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County Cricket 2026

Parkside said:
I'd argue that England Internationals tv and gate receipts and County Championship sustain each other. The CC is the feeder to the National team with the resulting International team raising the revenue to sustain the CC.Without a CC there's no England team.
The Hundred isn't self-sustainable given the ludicrously exorbitant salaries incurred.
U-tube following probably gives a better guide to CC interest rather than actual attendances.
Northants,to a degree, have always been a basket case but both Leicestershire and Derbyshire have turned both finance and playing results around through good management.
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I agree with that. I have never argued that the county championship doesn’t matter or doesn’t deserve credit for its role in supporting the England team. I have only ever argued that an 18 team county championship, which is the some extent the accident of history bequeathed to us by the Edwardian era (give or take a Glamorgan and a Durham) is the only way it can possibly be structured. The game has changed in 120 years. The county championship should survive. The structure of the 1910s doesn’t have to.

Without a first class structure, there is no England team. That doesn’t mean it has to be this first class structure.
 
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Fleagle said:
It’s interesting data in both the positive and negative sense.

The increases are good to see and a reminder (which I don’t think we need on here) that the county championship is a thing in its own right that people do watch. The one man and his dog thing is a myth. I don’t know how many days play you get, probably 20 out of the nominal 28, so that’s 3000 a day on average at Surrey in 2024, and 4000 last year.

That’s a number that obliterates anything you get in first class cricket anywhere else, even at the rightly lauded in other ways Sheffield Shield. We don’t all have the benefits Surrey have. But we can surely all learn something from that example.

But even with Surrey, you are still only talking decent National League attendance. And then there’s Northants and Leicester. At around 200 a day. That’s a huge difference. And a gate you’d struggle to sustain Northern League at. It’s a difficult circle to square. I love county cricket. I’m always pleased to be reminded that I’m not a complete freak in that respect. But it’s still a minority interest that relies heavily on the other areas of the game that are more popular to sustain it. And the likes of Northants really are basket cases.
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Totally incorrect. Remember the counties count the amount of memberships in attendances every day like football clubs do. We all know that's not the actual amount of people through the gates.

Look at the average actual attendances people through the actual gates is where you see on average is half of that and walk in paying fans is averaging less than 20 at most counties per day.

Look at the actual attendee figures you will see the county championship is unsustainable and a major loss for counties.
 
Iamme said:
Totally incorrect. Remember the counties count the amount of memberships in attendances every day like football clubs do. We all know that's not the actual amount of people through the gates.

Look at the average actual attendances people through the actual gates is where you see on average is half of that and walk in paying fans is averaging less than 20 at most counties per day.

Look at the actual attendee figures you will see the county championship is unsustainable and a major loss for counties.
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Even on that basis, the figures show that the number of paying members and/or people paying at the gate increased for the CC in 2024 and we know that Surrey's figure increased significantly again in 2025.
 
Iamme said:
Totally incorrect. Remember the counties count the amount of memberships in attendances every day like football clubs do. We all know that's not the actual amount of people through the gates.

Look at the average actual attendances people through the actual gates is where you see on average is half of that and walk in paying fans is averaging less than 20 at most counties per day.

Look at the actual attendee figures you will see the county championship is unsustainable and a major loss for counties.
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That’s plain wrong. It’s what football clubs do. It’s not what those data do. It’s trivially easy to demonstrate that this is so. Surrey’s published membership for 2025 is in excess of 20,000. If they are counting them for every home day’s play then that is more than half a million even before any fucker even turns up. And no one is claiming that. Those are actual attendance figures.

I’m not exactly a champion of County Cricket as it is currently structured on here. Not compared with many anyway. But you really are full of it. And it’s like shooting fish in a barrel to demonstrate that you are.
 
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