English cricket is braced for losses of up to £380m if no matches are played this summer because of the coronavirus pandemic, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board has revealed.
Speaking to the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, Tom Harrison said that even if the Test series against West Indies and Pakistan and a series of T20 and one-day internationals against Australia took place, the ECB would still lose £100m in 2020.
It was, Harrison conceded, “the most significant financial challenge we have ever faced”.
The cricket season was due to begin on 2 April, but no matches will be played now until the start of July at the earliest.
“We anticipate the cost of no cricket this year could be as bad as £380m,” Harrison told MPs. “That is the worst-case scenario for us. That would be the loss of 800 days of cricket across all of our professional clubs and the ECB.
“The complexities of lockdown in those nations means there’s a huge amount of complexity to bring teams over, follow government guidelines and get players ready."
“We are staring at a £100m plus loss this year whatever happens. But with a following wind, hopefully we will be able to play a significant number of Test matches this summer which will help us mitigate those financial losses.”
Harrison admitted he could not commit to ring-fencing money for any part of the game, including women’s or grassroots cricket, in such unprecedented times. However, he did tell the DCMS committeee: “We will do whatever we can and whatever is in our power to protect women’s cricket.”
Harrison insisted that the Hundred, which he described as a “profit centre” that would have made £11m this year, would be a success when it launches in 2021.
“In terms of the position we put ourselves in for the Hundred, right at the moment Covid-19 struck we were in a very, very strong place,” he said, pointing out that the ECB had already sold 175,000 tickets by the end of February. “The game had never sold that number of tickets at that speed before, with the exception of the Cricket World Cup.
“So we were in a very strong position to achieve exactly what we set out to achieve in terms of growing the audience for cricket in this country.”
