On Sunday, Aug. 16, the men’s and women’s finals of The Hundred will be contested at Lord’s. The competition is in its sixth year and has been a disruptive force since its conception in 2017.
The format is disruptive, consisting of 100 deliveries, broken into sets of five, with a bowler able to deliver 10 successive balls. Players for this year’s event were acquired mainly by auction, rather than selection, with four overseas players, instead of three, allowed in each starting XI.
A further disruption occurred over the winter when equity shares were sold in the eight franchises. And ticket prices have been increased.
Speaking after the first week and the 11th match on July 29 between the Trent Rockets and the Welsh Fire, England’s opening batter, Ben Duckett, expressed his surprise at the number of empty seats at several grounds.
His reasoning was: “You look at every side, and it’s just world-class opponents. I’d be desperate to watch some of these guys play cricket.” At 3 p.m. in Cardiff on a Wednesday, there were around 7,400 spectators. This compares with a record 11,796 attendance for the Welsh Fire’s opening match against MI London the previous Saturday evening.
Critics of The Hundred were quick to seize onto the fact that overall attendance in the first week of this season was reported to be 18 percent lower than in the first week of 2025. In aggregate, the first six men’s matches drew a combined attendance of 89,413 compared with 109,519 in 2025. Several explanations have been advanced.
One is the transition to whole or partial private ownership. The new franchises need to work closely with the host county cricket clubs and there are suspicions that some marketing campaigns may have been slow to start; the tournament did start one week earlier than in 2025. Increased ticket prices may have caused sluggish early demand.
It is also possible that it is taking time for the new owners to understand their market. A particular case in point is SunRisers Leeds, previously playing under the name of the Northern Superchargers. The significance of that change may be lost on the uninitiated. Under the original name, the target audience was families in Yorkshire and the northeast of England.
As clearly seen in football, such is the partisan rivalry between cities in the region that people from football hotbeds such as Sheffield, Barnsley, Huddersfield, Bradford and Hull may baulk at supporting a cricket team with Leeds in its name. Furthermore, the franchise has only two Yorkshire players in its squad and is 100 percent owned by the Sun Group of India.
Sunrisers co-owner, Kaviya Maran, is on record as saying, rather blandly: “We need to get the crowds in. Obviously, it’s a new brand.” She may regard it as new, but ripping up an existing five-year old brand and replacing it with another requires an adjustment on the part of fans who had become familiar with the original brand.
Apart from the Sunrisers, Manchester Originals became Manchester Super Giants and the Oval Invincibles became MI London. Other teams changed their colors and visual identities. Imagine the outcry if either Liverpool FC or Manchester United FC decided to change from red.
Loyal support is built over time, through culture, a sense of tradition, shared identity, local association and, of course, success. In English cricket that loyalty resides with counties rather than cities. Over time, the changed identities may settle down but a new layer of confusion has been added to a competition that needed continuity rather than disruption.
Although The Hundred was designed to attract new audiences to cricket via a shorter, faster, format, it was also designed to disrupt power balances. The managers of English cricket in 2017 were frustrated by the voting structure of the 18 counties, from whom a two-thirds majority was required in order to effect any change.
Investment in the game was needed and The Hundred was seen as the vehicle to achieve that, although the 10 counties who would not be part of the competition had to be persuaded along the way. This came in the form of a guaranteed windfall of $1.75 million, essential to bolster their sustainability.
In terms of attracting new audiences, The Hundred claims that over 2.5 million spectators attended matches between 2021 and 2025, of which 1.5 million attended the women’s competition, with 203,000 people buying tickets to their first-ever cricket match. In 2025, a global record was broken for total attendance at a women’s cricket competition, with 349,401 fans in attendance. Over five years, 530,000 junior tickets were purchased.
In 2025, 580,000 tickets were sold and issued. Attendances were at the same level in 2023, compared with 500,000 in 2022 and 540,000 in 2024. The stronger years were ones in which the tournament followed a men’s Test series against either Australia or India. The Hundred’s audience comprise 23 percent juniors, 41 percent families and 30 percent female buyers.
In 2025, viewing figures increased, with Sky Sports’ audience for the group stages up by 38 percent on 2024. BBC Sport saw 2.2 million online viewing requests for The Hundred in 2025, up from 1.6 million in 2024. This is regarded as success by The Hundred’s proponents. They also point to the injection of $701 million into English and Welsh cricket through the equity sales of the franchises.
It is left to those with less rosy spectacles to highlight questionable impacts and consequences of The Hundred.
The most commonly cited of these is the complex and congested cricket season in which four competitions and international series have to be shoehorned into six months. This is because The Hundred has to be played in August to coincide with school holidays.
The county championship has been pushed to the fringes of the season, whilst the T20 Blast has suffered a drop in attendances. Ironically, the One-Day Cup, now a development competition for younger players to gain first-team experience, has proved popular with spectators.
One suspects that that they are the ones who bemoan the lack of county cricket in August and do not favor The Hundred. Yorkshire has benefited, reaching the semifinals with seven players who came through its academy.
Another beneficiary at Yorkshire is its current CEO, Sanjay Patel, who was one of the key architects of The Hundred when working for the national board, for which he received a substantial bonus. Yorkshire’s 2025 accounts show that a company directed by Patel received a commission of $2.36 million for “corporate broker services in connection with the sale of Northern Superchargers Limited.”
It is claimed that payment was made prior to Patel taking up his Yorkshire post. A determination is to be made whether the case is referred to the Cricket Regulator. Detractors of The Hundred will hope so.
These detractors are also annoyed that franchises are underutilizing some of England’s brightest young talent. Each franchise has between four and six spare squad members, who have barely played a match.
They may be handsomely remunerated but, surely, they need to be developing their game. Franchises appear to have been reluctant to release players back to their counties for One-Day Cup matches.
Much more cooperation and goodwill are required if the Hundred is truly going to be the beneficiary for good in English and Welsh cricket that its advocates proclaim.
