Bidders for stakes in English cricket’s eight Hundred franchises will this week begin taking part in live auctions enabling them to submit binding offers at 15-minute intervals, Sky News has learnt.
Sources said on Wednesday that rivals contesting for franchises including the Oval Invincibles and London Spirit would be allowed to table new offers on the condition that they were at least £3m higher than the previous highest bid.
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) hopes the structure of the process will encourage a lucrative bidding war, with its 49% stake in the Oval Invincible the first to be sold on Thursday.
Three further auctions, including that of London Spirit, will take place this week, with the remaining quartet to be auctioned next week.
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Insiders said the ECB hoped to be able to delay an announcement about the outcome until the latter part of next week.
Losing bidders in each franchise may be given the opportunity to participate in the remaining processes, although the mechanics of such a scenario were unclear on Wednesday.
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People close to the process said they anticipated that the Ambani family, which owns the Mumbai Indians IPL team, was seen as the likeliest winner of the Oval Invincibles auction.
That would leave a consortium of technology billionaires which includes Satya Nadella, the Microsoft chief executive, and Nikesh Arora, the former SoftBank executive, as the potential favourite to buy the ECB’s stake in Lords-based London Spirit.
The private equity firm CVC Capital Partners and the consortium led by Mr Arora are also vying to buy the Oval Invincibles interest.
If the tech billionaires were successful in the Oval process, they would automatically drop out of the following day’s London Spirit auction.
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The other remaining bidders for London Spirit are a vehicle controlled by Todd Boehly, a shareholder in Chelsea Football Club; members of the Manchester United-owning Glazer family; and RPSG Group, the owner of the Indian Premier League team Lucknow Super Giants.
For franchises with only two shortlisted bidders, the auction will be a straightforward sealed bid shootout.
The London Spirit franchise is expected to be valued at more than £140m, meaning the proceeds to be received and distributed by the ECB would be at least £70m, the insiders added.
In total, the ECB has indicated that the Hundred auction could value the right teams at about £350m, meaning its stakes would be worth in the region of £175m.
The host counties are also allowed to sell their 51% shareholdings, although some have said they do not intend to do so.
The MCC, which controls the London Spirit franchise, does not intend to offload any of its stake at this point, according to cricket insiders.
Investors will only be allowed to own a stake in one of the eight teams, which also include Welsh Fire, Southern Brave and the Northern Superchargers.
A bigger-than-expected windfall from the process could offer a financial lifeline to a number of cash-strapped counties, with part of the proceeds likely to be used to pay down debt.
Concerns have been raised, however, that windfalls from the Hundred auction will not deliver a meaningful improvement in counties’ long-term financial sustainability.
The outcome of the Hundred auction is also likely to intensify other searching questions about the future of cricket, as the Test format of the game struggles for international commercial relevance against shorter-length competition.
The Hundred auction is being handled by bankers at Raine Group, the same firm which oversaw the sale of large stakes in both Manchester United and Chelsea in recent years.
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None of the parties contacted by Sky News would comment.
