The Hundred has quietly crossed a structural threshold. The 2026 season is the first in which operational control of all eight franchises sits with TeamCos — joint ventures between outside investors and the counties that host each team — rather than with the England and Wales Cricket Board directly. It is the culmination of a sale process the ECB finalized in late 2025, and it marks the moment English cricket’s newest format stopped being a governing-body project and became a genuine private franchise league.
The numbers behind the sale
The eight partnerships collectively valued the teams at more than £975 million, unlocking over £500 million in new investment into the English and Welsh game. Of that, £50 million was ring-fenced for grassroots cricket, with the remainder distributed across the professional county circuit that the Hundred was originally built to subsidize. Investors formally took over from October 1, 2025, making 2026 the first full season under their stewardship.
Who actually owns the teams now
The buyer list reads like a snapshot of global sport’s capital flows: four of the eight teams are now linked to ownership groups with existing stakes in Indian Premier League franchises, while the other four are backed by American investment. Reliance Industries, the Ambani family conglomerate that also owns Mumbai Indians, took a 49% stake in MI London (formerly London Spirit), and Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly’s Cain International acquired the same-sized stake in Trent Rockets. Some teams, including Birmingham Phoenix, London Spirit’s renamed successor, Southern Brave and Welsh Fire, have restructured equity while keeping elements of their original branding. Chelsea and England footballer Jude Bellingham also took a small ownership share in Birmingham Phoenix, part of a broader pattern of the new investment round pulling in high-profile names from outside cricket entirely, betting that celebrity association can help the format cut through to casual sports fans who have never previously followed the domestic game.
What the ECB kept for itself
Crucially, the ECB has not handed over everything. The governing body retains control of the competition itself — its playing regulations, calendar slot and overall structure — while ceding day-to-day franchise operations, commercial activity and player recruitment strategy to the new ownership groups. That split is deliberate: it lets the ECB protect the Hundred’s core format and English contracted-player pool from being reshaped by outside owners chasing IPL-style expansion, while still letting those owners run their businesses.
The bull case for private ownership
Supporters of the sale, including several county chief executives who depend on the redistributed proceeds, argue the deal solved an existential problem: English domestic cricket’s finances were strained, and outside capital at this scale simply was not going to arrive without ceding real operational control to investors used to running professional sports franchises. In their reading, the Hundred’s private ownership era is what kept county cricket’s lights on.
The skeptical case
Critics, including some traditionalist voices in the English game, warn that ceding operational control to IPL-aligned owners risks slowly reshaping the Hundred into a satellite of India’s franchise ecosystem — importing player pathways, marketing playbooks and even eventual scheduling pressure that could crowd out the county championship the sale proceeds were meant to protect. They also note that a handful of billionaire owners now control assets that were, until recently, publicly accountable through the ECB.
The women’s game’s stake in the outcome
One of the least discussed but most consequential elements of the sale is what it means for the Hundred’s women’s competition, which has been credited with meaningfully lifting attendances and broadcast numbers for domestic women’s cricket in England since the tournament’s 2021 launch. Under ECB ownership, women’s fixtures were guaranteed prime scheduling slots and marketing parity with the men’s games as a matter of policy rather than commercial calculation. Whether TeamCos, now answering to private shareholders focused on return on investment, maintain that parity once attendance and sponsorship data can be broken out by gender is an open question that women’s cricket advocates in England are watching closely, even as the ECB insists its competition-level rules protect the women’s schedule regardless of who owns the franchises.
What’s next
With TeamCos now fully responsible for commercial strategy, expect faster decisions on sponsorship, kit deals and marketing than the ECB’s committee-driven model allowed — but also a test of whether private owners stay committed to the Hundred’s stated grassroots and women’s-game investment commitments once they are the ones writing the checks rather than the regulator enforcing them.