LONDON: The England and Wales Cricket Board has published its Annual Review and Financial Statements for 2020/21. In the review, the ECB has declared revenue losses amounting to more than £100m ($141m), compared to what had been expected to be received in 2020, after a year of matches played behind closed doors.
The losses reported are from across the game as a whole – including ECB and First Class Counties.
The review covers a year of significant disruption but where cricket led the way in being the first sport to stage international team competition in the UK after the pandemic struck.
Staging international cricket and taking swift action to reduce costs meant the ECB avoided the worst-case financial scenarios last year and was able to support the cricket network, although revenue was impacted by the postponement of The Hundred and staging biosecure cricket incurred significant additional costs.
The ECB’s end of year results show that in the year ended 31 January 2021, a year when revenue had been projected to increase significantly to allow for investment in growing the game, turnover was £207m, a fall of £21m as compared to the previous year. The loss on ordinary activities before taxation was £16m in the year ended 31st January 2021, compared to a profit of £6.5m in the prior year.
With the aim of protecting cricket’s financial sustainability, the ECB took action to reduce costs, including stopping some planned investment, staff furlough and pay reductions from April to October, and through a redundancy programme removing posts from the organisation which saw the number of employees on the ECB payroll at the end of January 2021 reduced to 331 from 389 a year earlier. As a result, the ECB was able to provide emergency assistance to the cricket network while avoiding the worst-case impact on its final year-end position.
Last year was also the first year of the new County Partnership Agreement (CPA), with distributions to the cricket network and stakeholders at the highest levels seen in ECB’s history.
Scott Smith, chief financial officer of the ECB, said: “This has been a challenging year, but by being able to stage international cricket and by taking decisive action early in the Pandemic, we have been able to support the network and avoid a far worse financial scenario. There remains considerable uncertainty over the year ahead, but we hope that delivering another full summer of cricket – and with crowds beginning to return from next week – we are able to protect the revenue we need to invest in growing our game.”
