The size of viable traders within the Hundred groups is “much broader and larger” than expected before Friday’s first round of bidding time limit. This is in line with ECB senior management, which on Wednesday defended Hundred’s planned valuations of foreign broadcast rights, insisting: “We are confident in our product.”
The ECB sent funding brochures to around 100 people on the last day, who have been given a deadline of October 18 to demonstrate their initial interest in buying a stake in one of the 800 groups. The groups are currently owned by the ECB, but will become franchises run as joint ventures with the host countries (or the MCC) once the sale process is complete.
One potential investor, who has since withdrawn from the sales process, told ESPNcricinfo that those figures “make no sense” and had not been fully explained. “It appears they first came up with a valuation and then made up numbers to justify it, things like the sudden, exponential growth in broadcasting revenues in India and North America,” they mentioned.
Richard Gould and Richard Thompson, the ECB’s chief executive and president respectively, are in Multan during this period during England’s second Test against Pakistan, before the first round time limit. They said the board has drawn interest from a “full range” of potential investors and defended the projected increase in revenue from Indian broadcast rights.
“We are not assuming that the Indian men’s players will be released, because that has not been what has happened,” Gould said. “We are confident in our product, in terms of the window we occupy and the players we have available. There are a lot of T20 and short format franchise competitions at the moment, and I don’t think all of them are going to last, really.”
Gould said “around 100” people had requested access to the ECB’s “data room”, along with “a lot of Indian interest” and the vast majority of IPL and WPL franchise owners were known to be concerned about the procedure. He mentioned that there has also been passion “from the United States, from other sports and from investment houses.”
He mentioned: “We are reaching the end of the first stage this week… at the moment, you can express interest in all eight clubs. We will have a better indication in the next week or two. From then on, we will spend about a month going over them At the end of that process, they will be able to go and meet the clubs in the county and see where their relationships work best.
“During that period, you will be able to take interest in up to four teams. Once we get to the crucial phase, which is the next phase, all you will be able to do is put your name on two teams, and we will only be able to win one. Obviously, we want maximize the price, because the value that the ECB has is in the name of sport.
Gould mentioned that there were “a couple of tire kickers” among the parties that initially showed interest, but Thompson insisted that the ECB had generally exceeded expectations. “Raine mentioned early on that they thought there would be 3 to 4 bidders based on the workforce,” he said. “The funding pool is much broader and larger than they anticipated.”
“What we don’t want is to feel obligated to sell them all and think, ‘They might have given us extra accumulation if we had held back because that same team wasn’t in a position to travel.'” “, said. “The worst thing we can do is underestimate the game and look back thinking, ‘We let some of these franchises ride at prices that weren’t full market value.'”
