As reported by Cricinfo, the London Spirit Hundred team have been bought by a group of American businessmen, including the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella, who have paid £150m for a 49% share in… well… what? What have they actually bought?
Let’s start with a couple of things they have not bought.
1. A share in the future TV and merchandising rights of London Spirit.
There is no way that these hard-headed businessmen can possibly believe that they are going to get their money back from TV rights and sales of replica shirts. The ECB’s own (optimistic) estimates, as leaked by Lalit Modi last year, suggest total profits for London Spirit of just £48m before tax over the next 8 years. Tax would reduce that to £34m, but remember that the investors have only bought 49%, so would actually get just £16m back, leaving them £134m in the red. And that’s assuming the ECB’s estimates of a substantial increase in TV revenue hold. The bottom line? Our American friends are not in this for the money!
2. Lord’s
If instead of London Spirit, Satya Nadella & Friends had decided to hop on a bus over to Islington and bought Arsenal Football Club, among the things they would now actually own would be the the Emirates Stadium. That’s not the case with The Hundred. The new owners do not now own Lord’s – the self-styled “Home of Cricket” where London Spirit play their home matches – they don’t even own 49% of it. They don’t own a single brick of the pavillion, nor one blade of grass on the square – they own nothing physical whatsoever.
So, what have they bought?
The simple answer is that we don’t really know.
When I was at school, a friend returned after Christmas one year with a star – an actual star in the sky, along with a certificate to say that he owned it. (And all I got was a new bike!) So is this what Nadella & Friends have bought? The cricketing equivalent of a star in the sky? A certificate which says “London Spirit – Property of Satya Nadella”? It is possible. But given that these men rose to the top of some of the most powerful businesses in the world, I’m going to suggest that they aren’t that stupid – they have bought “something”, so what it it?
The best answer I can come up with is that they have bought a sort-of “timeshare” over Lord’s – the right to be the “Kings of Lord’s” and to use it for a specified time (roughly coinciding with the month of August) over a specified number of years. (The documents leaked by Modi suggest 8, because they finish in 2032, but… as with so much of this, who knows?)
But what does that timeshare entail? The right to go into the pavilion, normally reserved for MCC members? The right to take over the pavilion on match days? These are not men who are used to having to queue for a seat – if they want to sit in the Long Room to watch the game, they’ll expect to be able to walk in and do that, and have it all to themselves, with big blokes in black glasses on all the doors to make sure of it.
If this is what happens, it has all been done legally and above-board – the members of the MCC voted to allow the current leadership full rein to negotiate the terms of this timeshare; but none of them know what it actually entails. And they may never know, until they walk up to the pavilion one day next summer to find out their name isn’t on the list and they can’t come in.
