This is the final version of an article in the June edition of The Cricketer. It concludes a series of articles – you can find using the back tab at the bottom of this and previous pages – reflecting Network discussions on current critical issues suggesting the club game is at a tipping point.
Recreational cricket is set for a payout bonanza if widely reported terms of ‘privatisation’ of The Hundred are to be believed. An estimated £50m – a 10 per cent share of ECB’s proceeds from sale of its minority interest in the eight franchises.
So why are clubs not salivating at the prospect? Perhaps because the term ‘recreational cricket’ can be loosely defined, and because £50m is small beer compared to a 30 per cent share in its net broadcast revenues the ECB is supposedly committed to deliver to recreational cricket under the terms of the Sport & Recreational Alliance charter it is signed up to.
With gross revenues reported from the extended four-year Sky broadcasting deal of £880m alone, those promised funds could be eye-watering.
Yet in the first year of the current Sky deal clubs have seen nothing. Had it not been preoccupied with a different kind of equity, along with diversity and inclusion and the recommendations of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report, the ECB’s limited funding of the club game through its County Grants scheme might already have disappeared.
But let’s assume a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in the sustainability – economic, social and environmental – of the recreational game. How would the cash be spent?
More than 500 club leaders have so far completed the Cricket Club Development Network’s rolling member survey which asks them to identify their top priorities. More than 85 per cent ranked ‘junior transition to adult cricket’ and ‘the development of new income streams’ highest priority.
Firstly, the development of junior cricketers – boys and girls – and conversion in numbers to the adult game is perhaps shorthand for embedding a lifelong passion.
And, secondly, an implicit understanding that exclusively saddling those who play the game with financing both current costs and future investment is not sustainable, masked as it is by overreliance on the cheap labour of a declining volunteer army.
The ECB national programmes – All Stars and Dynamos – have galvanised club efforts at the youngest ages. More clubs are offering cricket at these ages than before and it feeds through to older ages.
The wider the base, the greater retention to adult cricket at the pyramid’s apex and ECB’s perceived step off the marketing pedal – 2024 national programmes numbers are down on 2023 which, in turn, were down on 2022 – could reverberate for years to come.
Local school engagement is critical, so Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement in May of £35m government investment in youth cricket, including substantially more funding for Chance to Shine’s work in schools, is very welcome.
How exactly that money will be invested – if it survives the general election and ministrations of Sport England – has yet to be worked out. There’s strong evidence the announcement came as a surprise to both the ECB and Chance to Shine.
It must include ways to embed cricket after initial introductory school programmes and that means working with clubs. Chance to Shine’s own data shows 14,000 of 20,000 primary schools are in close proximity, often walking distance, to a local club.
Not all those clubs have the coaching, equipment and administrative capacity to deliver junior cricket, while others are already bursting at the seams. There’s increasingly acute pressure on grounds and on groundspeople in much of the country, too.
The municipal and school facilities many clubs relied on to facilitate junior cricket growth and the explosion in women’s and girls’ fixtures (and ECB just announced targets to treble that) get scarcer as local authorities cut back on grounds maintenance, while emergence of non-traditional clubs and ‘pop-up’ teams increases competition for space.
The diminishing number of skilled volunteers is the No.1 preoccupation of leaders in those clubs who cannot afford the going rate – salaries or contracts in excess of £30,000 a year are not uncommon – of professional support. And that’s before the toll of climate change is added to the equation.
So we are seeing mergers and strategic partnerships between clubs, driven by ground issues. It’s giving rise to the so-called ‘superclub’; amalgamations of one or more clubs, not necessarily in close geographic proximity, resulting in five, six or even more teams playing under the same banner across several venues and in different leagues.
This consolidation might resolve ground issues, although not the pressure on groundspeople now expected to maintain grounds on different sites.
Successfully combining different organisational cultures is incredibly difficult. Rationalising costs sometimes means rationalising teams and loss of opportunity for less talented or developing players. And it’s blamed for the reduction of friendly and Sunday teams; there are areas of the country where such forms of the game have disappeared altogether. This can result in an exodus of players and their membership fees to other clubs, or away from the game entirely.
Conversely, these emerging behemoths are also accused of sucking up the local talent – sometimes with the lure of cash – and threatening the viability of smaller clubs whether in the same or nearby towns and villages.
A recent network poll revealed just 20 per cent saying the growth of ‘superclubs’ is an issue in their area. But these minority concerns may be concentrated in certain areas of the country; for example, where there are highly competitive leagues operating across multiple county borders.
There are rumblings that this trend is encouraged by some county boards and is even unspoken ECB policy. But there’s little evidence of this.
ECB have long promised their ‘club of the future’ blueprint but this is no closer to fruition than when first mooted. The ‘Hub club’ agenda was associated with junior cricket development in the early years of Clubmark accreditation. More recently, a reference to “core club” in an ECB club newsletter also raised suspicions.
Clubmark was initiated by Sport England back when it was interested in club development. The ECB saw it as a tool to assess winners and losers in the inevitable club shakeout that never really happened. Now it limps along on an ECB backburner waiting for some sort of strategic impetus.
Yet the majority of clubs leaders think that, for all Clubmark’s past bureaucracy, it could galvanise many more clubs around a common development agenda. Especially if it came with a funding commitment through the new recreational game bonanza.
The club game is at a tipping point. Many are in desperate need of facilities investment. The focus on new income streams results from a lack of available grant funding. Sport England has withdrawn from club funding unless catering for underserved groups in the poorest 30 per cent of postcodes and the ECB only ever offered pump-priming of Sport England money. The primary source of club funding is now local authorities, mainly from property developer contributions to local community infrastructure.
In Network research conducted in autumn 2022, 42 per cent of club chairs said they would step down in the following year or two, and 80 per cent intended to relinquish within three to five years. Our mailing list reveals that 15-20 per cent of 600 Clubmark clubs not represented in network membership have welcomed new chairs since that survey. Anecdotally, the ECB has also seen higher than usual churn in club roles in its recently completed annual safeguarding compliance audit.
The recreational game sorely needs funding and clarity around a future vision – one in which clubs are active participants, not token consultees.