The Hundred can eclipse IPL as cricket’s “premier tournament”, says Raine exec – SportsPro

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The Hundred has the potential to eclipse the Indian Premier League (IPL) as cricket’s “premier tournament”, according to Raine Group partner and head of EMEA Jason Schretter.
Global merchant bank Raine co-led the process to sell stakes in The Hundred’s eight teams alongside Deloitte. The agreements, reached in February, raised UK£520 million (US$707 million), valuing the franchises in the England and Wales Cricket Board’s (ECB) 100-ball competition at close to UK£1 billion (US$1.4 billion) cumulatively.
Investors include the chief executives of tech giants such as Google and Microsoft, as well as private equity firms and IPL teams. While the Indian league has been a runaway success since its debut season in 2008, firmly establishing itself as cricket’s most commercially dominant franchise competition, Schretter believes The Hundred has the potential to rival it.
“The Hundred should have the ambition not just to be the second best [franchise cricket league], but to be the best,” said Schretter, who was speaking at the SportsPro Investment Summit in London.
“The reason why I say that is it is geographically positioned in a time zone that can unlock the whole cricket world. If you’re sitting in the US, it’s pretty hard to watch an IPL match. As great as the product is, you’re getting up quite early in the morning or late at night.
“And so I actually think this (The Hundred) can become the premier tournament.”
Schretter acknowledged that The Hundred surpassing the IPL was a long-term aspiration and unlikely to happen “in the next five years” at least. Indeed, the IPL’s 2025 campaign, which wrapped up last month, served as yet another reminder of the league’s commercial dominance.
Notably, this month’s final delivered 169 million TV viewers, making it the most-watched cricket match ever in India. JioStar said the 2025 campaign reached a combined audience of one billion viewers across its linear television and digital platforms.
A study by investment bank Houlihan Lokey also pegged the business value of the IPL at US$18.5 billion in 2025, which was a rise of 12.9 per cent year-over-year (YoY).
Closing the gap on the IPL, which boasts domestic broadcast rights deals worth I₹48,390 crore (US$6.2 billion) and a title sponsorship with Tata Group reportedly valued at ₹2,500 crore (US$300 million) annually, is a daunting task for The Hundred, which is only four seasons old and remains divisive among cricket fans in the UK.
Jonathan Goldstein, co-founder and chief executive of Cain International, which reportedly paid UK£40 million (US$54.3 million) for a 49 per cent stake in the Trent Rockets, said the goal is to build a product akin to the IPL, even if The Hundred does not surpass it.
“The ambition here is to create – if one’s being sensible – the second biggest cricket competition in the world,” said Goldstein, who joined Schretter and The Hundred’s managing director Vikram Banerjee on stage at the SportsPro Investment Summit.
“The IPL has been an extraordinary success. It’s second to the NFL in broadcast per game revenues. The holy grail is to create something like the IPL, and over the course of the next five to ten years that’s what we’re going to be seeking to do.”
More domestic franchise leagues have been launched since The Hundred’s first season in 2021, including the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) International League T20 (ILT20) and South Africa’s SA20. Another is Major League Cricket (MLC) in the US, which takes place during the English cricket summer and whose high-profile backers include multiple IPL franchise owners and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella.
Goldstein, however, said he was not worried about competition from across the pond.
“I don’t really see America as a long-term competitor to Britain in relation to cricket,” he said. “America’s got its staple sports. It’s got [American] football, baseball, basketball, [ice] hockey. And Britain has cricket in the summer.
“Why is the time right for the ECB? Because cricket, by comparison to football, has been under commercialised and under exploited, and that’s the opportunity for all of us.”
Banerjee told SportsPro at the end of April that the sales of stakes in the Hundred franchises were “in the final straight” and discussions with investors remained in “a really good place”.
More than two months on, Banerjee reiterated that the deals are “nearly there” and again cited the complex nature of the sales for the extended wait.
“In any process where, at the last count, there were 21 law firms involved, it’s going to take a bit of time,” said Banerjee. “And we’d always thought that we’d rather get to where we wanted to get to, in a good place, than rush things and perhaps not get it quite right.
“But we’re finally in a place where the majority of everything is all agreed, so we can finally start looking forward into how we grow the tournament and how we work together to take it on to the next phase.”
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