Does The Hundred know how to grow fandom as changes & player flux impacts attendance?
What's Shaping Sports Weekly Digest 27th July
The Lead
The Hundred is now in its 6th year and is a live case study in efforts to manufacture fandom, how a sport attempts to grow and what happens when outside investment poses a potential power shift in how it goes about that growth.
A staggering £500 million was invested last year when the ECB sold stakes in all 8 teams, half of which are to Indian Premier League owners. The money is a massive one-off boost to cricket in the UK and for some counties a huge lifeline.
Despite more money in the game the 6th year and first in this new era has had a mixed start with attendances down by almost 20% after six men’s games compared to the opening fixtures last year. The women’s games which preceded the men’s at the same venues were down in all bar one game.
Ticket prices for kids remain low but are now a lot higher for adults, between £35 and £55. About 4,000 tickets were given away for MI London’s (Oval Invincibles in old money) opener at the Oval. More positively, this Wednesday’s London ‘derby’ between MI London and London Spirit is close to a sell out and my local side Southern Brave have already sold out their 8th August game against Manchester Supergiants.
The 100 ball format is only played in the UK and was brought in to generate new interest in cricket from younger fans. In the first five years 2.5 million attended, with 203,000 people buying tickets to their first-ever cricket game. But last year a staggering admission from the ECB was that they have no evidence that new fans attracted to The Hundred have gone on to attend other forms of the game.
The eye test of attending games at The Hundred shows younger people and families are attending, but numerous changes influenced by the IPL owners and the way squads are created feel like they’re going to work against all the things you need to do in generating fandom.
Due to changes from a draft to auction, only around 1/5th of players across both men’s and women’s teams are playing for the same team as last year.
Changes in personnel is not new in sport but if the goal is to bring new fans into the game, players are a big part of that and allowing such a large flux in player changes isn’t going to help bring that familiarity and closeness to a team and then desire to watch or support.
With each team playing at a county ground you have fans of the respective counties going to watch, while also the opportunity the ECB haven’t measured so far for if The Hundred moves people into other formats like their local county. Here the player familiarity should be key but it’s remarkable how few players in the Hundred are playing at their traditional home grounds.
Just 12% of men’s and 15% of women’s players are playing for The Hundred team at their local county ground. I write this as I watch the side closest to me Southern Brave play MI London at the Utilita Bowl and instead of Hampshire’s star James Vince playing for the Brave as he had done for the first five years, he is wearing MI London colours. One of English crickets all time greats Joe Root, while not playing much for Yorkshire due to England duties, is associated with that county but plays for the Welsh Fire instead of Sunrisers Leeds.
Three of the teams changed names and all have brought out new kits. MI London have offered a kit amnesty to swap the now old Oval Invincibles kit, but did the owners need to throw away what the Invincibles had started to build up in recognition with the men winning the last 3 titles and the women the first 2? Free kits are on offer at Manchester after their AI launch video shocker that called on the city’s red and blue football divide to unite.
Each match at The Hundred comes with all the bells and whistles around the cricket from live entertainment to interactive activations yet the on field product itself has to be the main draw. The competition runs for just 3 weeks which isn’t long to create any lasting belonging from one year to the next and with all the changes made this year to team’s identities and squads it feels like a reset, rather than a competition finding rhythm.
In the short-term, The Hundred may have saved a few counties from going under. Its biggest success so far is arguably the increased awareness of the women’s game and the money women’s players can now earn. Whether in the long term we’ll still be talking about these franchises, a format played by no other country or most importantly the impact it had on growing younger cricket fandom is unclear.
In other news
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Bob Myers, the President of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, who own the 76ers pitched for Lebron on his agent’s podcast, telling Rich Paul “If LeBron is here I would honestly say this is your best chance to win…What I would say to LeBron is if it’s about winning this is the team to win”.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver wanted LeBron to hurry up deciding so they could set the NBA schedule, which usually doesn’t come out till mid-August anyway.
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