One of the curios of the ECB accounts is payments made to a company called Reigndei. According to the accounts for the year to 31 January 2017 Reigndei is "An insurance company beneficially owned by the 18 first class counties, MCC and MCCA."  Presumably the ECB's payments are to insure against bad weather at international matches.   Reigndei is a very profitable entity.  In the period 2005 - 2017 premiums paid to Reigndei by the ECB were £6.3m greater than the claims paid to the ECB by Reigndei.  Reigndei also earns interest on premiums received and the true profitability would be somewhat higher.  As an international insurance company I don't think Reigndei would pay tax in Guernsey and there is no indication in the ECB accounts of any controlled foreign company tax charge in respect of Reigndei. What is not clear is what Reigndei does with the money it accumulates.  The company is resident in  Guernsey  and as a consequnce  th...

In its accounts for the year to 31 January the England and Wales Cricket Board shows costs of £157m split between costs of sales of £20m and administration costs of £137m. But there is nothing in the accounts that explains how the money is spent.  There is nothing wrong in the lack of disclosure in terms of UK GAAP or The Companies Act but as the ECB is a public benefit entity receiving funding from Sports England, additional disclosure would be best practice. Reading through the accounts it is possible to identify certain items of expenditure and these are set out in the table at the foot of this post. The source column in the table identifies where in the 2017 accounts information is disclosed. The biggest expense is the £66m paid to the first class and minor counties, and the the MCC (not clear why ECB is making payments to the MCC.  The ECB is based at Lord's but presumably this is rent free / contribution to costs only.)  If you add the payments mad...

Cricket history is one of my interests.  I'm currently writing a book on the England vs West Indies test series of 1933 and the return series in the West Indies in 1935. Doing this I spent some time going through the MCC archives where I came across correspondence on negotiations between the West Indies Board of Control and their three star players: Learie Constantine, George Headley and Manny Martindale over contracts for the 1939 tour of England. I thought it was interesting stuff but didn't fit in with the book, so instead it became an article that got published in the Nightwatchman cricket quarterly.  Now I have a blog it is reproduced below. Six hundred pounds, plus expenses Test cricket between the two World Wars seems very far away. Norman Gordon of South Africa died in 2014 and there is no - one left alive who played international cricket before World War II.  All we are left with is flickering fragments of Test matches on film.  Yet during the...

The ECB has announced a media rights deal to run from 2020 - 2024 (i.e five years in total).  This is their  Press statement The deal sees the return of live English cricket to terrestial TV but only for 20/20, all tests and 50 over ODIs remain behind Sky's pay wall.  In men's cricket the BBC will show 10 games from the new domestic 20/20 competition including the final (which is good news as I think the original intention was that Sky would have exclusive rights to the final). There will also be two live, men's international 20/20 games on the BBC plus one women's 20/20 international on the BBC. An interesting snippet is that Sky are proposing a cricket only channel, might that mean cheaper access for people who only want the cricket channel? The ECB are claiming the total rights package (Sky plus BBC)  is worth £1.1 billion.  If the figure is correct it is a big step up from the existing deal.  The  Daily Telegraph  reckons the prev...

Welcome to my cricket blog It's a side on view because I'm looking at cricket: from a historical, financial and (as far as my bad maths allows)  statistical viewpoint.  So nothing about England test match selection or who is going to win the IPL, because those things are covered very well already. Hope you enjoy it.