ECB refuse billion-dollar proposal for the Hundred from IPL founder

The ECB turned down a similar offer last year from the Bridgepoint Group worth £400 million for a 75 per cent stake in the Hundred. At the time, Richard Thompson, the ECB’s chairman, said he would only consider offers of a “few billion” and since then the ECB has pursued a strategy of selling equity in the teams, with the board retaining ownership of the competition.

Modi told Telegraph Sport he has lined up investors willing to pump money into a 10-team tournament but told the ECB the Hundred format does not work and should be converted into a Twenty20 competition instead.

He says his competition would include a team purse of up to $10 million every season, putting wages on a similar level to the IPL. Modi put the value of the competition at $100 million a year over 10 years and says the franchises should be English-owned and English-run with minimal input from India. He believes the ECB should sell no more than two franchises to IPL teams in order for it to keep its English identity and not turn into another version of the IPL.

Modi has been working on his plan for English cricket for the past 18 months and believes its scale would make the competition second only to the IPL in terms of financial clout, and the windfall would guarantee the future of the counties for a generation. The ECB’s plan to sell equity, by its own estimate, will bring in a tenth of what Modi is confident he can deliver. However, the ECB wants to retain control of the competition and the high summer window.