Lord’s tenant Middlesex County Cricket Club eyes end to mutual ownership
The 161 year-old Middlesex County Cricket Club (MCCC) is kicking off a secret review of its mutual ownership status as it seeks to place the Lord's-based outfit on a sustainable long-term financial footing.
Sky News can exclusively reveal that Middlesex has drafted in Oakvale, a specialist sports and gaming corporate finance advisor, to explore a range of options, which insiders confirmed on Tuesday would include the longer-term possibility of a demutualisation and partial sale.
Prospective investors are already understood to have begun being sounded out about the early-stage plans.
Sources said there were no plans for the club to move away from or stop playing at Lord's, adding that demutualisation and ceding its member-owned status were not "immediately" on the agenda.
The review is the latest to involve one of English cricket's 18 professional counties and follows the recent sale of a controlling stake in Hampshire to the GMR Group, the owner of the Indian Premier League franchise the Delhi Capitals.
News of Middlesex's review comes within weeks of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) securing a landmark windfall of £520m to be injected into the professional and recreational game from the auction of its 49% stakes in the sport's eight Hundred tournament franchises.
The most lucrative of those came from the sale of the Lord's-based London Spirit team, which was valued at £295m after being at the centre of a fierce bidding war eventually won by a group of American technology billionaires.
These included the Indian-born chief executives of Google and Microsoft, with the consortium led by Nikesh Arora, the former SoftBank executive.
Cricket insiders tipped the consortium to explore whether a bid to inject funding into the MCCC would also make sense.
The Hundred auction will rank as a financially transformational moment for the sport, coming at a time when many of the professional counties - including Yorkshire - have been struggling to make ends meet.
While the MCCC will benefit from an estimated windfall of more than £20m from the distribution of the ECB's proceeds from the Hundred sell-off, its financial position is comparatively weaker than other first-class counties.
It pays rent to the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the owner of Lord's, and unlike most counties does not own or have a direct financial interest in its home ground.
This is said to have made exploiting its commercial assets more challenging.
The MCCC was founded in February 1864 by a "gathering of gentleman of Middlesex in the London Tavern", according to the club's official history.
Middlesex made its debut in June 1864 at the Cattle Market Ground in Islington and has been based at Lord's since 1877.
It has won the County Championship 13 times and counts English cricket legends including Denis Compton, Mike Gatting and Andrew Strauss among its former players.
This summer, the New Zealand batsman Kane Williamson will play for Middlesex in the Vitality Blast and Rothesay County Championship.
Currently owned by its roughly 7,000 members, its status as a mutual means it is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
According to people close to the process, at least 50% of the MCCC's members would need to vote in a ballot for it to be legitimate, which one described as challenging because many of the club's members acquire membership solely in order to secure tickets for Test matches played at Lord's.
Even if a future vote were to be valid, 75% of those casting their ballots would need to vote in favour of ending its mutually owned status.
To date, only three professional counties have demutualised, with two of those - Hampshire and Northamptonshire - doing so to avoid collapse, with the other, Durham, going bust.
One source described the MCCC as one of the biggest brands in global cricket and said the strategic review was aimed at ensuring the club would be competitive in all forms of the game, as well as financially sustainable, over the next 50 years.
According to one prospective investor, Oakvale's analysis is expected to focus on protecting the MCCC's heritage, as well as the interests of members and Middlesex's fan base.
The MCCC has hired advisors from Oakvale to explore strategic options that will include eventually ceding the Lord's-based club's 161 year-old mutual ownership, Sky News can exclusively reveal.
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