The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has appointed Vikram Banerjee, currently its director of business operations, its new managing director of The Hundred, the short-form eight-team domestic competition.
This comes soon after the ECB finalized the process of selling stakes in all eight sides to private investors, raising around £520 million ($657.3 million) in revenue in the process.
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In total, as the competition looks ahead to its fifth season – to be held in August this year – the eight teams have a combined valuation of £975 million. The ECB is understood to be pleased with the money brought in, given that they turned down an offer of £400 million for the whole tournament from the Bridgepoint Capital private equity firm in late 2022.
Banerjee was in charge of the process of attracting investment and dealing with potential new team owners, and has now been moved into the role of heading up the competition (featuring both men’s and women’s editions) as a whole.
His new role, the cricket body has said, will see him “conclude the ongoing sales process and then work with each of the investors, professional counties, and wider partners to ensure alignment.”
Rob Hillman, the ECB’s director of major events, will remain in charge of the competition on a day-to-day basis, meanwhile.
The governing body has kept control of the competition itself, meaning it controls the time window, format, number of teams, and overall structure.
The whole process got underway in September, with the ECB – who has run the competition up to this point – initially gifting 51% to the professional counties at whose venues the Hundred teams play. The ECB then looked to sell the other 49% in each organization, leaving it up to the host county as to whether any further stake was sold (thereby making an outside investor the majority stakeholder).
Banerjee, who first joined the ECB in 2017, has commented: “I’m delighted to be taking on this new role, and to be able to drive the competition forward, building on the success of the competition so far and working with a new group of partners who bring such an impressive range of skills and expertise from the very best of global sport and industry.”
Before joining the ECB, he worked in commercial strategy at the Whitbread hotel and restaurant multi-national firm, following on from several years as a county cricketer for Gloucestershire.
Richard Gould, chief executive at the ECB, added: “Vikram has led the work to attract new partners into the competition superbly, and is the perfect person to now conclude these deals and work with the teams and investors to take The Hundred to the next level over the coming years.”
Despite all teams now having had stakes sold, the 2025 season of The Hundred is likely to be transitional in terms of the new stakeholders, and widespread changes are unlikely to take place until 2026.
The most lucrative deal saw a consortium of Silicon Valley tech heavyweights pay £145 million for 49% of the London Spirit, who play their home games at the iconic Lord’s Cricket Ground in London.
