Manchester Super Giants claimed their maiden Hundred title on 16 August, beating Trent Rockets by five wickets with two balls to spare in a final at Lord’s that capped the tournament’s sixth season and its most transformative off-season yet. Tim Seifert’s 38-ball 72, laced with seven sixes, hauled Manchester home after Trent Rockets had posted 158/8, with Seifert’s chase of 159 earning him the competition’s Most Valuable Player award and sealing the first Hundred trophy for either of Manchester’s men’s or women’s franchises.
A season played under new owners
The 2026 campaign, which ran from 21 July to 16 August, was the first since the ECB completed the sale of stakes in all eight Hundred franchises, a restructuring that brought in £520 million of fresh investment and left every team with at least partial overseas ownership. Manchester Originals became Manchester Super Giants under new owners RPSG Group, one of four rebrands that accompanied the sale alongside Oval Invincibles becoming MI London under Reliance Industries, Northern Superchargers becoming Sunrisers Leeds under the Sun Group, and Southern Brave taking on backing from GMR Group. Four of the eight franchises now carry direct ownership links to existing IPL sides, while the other four are backed by American investment groups, giving the competition a distinctly different look from the one that launched in 2021.
The first-ever Hundred auction
For the first time in the tournament’s history, squads for 2026 were built through a player auction rather than the draft system used in all five previous editions, with the sale held across two days, 11 and 12 March, at Piccadilly Lights in central London. Durham all-rounder James Matthew Coles emerged as the auction’s most expensive buy, going to London Spirit for £390,000, while Beth Mooney and Sophie Devine topped the women’s sale at £210,000 apiece. Sunrisers Leeds used the auction to push back against reports of an informal shadow ban on Pakistani players by signing leg-spinner Abrar Ahmed for £190,000, a deal seen in the dressing rooms as a deliberate signal that the competition’s new owners intended to recruit on merit rather than politics.
The ECB calls it a “seminal moment”
ECB leadership described the £520 million capital injection as a seminal moment for the English game, with more than £500 million earmarked for reinvestment into cricket in England and Wales at both the professional and grassroots level, including a specific £45 million commitment to new and upgraded recreational facilities funded directly from the team sales. Board officials argued that securing that scale of outside investment effectively future-proofs domestic cricket’s finances at a time when broadcast and sponsorship revenues across the sport have become harder to grow organically.
Not everyone is convinced the debate is over
Despite the ECB’s framing, the competition remains a lightning rod for criticism within English cricket. Commentators and county figures who have long opposed the Hundred’s existence argue that six seasons in, the tournament still has to justify itself on cricketing rather than purely financial terms, with some suggesting that every perceived ill in the domestic game continues to be viewed through the lens of feelings about the Hundred specifically. Attendance data from the 2026 season gave both sides ammunition: overall crowds were slightly down compared with the previous year, even as broadcast viewing figures ticked up and 22% of tickets sold went to under-16s, a figure the ECB points to as evidence the competition is successfully building a younger fan base. Notable attendance dips were recorded in Leeds and Southampton, the two host cities where the home franchise had undergone the most dramatic rebrand, raising questions about how smoothly fans are adjusting to the new IPL-style identities.
What’s next for the Hundred
With Manchester Super Giants’ breakthrough title providing a feel-good story to close out the first season of the new ownership era, focus now shifts to how the eight re-branded, foreign-owned franchises build on a transformative year. Questions remain over whether the auction system will be refined for 2027, whether further name or identity changes are coming as new owners settle in, and whether the grassroots investment promised from the £520 million sale will be visible on the ground quickly enough to blunt continued criticism of the competition’s format. For Manchester, Seifert’s six-hitting masterclass gives the newly rebranded franchise an immediate identity of its own heading into the next cycle.
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