Is The Hundred good? What is The Hundred? Is it saving English cricket, or killing it?

The answer seems to depend on who you ask, and where you ask them.

If you ask at the games, you’d struggle to imagine there has been any negativity surrounding the England and Wales Cricket Board’s (ECB) domestic 100-ball summer tournament at all. Families clad in replica shirts, waving flags, seem to be having a lovely old time. At the eliminator game (effectively the semi-final), Steve is there with his two children Danny (aged nine) and Sophie (seven). With the look of a parent who desperately ran out of ideas as to how to entertain two kids during the summer holidays, he describes the day as “a godsend”. They’ll be back next year.

At finals day, with a full house of 27,000 people, there are similar scenes: Claire encourages a shy child to wave her foam meerkat’s paw, handed out in the thousands by the sponsors.

Supporters of Sunrisers Leeds wave flags during their game against Welsh Fire at Headingley (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

But if you ask pretty much everywhere else, you’ll get a slightly different story. Stories about declining attendances abound. Headlines that reference ‘revulsion for The Hundred’ have appeared in national newspapers. Pundits have decried the quality of the play. Many existing cricket fans simply aren’t talking about it at all, focusing on whatever psychodrama the England men’s team provides that week.

So what to make of the whole thing? Is it good? Who decides what ‘good’ means? Has it served its original purpose? Does any of this matter?

After six editions, even taking into account these changes, you would have thought that conclusions will have been reached, with minds changed one way or another and success or failure declared. But it still feels like the same conversations around The Hundred are happening as they did a decade ago.

The germ of The Hundred was dreamt up 10 years ago when it was decided that English cricket needed something new — a city-based tournament that could compete with, if not necessarily overcome, the all-powerful Indian Premier League (IPL).

It would be slightly different to other Twenty20 leagues: rather than 20 overs of six deliveries each, this new format would be 100 deliveries, the ultimate purpose to shorten the game just enough for free-to-air, non-sports specialist TV stations to broadcast it.

The Sky Sports studio for the original draft for The Hundred in October 2019 (Christopher Lee/Getty Images for ECB)

The early PR wasn’t great. Andrew Strauss, at the time the ECB’s director of cricket, said in 2018 that the competition would be “for mums and kids in the summer holidays” and would be easier for them to follow than traditional formats, which carried with it the implication that women and children couldn’t count to six.

It was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but the first season came in 2021. Eight ‘franchises’, located in seven cities, were given names of varying degrees of silliness.

Before the 2026 edition, the biggest changes to the competition’s structure were made. Previously, all eight teams had been centrally owned by the ECB and run by ‘traditional’ county teams. In 2024 it was announced that 51 per cent of each team would be awarded to those counties, and the remaining 49 per cent made available to external investors. The counties could also sell as much of their stake as they wanted, which half did to one extent or another.

Stakes in three of the eight teams were acquired by companies that also control IPL franchises: Mumbai Indians, Sunrisers Hyderabad and the Lucknow Super Giants, and with that came name changes. Respectively, the Oval Invincibles became MI London, the Northern Superchargers became Sunrisers Leeds, and the Manchester Originals became the Manchester Super Giants.

The sales of these stakes raised around £554million ($751m), a whopping £145m of which came from a consortium of Silicon Valley investors known as the ‘Tech Titans’ purchasing 49 per cent of the London Spirit. The assorted investments valued the eight teams collectively at just under £1billion.

The money gained from the ECB’s share sales allowed two things. More money was made available, raising the general level of player salaries, and helped pay for the number of overseas players per team going up from three to four. The other benefit was that significant amounts would be put back into the English game, decided by a series of semi-complicated formulas but, broadly speaking, the proceeds have been split between the counties, the MCC and grass roots cricket.

Most English ‘non-host’ counties will get around £25m each.

Which is great, but that’s the short-term benefit. Its longer-term value is less certain.

Georgia Elwiss of Trent Rockets runs out Jess Jonassen of Sunrisers Leeds on finals day (Philip Brown/Getty Images)

One stick used to beat the 2026 edition has been attendances.

Early in the tournament, it was reported that crowds were down by 18 per cent, which was technically accurate at the time but probably unfair because of the small sample size. Nonetheless, England and Trent Rockets opener Ben Duckett broke from the party line to lament the empty seats. “I’m so surprised that the crowds have been what they have,” he said, “because I’d be desperate to watch some of these guys play cricket.”

By the end the number of tickets ‘sold and issued’ was around 550,000, roughly five per cent down on last season but the third-biggest of the six years. It is also the highest in the summers where there hasn’t also been a high-profile men’s Test series (when Australia in 2023 and India in 2025 toured), which the ECB believe is a ‘launching off’ point: cricket is more in the public consciousness, so The Hundred grabs its coattails.

