Hundred chiefs have been told that the competition’s widening gender pay gap is “not fair and not right”, as English cricket celebrates its near £500million windfall from the franchise sell-off.
On Wednesday, Southern Brave became the final team to go up for auction and with all eight franchises now having sold at least a partial stake, the group has collectively been valued at more than £960million.
The money raised from the sale - roughly half of that sum - is to be pumped straight back into the domestic game, split between the first-class counties, Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the recreational pyramid.
Oliver Hannon-Dalby, the newly-elected chair of the Professional Cricketers’s Association, has become the latest hail the potential impact of the unprecedented investment, vowed to use his tenure to push for pay parity across the men’s and women’s Hundred tournaments.
“The women’s game in this country is absolutely exploding and its brilliant to see,” Hannon-Dalby, the veteran Warwickshire seamer, said. “The women’s Hundred has been an absolute success.
“It’s a conversation we need to have [about the pay gap] and it’s something we need to try. It’s something that I put in my manifesto, it’s something that’s important to our members and something we definitely want to improve.”
In 2023, the damning ICEC report recommended that the England & Wales Cricket Board equalise salaries across the two competitions by 2025. Instead, however, the gap has widened in the highest salary brackets this year.
Though the overall pots in both competitions are up by 25 per cent, the distribution of funds has not been equal, with the best-paid men’s players set to earn £200,000 - a 60 per cent increase - compared to the top women’s fee, which has risen only 30 per cent to £65,000.
“By this stage, gender pay was meant to be equal and certainly in the conversations that we’ve had with the ECB in previous years, they said they were going to improve it,” Hannon-Dalby said. “And it’s actually probably got wider, hasn’t it? The pay gap’s actually got wider, which is not great.
“It’s simply just not fair, is it? It’s not right.”
Organisers defended the salary increases when they were announced late last year, prior to this month’s landmark sell-off.
Rob Hillman, the Hundred’s tournament director, insisted that the rises were “clearly not the end of the journey” in boosting pay for women’s players, with the top salary now four times more than in the tournament’s debut year in 2021.
The ECB are viewing 2025 as a transitional season for the competition before the influence and resource of private investment is truly felt in 2026, and for now the body has focused on topping up the most lucrative men’s contracts in the hope of attracting more overseas stars.
Hannon-Dalby, a county stalwart, has himself never played in the Hundred and while he welcomed the influx of cash about to hit a sport plagued by financial difficulties, he urged cricket’s authorities to use it wisely to preserve the game’s future at all levels.
“I want to protect county cricket as much as I can,” he added. “I don’t think that if you spoke to the ECB that they’re really sure yet of how they’re going to use it. How that money’s used and how it’s filtered down into the county and recreational games is going to be important.
“It’s great and I can’t really argue with the figures that are coming to the game there. Hopefully, in 20 years time we’ll be sat here saying: ‘Wow, what a brilliant job that money did for the game’.”
