players is sure to push that figure further upwards.
The launch of the Women’s Premier League, a T20 franchise league based in India and the success of the ECB’s own women’s Hundred suggests salary inflation will also affect the 18 centrally contracted women
Since 2018-19, the number of cricketers employed by the ECB has risen from 37 to 128, with average headcount rising from 331 in 2020-21, a figure reached after restructuring as a result of Covid, to 495 in their latest accounts.
The latest increase was put down to “the increase in umpires as well as increases in commercial, communications and events and game support staff”, after last year’s was blamed on “the employment of players and coaching staff of the Hundred entities in the first full year of the competition”.
The controversial bonus paid by the ECB to their former chief executive Tom Harrison, collected shortly before he departed the organisation in June 2022, is revealed to have taken his total remuneration to £1.13m in four months, up from £496,000 the previous year. This may be the highest paid to a British sporting executive. By comparison Mark Bullingham, chief executive of the FA, was paid £819,000 in 2021-22.
The ECB reported a profit before taxation of £21m, similar to the £21.5m declared a year ago. This has allowed it to boost its reserves to £35.4m, up from £23m the previous year and £2.2m at the end of the first pandemic year, 2020-2021.
Having reviewed their reserve policy over the past year they now say they hope to inflate it to a level that “would absorb the loss of an international series if a touring team were not to meet their future tours obligations to play a series in the UK”.
