The ECB have avoided the potential embarrassment of a Hundred franchise wearing a gambling company’s logo on the front of their shirts, with all eight teams locking in primary sponsors from other sectors before Tuesday’s opening game.
The Hundred had a central deal for front-of-shirt sponsorship with KP Snacks (who own several crisp and nut brands) for its first five seasons, when the ECB ran the eight teams. But host counties and new investors took charge of team operations late last year, and have since been able to negotiate their own sponsorship deals.
The sponsorship market has proved far more challenging than first anticipated, in part because the Premier League has imposed a ban on front-of-shirt betting partners ahead of the 2026-27 season. That prompted the ECB to allow Hundred teams to sign gambling sponsorships for the 2026 season only on a ‘last-resort’ basis, despite the tournament’s family-friendly approach.
But the eight franchises have all now locked in alternative partners for this season. Some teams are still expected to wear gambling logos on their kits – either on shirt sleeves or trousers – but the ECB have publicly committed to taking a “powerful stand” next year with a blanket ban on visible betting sponsorships in the Hundred from 2027.
“From next year, it’ll be banned,” Vikram Banerjee, the Hundred’s managing director, told Cricinfo. “You have to acknowledge that gambling and the betting industry is a massive part of sports sponsorship… [But] there’s be no visible betting sponsorships from next year, which is a powerful stand and stronger than any other cricket league.”
“We – myself and the ECB – are very aware of the family audience and what we’re trying to do as a brand,” Banerjee added. “Our position was to see if we can get it banned for this year. We had a good discussion and the [Hundred] board agreed, in my parts, that it’s an opportunity for us to take a stand that is stronger than any other sport in the world.”
The Hundred’s board agreed after a vote in May that betting sponsorships would be allowed for 2026 but only on a ‘last-resort’ basis, including a minimum valuation, the opportunity for players to wear sponsor-less shirts for religious reasons or due to personal views, and a stipulation that children’s replica kits could not feature any gambling logos.
“We felt as a board that this year – with all the operational change that’s going on, all the transition that’s happening, plus, frankly, quite a challenging market with the Premier League going through changes and all the rest of it – [that] just a one-year transition period was helpful for some of the teams to see them through this year,” Banerjee said.
Only three of the eight franchises had front-of-shirt partners in time for the Hundred’s kit launch on June 1, but the other five have now signed with a variety of brands – including an online estate agent, a global logistics giant, a health insurance company, and financial services firms – in time for the start of the 2026 season.
“It has been a collaborative effort from teams and partners and ourselves to see if we can get other options through,” Banerjee said. “It has ended up working well… We’ve found a decent, sensible and pragmatic approach for this year.”
“The level of unprecedented change that we’ve gone through in the last 12 months, I don’t know of any other sports league that’s done that,” Banerjee said. “Along the way there’s been a lot of learning, a lot of hard work to get to this point… I’m super excited about where we are and what we can achieve, and what fans will see from Tuesday.”
The 100-ball format is unchanged for 2026 but the ECB is pushing to double down on the “currency of ‘balls'” and want to remove the word ‘sets’ from the tournament and its coverage on Sky Sports and the BBC. The term has effectively replaced ‘overs’ in the first five seasons but is seen as unnecessary “jargon” that has put existing cricket fans off the Hundred without simplifying the game for new ones.
“The idea was never just to be different for different’s sake,” Banerjee said. “Sets, I can see what we were trying to do. But, like anything where you are innovating and trying to grow and do new things, some land and some don’t as much… If we strip it back and go back to ‘balls’, I think that works really well.”
Teams will also compete for a new trophy this year, the ‘Hundred Helix’, which will see each men’s and women’s result count towards one table to determine an ‘overall’ winner as well as the two main trophies. All three trophies (men’s, women’s and overall) will carry equal prize money.
Matt Roller is a senior correspondent at Cricinfo. @mroller98
