Lancashire Cricket CEO Daniel Gidney has floated a bold and potentially transformative idea: offering the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) a minority stake in The Hundred. Gidney believes this commercial alignment could be the key to attracting top Indian men’s players to the England and Wales Cricket Board’s (ECB) short-format competition.
“I think it’s possible,” Gidney told ESPNcricinfo. “If I was the ECB, I’d be talking about perhaps bringing the BCCI in as a minority ownership partner in the tournament as a whole. If you do that, then you are aligning interests. That is probably your best chance of getting [Indian men’s] players in The Hundred. It comes down to the will, and the individuals on both sides.”
Commercial incentive could reshape global cricket policy
Gidney stressed that the BCCI’s longstanding restriction on its contracted players participating in overseas T20 leagues would not change without substantial incentive — and a financial stake could provide that reason.
“The BCCI have been really successful with protecting their brand and by making sure they don’t plan any T20 tournaments anywhere in the world… If I was the BCCI, then I would have to say I would need a significant incentive to relax the current policy because that has been extraordinarily successful and has grown the IPL into the massive commercial entity that it is.”
Lancashire’s deep ties with Indian cricket
Gidney believes Lancashire Cricket is uniquely positioned to lead any collaboration with the BCCI, citing strong existing relationships and a long history of welcoming Indian players.
“We’ve probably had more Indian overseas players than any other county,” he said. “When you have VVS Laxman at the NCA, who [Lancashire director of cricket] Mark Chilton captained, then you have strong relationships all the way through.”
He emphasized the need for trust and understanding between cricketing bodies.
“It’s all about relationships between stakeholders… If you build a relationship with the BCCI and understand the types of players that they see as potential future Test players, that’s a lot easier than putting in an NOC request saying ‘We’d like to see Virat Kohli or Rishabh Pant playing in the County Championship.’”
Exhibition games between IPL and English teams a stepping stone
Gidney suggested that exhibition matches between IPL franchises and English county or Hundred teams could be a more immediate opportunity to bring Indian talent to UK audiences.
“That’s the first step,” he said. “Imagine having an LSG vs Delhi Capitals game here at Emirates Old Trafford — at the end of the season, say in September. That could be pretty mega, in terms of the Indian fans in the UK. It would make commercial sense for everybody.”
He also proposed aligning franchise ownership across leagues as a pathway to efficient talent sharing.
“When an overseas player gets bought at auction in the IPL, and that’s locked in for three years via retentions, then it just makes commercial sense for that player to then potentially play for Durban, for Manchester, and also potentially for Lancashire in the Blast … It’s a lot more efficient, and it could become a lot more straightforward.”
The Hundred needs flexibility and investor innovation
As the ECB considers structural changes and possible outside investment in The Hundred, Gidney argued for a model that encourages innovation through partial private ownership.
“But having eight investor-owned teams will encourage innovation. The ECB have done a really good job of creating this acquisition product, but they’ve had to do things in a pretty vanilla way for eight teams. They currently have eight identical DJ booths, which are all quite big: it kills about 3000 seats in the stadium here. It could now take up about one-third of that.”
He added that ownership models should emphasize mutual trust over rigid control.
“Control means ten different things to ten different people,” he said. “We have a joint-venture operations agreement, so effectively, we are running the team on a 50-50 basis. And then in the shareholders’ agreements, as long as you have above 25% — which we do — you get minority protection, which means that we can have some general reserved matters.”
“We’ve done the JV ops agreement, we’ve got a very robust shareholders’ agreement, and we’ve got good reserved matters. But all of these things are for the bottom drawer, because if you need to pull that out, then you’ve got a problem. The key is being able to trust your partner that you are working together… Chemistry is really important, and we’ve got that with RPSG.”
Name of Author: Cricexec Staff
