County Memberships

Nick Bloom has recently published a book on county cricket, "Batting for Time: The Fight to Keep English Cricket Alive". I haven't read the book, but the review in the Daily Telegraph got a lot of attention for a quote from Durham Chief Executive Tim Bostock describing county members as Luddites.  The "L" word is only the half of it, Bostock also describes county members as the "lowest common denominator."  This is a companion piece to an article published last year in the Telegraph where an unnamed ECB source described county members as "fleas on the tail of the dog."

The middle - management rungs of English cricket's bureaucracy have an odd attitude towards paying customers.  Of course contempt for customers can extend to the free market but the rule is it shouldn't be openly expressed, even a bank that has me on hold for half an hour will say every two minutes "your business is important to us".  If English cricket had a phone line it would just be someone with a public school accent shouting, "get off the phone coffin dodger, I'm expecting a call from the Saudis."

Oddness isn't confined to cricket's administrators.  You would have thought the Daily Telegraph, paper of the tweed clad and gin sozzled, would have been a natural ally of county members but instead it's thrown in its lot with the vacuous managerialist tendency in English cricket.  It's a small sidebar to the strange demise of English conservatism.  Because the Telegraph and journalist Nick Holt could have turned their story through a hundred and eighty degrees: the article also includes a quote from ECB chief executive Richard Gould: “When I’ve got clubs moaning that their members want them to do something that they don’t, often it’s clubs that have neglected their membership base."  This could have been moved to the top of the piece beneath the headline. (Gould slams "moaning" county chief executives?) but the Telegraph would rather lead with Luddites.

The belief at The Telegraph, Durham CC and sections of the ECB bureaucracy that county members are a check on progress does not have a factual basis.  My county, Warwickshire, voted to go ahead with The Hundred without any formal reference to members and I don't think any of the 15 mutual counties, in theory run by their members, had a proper vote on whether the Hundred should go ahead.  Decisions are made at board not member level.

Now you might think that the board of a members' club would be elected by the members but that's not the case at Warwickshire CC.  "Elected"  board members can only be candidates for selection if approved by the nominations committee.  If the number of vacancies on the board matches the number of candidates the candidate(s) go onto the board with no vote.  As the number of vetted candidates always matches the number of vacancies the elected board member is never, you know, elected.  At Warwickshire and, I think, a number of other counties, the board runs the county and the board is selected by the ..... board.

That's not to say that the membership has absolutely zero influence.  Warwickshire's chief executive, Stuart Cain, was rather taken aback by the number of members objecting to the Strauss plan and talk of calling a Special General Meeting. This was probably a factor in Warwickshire moving from a position of cautiously accepting the direction of the Strauss proposals to being happy for them to wither on the vine.  But only one factor, it was clear from the outset that Stuart Cain had  reservations over the proposals and I get the impression that incoming ECB chairman, Richard Thompson, had no desire to put the squeeze on the counties to support a plan Thompson had nothing to do with.  The ECB is, for the moment, the big power in English cricket, the players are second, county chief executives third and county members, at best, a distant fourth.

That's enough ranting.  We like a table at Sideonview, here's one of county members for 2022.

County	Members
Derbyshire	1,089
Essex*	3,719
Glamorgan	1,528
Gloucester	4,029
Kent	2,082
Lancashire	5,100
Leicestershire	880
Middlesex	8,403
Nottinghamshire	5,773
Somerset	5,457
Sussex	1,734
Surrey	19,087
Warwickshire	3,263
Worcestershire	2,459
Yorkshire	3,335
	67,938

A few comments. The membership figures are taken from the 2022 or January 2023 returns to the FCA for the 15 "mutual" counties (i.e. not Hampshire, Durham,  Northants). The 68k county members represents an increase of approximately 5% over the previous year*. I haven't ordered the counties by size of membership as numbers aren't completely comparable; some counties have white ball memberships that at other counties are season tickets with no membership rights, although I think white ball membership is becoming more common. There were big percentage increases in membership at Lancashire (may be due to including white ball only memberships), Worcestershire and Kent and a sharp decline at Somerset. 

You can see why, former Surrey chief executive, Richard Gould is dismissive of the moaning of some county chief executives. Surrey's 19k members make up 28% of all county members and must account for approaching £4m of Surrey's income. It's not realistic to expect all counties to have 19,000 members but Surrey's current membership doesn't just stand out against other counties it is very high compared to Surrey membership in previous years. Surrey's membership has pretty much doubled in the past five years whilst at other counties membership numbers have either stayed constant or declined. I think it might be an idea for Gould to set up an ECB sub - committee charged with; improving communication with members, driving democracy at all first class counties and spreading best practice for growing membership, between counties.

* The 2021 figures included 2020 figures for Warwickshire and Essex.