“It’s a tiny bit down broadly flat,” Vikram Banerjee, the CEO of The Hundred, told reporters last week. “Of course, there’s room for growth, but at this stage, given where we are, I’m very, very happy with ticket sales.

“Ticket sales are just one of those metrics, but if you look at broadcast, we’re doing unprecedented growth. Some of the digital growth and social media views, whether that’s through TikTok and Instagram or YouTube… there are some really strong metrics that back up just how delighted we are with where this tournament’s at.”

Sky Sports, The Hundred’s primary broadcaster, reported viewership is up six per cent year-on-year. They claimed 43 million ‘views and impressions’ across their social platforms, although their most successful piece of content, responsible for 5.4 million of those views, featured the England and Real Madrid footballer Jude Bellingham attending a Birmingham Phoenix game.

Bellingham has invested in the Phoenix but, even so, it feels significant and arguably a little bleak that the best-performing post did not involve any cricket and was led by someone who isn’t a cricketer.

Jude Bellingham is in the house! 🙌🏏

Watch all the action from Edgbaston with NOW: https://t.co/l0AiGvS4dE 📺 pic.twitter.com/dCZ3mYPQIl

— Sky Sports Cricket (@SkyCricket) August 1, 2026

Banerjee tried to spin “flat” as a success, but how seriously can we take that? Around 510,000 attended in The Hundred’s first year: can we call an eight per cent increase in six years an unequivocal success? Particularly when, as CricketHer pointed out, attendance figures for the women’s game were down at every ground apart from Cardiff, compared to last year?

As a percentage of the capacities of all the grounds at which games were played, on average about 76 per cent of the seats were filled. Is that good?

It also feels like there has been very little cultural cut-through. Machinations involving the England Test team, who announced Joe Root and Stephen Fleming as their new captain and coach halfway through tournament, seemed to get far more attention than anything happening in The Hundred. The ‘Clicky Ponting’ saga, a cheating scandal in village cricket, seemed to be discussed more widely among existing fans.

But therein lies the rub: The Hundred isn’t really for established cricket fans. Its purpose is to bring in new ones.

Figures on whether that has worked are sparse, but the ECB reported that 40 per cent of the attendees throughout the tournament were under the age of 16. ECB CEO Richard Gould told the media last week about walking through Manchester city centre after a game and seeing “more cricket shirts than football shirts”.

What he didn’t mention is that in their early games, the Super Giants handed out free shirts to anyone who bought a ticket: a fine initiative, but perhaps not the “great indicator” of success that he identified it as.

Part of the problem is that so little of the discussion around The Hundred, from both the media and officials, is actually about the cricket. More often than not it feels like an entity constantly trying to justify its existence.

So let’s discuss the cricket.

The general consensus seems to be that the standard has been pretty good, better even than previous editions, on the men’s side, but on the women’s side there has been a decline. Former England spinner Alex Hartley has been especially scathing of the standard of play while commentating on the BBC.

Perhaps one problem was that the eventual winners on the women’s side, Trent Rockets, were too dominant. They finished top of the league table having won seven of their eight games, one game against the Birmingham Phoenix lasting just 126 balls. The women’s final was similarly uncompetitive, the Rockets beating Sunrisers Leeds by chasing down a target of 92 with 46 balls to spare. That isn’t going to make any competition appealing.

The men’s final was closer. The Rockets set the Manchester Super Giants a middling 159 to win, which they did overcome even if a late flurry of wickets made it much closer than it probably should have been.

The BBC’s Alex Hartley interviews Paul Walter of Manchester Super Giants (Philip Brown/Getty Images)

This isn’t to say there hasn’t been good cricket. More runs doesn’t necessarily equal quality, but the men’s tournament saw record collective scores, a total of 10,254 runs surpassing the previous record of 9,481. The women’s teams scored a combined 8,013, the second-most of the six seasons.

It felt like Mitch Marsh was flaying some unfortunate bowler all over the place every time you turned on the television. Trent Rockets opener Sophia Dunkley won the final with a superb innings mixing power and touch, while the Sunrisers’ Phoebe Litchfield produced some terrific clean hitting and brilliant fielding.

There were also plenty of impressive highlights moments throughout the tournament. Harry Brook and Dewald Brevis hit ‘no look’ sixes that went semi-viral. There was even some beef, Trent Rockets captain Sam Billings — formerly skipper of the Oval Invincibles — unimpressed with how MI London reacted to dismissing him in a clash with his former franchise.

“It’s even sweeter to get the win today”

Sam Billings’s honest thoughts on MI London’s reactions to his dismissal. pic.twitter.com/39Lkb4MxSs

— Sky Sports Cricket (@SkyCricket) August 8, 2026

“I probably do think this is the highest standard (season) so far,” Dunkley tells The Athletic. “Definitely. The women’s game is really evolving year-after-year at such a quick rate, as well as having four overseas players in each team, which brings a lot more international experience and naturally will lift the standards. So I think a combination of the two has really helped that. It definitely feels like the highest standard of The Hundred I’ve played in.”

