As the man parachuted in to save Northern Rock during the 2008 financial crisis and the chair of the Premier League at the height of the European Super League threat 13 years later, Gary Hoffman can be forgiven for enjoying the relative tranquillity of his latest role, in county cricket.
The 65-year-old became the chair of Northamptonshire in October, and after enjoying some sunshine in Cape Town while taking in a warm-up game against Gloucestershire last month, is ready to enjoy the County Championship season.
What Hoffman describes as the “small but perfectly formed” County Ground at Wantage Road has been re-energised by the surprise appointment of Darren Lehmann as the head coach shortly after Hoffman started his role. “If you ask Darren he’ll tell you that the timing was right,” Hoffman says with a smile.
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The timing was definitely not right during Hoffman’s ill-fated spell at the Premier League, which ended with him effectively being booted out of office after 18 months after a vote of no confidence by the clubs. The catalyst for his removal was unhappiness at the league’s decision to approve Newcastle’s sale to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, although it is unclear how much influence Hoffman had. As revealed by the Guardian the following year Boris Johnson’s government had spent months encouraging the league to sign off the deal with one of their key trading partners, with lobbying efforts led by Gerry Grimstone, then the minister for investment.
Hoffman is speaking publicly on the matter for the first time since leaving the Premier League, and while reluctant to settle scores it is clear the job took its toll. The Newcastle takeover was the tip of an iceberg that at times threatened to sink the Premier League. Hoffman was also tasked with steering the league through the pandemic and the civil war caused by the Big Six clubs’ Project Big Picture proposals, which led to the breakaway Super League threat.
He reflects about being a senior figure at Barclays “when the banking industry was collapsing … and then [I] went to run Northern Rock, and the weekend the Super League story broke was comparable with that. My time was arguably the most intense period, the most difficult period in Premier League history for lots of reasons.
“When you’re a sports addict it should be the dream job. I chaired the [grassroots funding charity] Football Foundation for nine years, I knew everyone really well, I’d been involved in the sponsorship of the Premier League through Barclays. So in many ways being appointed chairman of the Premier League was the dream job and should have been the most enjoyable job in the world.
“But it wasn’t. Partly that was because of the time I joined. It was incredibly intense through Covid, through Project Big Picture, through the European Super League, through the Newcastle takeover. It was really tough, but I emerged from it with my values intact.”
Partly through Hoffman’s work with the government, which led to Johnson’s infamous threat to drop a “legislative bomb” to stop English clubs from joining the Super League, the breakaway was crushed almost before it began, but the Premier League’s difficulties have not abated.
A 12-month legal battle with Manchester City over associated party transaction rules, introduced on Hoffman’s watch after the Newcastle takeover, remains unresolved. The verdict in the Premier League’s financial fair play case against City will present huge challenges whatever the outcome.
The only assistance Hoffman feels able to offer to his successor, Alison Brittain, and the chief executive, Richard Masters, is his discretion.
“For anyone involved in the Premier League, it’s one of the toughest jobs in football,” he says. “I’ve always said I would never come out and criticise others. I think everyone who has been there should keep their mouth shut. They know it is a tough job. The Premier League executive should be left alone to get on with it.”
Hoffman’s current concerns, such as ensuring there is some county cricket to watch in Northamptonshire during the summer holidays, must seem rather parochial compared with negotiating with the UK government and conducting legal battles with Gulf states, but he takes them seriously, nevertheless.
Hoffman, the chair of the app-based challenger bank Monzo, is not a cricket newbie. He has been involved at Northamptonshire since 2016, when he bought shares in the newly demutualised club, which was facing bankruptcy over unpaid tax. After leaving the Premier League he was asked to apply to become the England and Wales Cricket Board’s chair in 2022, and made the final shortlist before the process was paused, which led to the appointment of the incumbent, Richard Thompson.
“People tend to be in cricket for the right reasons,” Hoffman says. “Mostly because they’re volunteers. All the county chairs and board members are volunteers, and they’re not in it for themselves. They usually love the sport, they’ve usually played the sport. People will have different objectives for different counties, and of course running county cricket is very different to running England cricket. But you start from a position where everyone is sort of on the same page.
“That’s not true of football in my experience. In football everyone has different objectives. When there’s lots of money around people will always argue about sharing the money out. And people argue even more when the money goes down, which is what happened during Covid. I think the Premier League did a great job keeping the lights on in that period.”
For the first time in decades cricket is not facing that problem, with every county set to receive a windfall of at least £20m from the ECB after the Hundred sale, although Hoffman is only half-joking when he says Northamptonshire “still count the lightbulbs to see if we can afford to turn them on”.
With Indian billionaires and Silicon Valley CEO’s among the Hundred buyers, Hoffman expects English cricket to spend the next few years battling similar issues to those the Premier League has grappled with for the past decade, with the biggest clubs pushing for a greater share of central revenues, particularly from television.
“If I was investing a large amount of money in a Hundred team I would expect to have a significant voice, and I’d expect more of the broadcast rights would come to me, rather than be shared with everyone else,” he says. “That tension has been there in football for a very long time. And you can see how what has happened in football, will play out in cricket.
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“Currently the non-host counties get a share of Hundred revenue on an annual basis, which comes from broadcast effectively. We have to make sure that if and when that dynamic changes, we have managed Northamptonshire to protect it in the long term.”
Hoffman’s immediate preoccupations are pushing for more county cricket when the Hundred is taking place – Northamptonshire have only eight days’ cricket this August in the One-Day Cup, which has been downgraded to a development competition – and he is also interested in overhauling the County Championship to produce greater jeopardy through a playoff system.
“I think it’s ridiculous that in the height of the summer we have so little cricket in Northamptonshire,” he says. “And the Championship should be reorganised to make it more of a spectacle, whether that be bums on seats, or more likely for streaming or television.
“Everyone got very interested in the Championship on the final day last year, but only for a few hours. Promotion and relegation was at stake so it mattered. It’s why the playoffs work in football.
“We in cricket need to learn from that jeopardy to create more interest. You can’t have a competition in which people only tune in for the last three hours. Cricket will never be football, but there must be ways of creating more interest.”
