Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly has paid almost £40m for a 49 per cent stake in Hundred franchise Trent Rockets.
Rockets are the seventh team in the England and Wales Cricket Board’s 100-ball competition to be sold, with only Southern Brave left to be purchased.
Nottinghamshire will retain their 51 per cent share of the Rockets, with Boehly’s company Cain International acquiring the slightly smaller stake from the ECB.
The sale of Rockets takes the value of The Hundred teams to in excess of £800m.
A US-based technology consortium, headed by Nikesh Arora, spent big on the Lord’s-based London Spirit, paying £145m for 49 per cent, meaning the franchise was valued at just shy of £300m overall.
Boehly had been interested in buying Spirit and fellow London side Oval Invincibles but was outbid, with 49 per cent of Invincibles picked up by the Ambani family, the owners of the IPL’s Mumbai Indians.
Boehly bought Chelsea for £4.25bn in 2022, while he is also the co-owner of French football team Strasbourg and minority owner of LA Dodgers in Major League Baseball.
Money raked in from the sale of Hundred sides will be spread throughout the English game at domestic and recreational level
Knighthead Capital, the co-owners of League One’s Birmingham City, bought a 49 per cent stake in Birmingham Phoenix, adding to the football flavour in The Hundred.
Yorkshire’s entire stake in the Northern Superchargers was purchased by Sun Group – who own IPL outfit Sunrisers Hyderabad and SA20 team Sunrisers Eastern Cape – for circa £100m, while Lancashire sold 70 per cent of Manchester Originals to the owners of the IPL’s Lucknow Super Giants.
Proceeds from the 49 per cent of teams sold by the ECB will be divided between the 18 first-class counties and the MCC, while if a host county sells all or part of their 51 per cent, 10 per cent of that money will also go to the counties and MCC.