After the final, Billings, whose Rockets side were runners-up, told reporters: “I was a cynic at the start, but I think it’s a brilliant format. It’s improved my captaincy 10 times over. It’s no doubt second only to the IPL: I play in most places, and I can say that confidently.”

Early in the tournament, Sunrisers Leeds posted a clip of their men’s team trying to learn a new ‘team song’.

It was cringingly embarrassing, as players tried to sing off pieces of paper that looked like slides from a badly thrown together PowerPoint presentation, resembling reluctant children being made to sing in church. It was quickly deleted.

forever in our hearts https://t.co/SHe42zflgb pic.twitter.com/2uFbVMJmip

— DAISY CUTTER (@daisycutterzine) July 26, 2026

In one respect this was just internet fun and games, but it also raised the question of identity, and presented a tournament that is caught between two ideas about fandom. One, that people just want to show up, possibly with their families, for a good night at the cricket and they don’t much care who’s actually playing. And another that is more in keeping with English sporting traditions; that fans are tied to a team or a city or a region, this song being an example of authorities trying to manufacture that.

One problem with tying The Hundred teams to global franchises, all rooted in the IPL, is that it partially erodes any point of difference. The Hundred was supposed to be different because… well, it was different. The format resembled T20 but was different enough to require a slightly different approach.

But if the teams involved have similar players and similar coaches and similar names to similar looking franchises in India and South Africa and the United States, then it’s just the same stuff in slightly different locations. The cricket website Daisy Cutter referred to this as ‘T20 franchise slop’.

As an example, in the first five years the Oval Invincibles played in their own pale turquoise colour, had a name that referenced their home and tended to sign their own Surrey players. When the owners of IPL franchise Mumbai Indians purchased 49 per cent of the team, their name and colours changed to bring it in line with the other teams in the ownership group, and players common with those teams were introduced too.

Amelia Kerr, Hayley Matthews, Nicola Carey and Will Jacks all also play for Mumbai Indians. Nicholas Pooran and Rashid Khan play for MI Emirates (UAE), MI New York (U.S.) and MI Cape Town (South Africa). Trent Boult plays for all of them plus Mumbai Indians. The women’s team is coached by Lisa Keightley, who is also in charge of the Mumbai Indians, while the men’s team is coached by Kieron Pollard, batting coach of… well, you get the idea.

Will Jacks playing for MI London (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

This is currently only an issue for three of the eight teams, but if there is an expansion in the coming years then it’s impossible to think that more IPL owners won’t bid for the extra teams.

There are positives, of course. The RPSG Group, who own the Manchester Super Giants, recently bought land next to Old Trafford that they will turn into a ‘high performance’ centre for all of the teams in their group to use. “This is about leaving a lasting legacy for cricket in this region,” said RPSG chairman Sanjiv Goenka.

“The professionalism stands out, but also the family aspect,” says Matthews, when asked about playing for multiple teams in the same group. “I feel like you’re always treated really well and taken care of. They certainly provide an environment that makes it easy for you to go out there and be able to focus on cricket and be at your best.”

Additionally, some players felt that the decoupling of the teams from the ECB actually enhanced their individuality. “From a player’s point of view, it’s felt like a bigger and better competition,” said Jos Buttler after leading the Super Giants to victory in the men’s final. “Each team is very individual.”

But for the tournament in general, what does it mean? Will The Hundred just become an outpost of Indian cricket, which is arguably already too powerful?

Jos Buttler, the Manchester Super Giants captain, lifts The Hundred trophy (Philip Brown/Getty Images)

There have been corollary positives.

The money brought in by the Welsh Fire has allowed Glamorgan to clear their debts, which in turn meant they could fund the Cardiff branch of the Centres of Excellence programme when the ECB withdrew its funding in 2024. The Hundred and its players has been used to promote the KP Snacks Everyone In Fund, an initiative to get families from varied backgrounds involved in cricket in some respect.

It feels like The Hundred is a tournament about which few have changed their minds. If you decided you were going to hate it, there’s plenty to back that up, whether its ‘big picture’ stuff like the marginalisation of other forms of the game and pushing the non-host counties into semi-irrelevance, or minor irritations like the ubiquity of sponsors Compare the Market’s meerkat mascots.

But if you’re the people at the top, you can point to an enormous stack of money, and thousands of kids waving flags, having a lovely day out with their families, and quite reasonably say things are going brilliantly.

Ultimately, it’s still cricket. If you’re channel surfing and just want to watch some high-quality sport, why wouldn’t you stop and watch the games? Prune it of any context and a casual viewer would probably barely notice the difference between this and any other short-form competition.

Nonetheless, you suspect there will never really be a consensus. Opinions will never change. Few will ever truly be persuaded.

And perhaps that’s OK.