By Andy Frombolton

Imagine you ran a small restaurant business and planned to expand. You might have a vision to have twenty or fifty restaurants across the UK in 5 years and a strategy for how to achieve your goal. But you’d also recognise that things won’t always go as planned and consequently you’d need to review progress and revise along the way.

Two factors: the public’s appetite for your product, and your ability to maintain standards as your business grows, will primarily determine how things turn out – hopefully better, possibly worse.

However, provided you’ve not expanded ahead of demand and you’ve maintained the quality (to keep existing customers happy), the end state will be a viable business. Conversely, if supply exceeds demand or if quality is compromised by being spread too thin then you risk the whole chain going bust, taking with it any viable sites and any loyal customer base.

In this example, for the entrepreneur to ordain exactly how many restaurants they’ll have in 2 years and where they’ll be – based on speculative future demand and requiring expansion beyond their hitherto-proven ability to maintain quality – would clearly be madness.

The ECB has mandated that there will be eight Tier 1 counties in 2025. Each will employ 15 full-time professionals. There will be 9 Tier 1 counties in 2026 and 10 in 2027. Can you see the problem?

In fact, the only thing which could make this scenario worse would be not to know (or to deliberately obfuscate) the current state of your business.

In my example, the aspiring restaurant owner will know how successful their business is. Beyond overall sales and profit figures, they will also understand how loyal their customers are, the impact and effectiveness of promotions, pricing flex points, etc.

Unfortunately, women’s cricket has very little equivalent data – and the ECB has prioritised positive optics and narratives over every opportunity to collect it. Marketing spin prevails to the exclusion of anything which challenges their messaging, notwithstanding that to plan effectively for growth obviously requires an honest and objective assessment regarding the current popularity of the women’s game.

Attendance at international matches? There were good crowds at many of the international matches, particularly at those venues with a tradition of strong support for women’s cricket. But, let’s be honest, ticket prices were much lower than for a Blast match (with thousands of free tickets also given away). The result may have been a great atmosphere and good optics – but the ECB has no idea as to what value these spectators place on attending these games.

Viewing figures? The ECB and Sky were eager to publicise record viewing figures for last year’s WAshes, but similar press releases haven’t been forthcoming for this year’s Pakistan and New Zealand series and it’s reasonable to assume they did less well.

Broadcast rights? Historically, the broadcasters haven’t had to pay for women’s cricket separately. This is beginning to change and ICC and several boards plan to run separate auctions for men’s and women’s cricket going forward. Having to pay for something which was previously ‘free’ (or almost free) will force broadcasters to put a price on the product – and these figures won’t be determined by good intentions but by a hard-nosed assessment of how much a broadcaster’s advertisers and subscribers will pay. Looking for positives, Viacom paid $112m for 5 years of the WIPL (although any read-across from the Indian market might be limited?) whilst, less encouragingly, FIFA hoped to get over $300m for the recent Women’s World Cup but in the end narrowly avoided broadcast blackouts when it settled for a figure around $50m.

The Hundred? This is the ECB’s principal platform for promoting women’s cricket. Virtually every game this year seemed to be accompanied by announcements for new record attendances at a women’s game. But viewing figures for the Hundred were down across both men’s and women’s games (except for the men’s final) – a dramatic 41% for the women’s matches on Sky (and 2% overall for the women’s games shown by the BBC but with the women’s final down 20%). A widely-touted explanation was the lure of the Olympics, but the Olympics were on throughout the day and evening and so this doesn’t explain the relatively-sharper decline in viewers for the women’s matches. Moreover, if this argument is true, it shows a worrying lack of loyalty amongst cricket spectators when presented with other options.

And, how accurately does the number of people in the ground halfway through the women’s game reflect an interest in the women’s game which could be monetised? A cynic might posit that you wouldn’t use a similar metric to determine the popularity of a men’s game. Surely a true fan wants to see every ball?

So, whilst there were unquestionably good numbers from the first ball of the women’s game at many grounds this year, many spectators arrived later. Why was this?

1. Were they genuine fans of women’s cricket unable to make the start time?
2. Were these people who enjoyed watching some of the women’s game and appreciated the skills on display, but watching the men’s game was the primary reason for attending?
3. Compared to The Blast many fans have to travel further to Hundred host grounds and a single match (completed in under three hours) might be too short to justify the journey, whilst a double-header constitutes a ‘good day out’?
4. Some might have no interest in the women’s game, other than as a backdrop to eating, drinking or meeting friends? Or they wanted to ensure they got to the ground in good time?

I obviously have no idea what the respective percentage for each category is, but more importantly nor does the ECB – nor seemingly does it want to. Because if they did, it would be easy to design a series of matchday scheduling / pricing permutations [combined with spectator surveys] to better establish “Where We Are Today” in terms of the fanbase for women’s cricket, their loyalty and their willingness to pay. The downside is that establishing these data points could be expensive, could result in some negative optics and would probably be opposed by both Sky and the host clubs who risk losing viewers and footfall respectively.

Some of the considerations could be:

• Ticket prices for Hundred matches during the Commonwealth Games weren’t reduced – even though spectators only got to watch a men’s game. This created a cognitive anchor that the women’s game is a ‘free’ bonus.
• Hundred tickets could be sold providing access to either both games or just the second game. (Obviously, a stadium couldn’t be cleared of people who only wanted to watch the first match.) This would thus allow a separate value to be assigned to the first match.
• Grounds could host 2 men’s games or 2 women’s games (rather than the current double headers).
• The women’s game could be played second more often. (Although past evidence suggests this impacts attendance and viewing figures especially for weekday games; reducing ticket revenue and impacting on-site food and drink sales, in addition to not looking good.)

Whilst these different permutations still wouldn’t generate a comprehensive data set, it would be far better than what we have today. And it would be real-life data, not PR nor the projections of a marketing consultancy, with no consequences for whether they’re right or wrong as to the popularity of the women’s game and the value which viewers and spectators assign to it.

Now, there’s talk of hosting double headers for the T20 Blast next year. (NB Whilst it would be possible to align the home teams, the women’s opposition would often be a different team.) Why do this? This would simply replicate the issues seen in The Hundred. At some stage, the women’s game needs to become financially sustainable – and core to this is growing a loyal fan base which is attractive to sponsors, advertisers and broadcasters. This is a chance for everyone who complains how the women’s game is currently marketed to come forward with their proposals. Women’s double headers? Weekend festivals (4 games over a weekend)? Selling the broadcast rights to a different company with a compelling vision for women’s sport? Focussing on the digital aspects and engaging with younger, new customers in a different way?

To end, let’s return to our example of the ambitious restauranteur.

It’s good to have dreams. And to aim to be better and bigger.

But it’s stupid to pre-ordain outcomes. Be flexible. Be good at what you do. Leave customers wanting more. Never lose control of quality control. Understand what differentiates you from your competitors. Don’t just copy another chain which offers a similar product. And (eventually) revenue must always exceed costs.

If you do all those things, the outcome will be the best it can be. A sustainable product with customers who love it.