The Hundred: Rewarding Mediocrity

 In the draft for The Hundred the following players were all given, top rank, £125,000 contracts:

Joe Clarke 

Tom Kohler - Cadmore

Tom Banton

Laurie Evans

Liam Dawson

The £125,000 bracket was designed for top international players the sort of people who earn $1m + from the IPL and need to be tempted to participate in The Hundred.

But none of the 5 players above are elite cricketers.  None of them is playing in the current iteration of the IPL, none of them is a regular in England teams.  And yet each gets £125,000 for playing in the Hundred.  

It's not the only money the five players get from English cricket as each of them also has a county contract.  Precise figures on how much county cricketers earn are hard to find but £100k per year might be a decent guess for an experienced, OK player at one of the larger counties.  (Lancashire's cricket wage bill divided by the number of cricket staff comes out at about £80k.)

A Hundred player has to rebate 12.5% of their county salary so as a rough estimate the five players above are earning £200k a year from English cricket.  And that's before factoring in employers' national insurance of 15%.  

But why?  Prior to the Hundred each of those players would have had a county contract with no ECB top up, why are they getting more now?  And of course they aren't the only players being overpaid, pretty much everybody with a Hundred contract is getting a lot more money than they did previously, for pretty much the same amount of work.

All this is deleterious for English cricket.  Firstly The Hundred loses money, £13m* going by the ECB's calculations, which is  diverted from other projects.  Secondly the introduction of central contracts in 2000 aligned the interests of county cricketers and the national side.  A decent county player could make maybe £100k playing county cricket but a centrally contracted player would be earning closer to £1m.  There was a clear financial incentive to improve.  Franchise cricket offered players another route to big bucks and the ECB seems to be adding to the phenomena of average players getting above average rewards.

One final question:  If we are headed to a cricket dominated by short form franchises what need is there for an ECB at all?

*  That's if you deduct the £1.3m plaid to each county (which you definitely should) and if you accept the ECB's unaudited figures (which you probably shouldn't)