ECB Structure Explained: Who Runs English Cricket

The single most useful thing to understand about the England and Wales Cricket Board is that it does not own English cricket. It is owned by English cricket — specifically by the forty-one members who hold it, most of them the very organisations it hands money to and writes rules for. That circularity explains almost every awkward decision the board has ever made, including the ones that look inexplicable from outside.

It also explains why reform in this country arrives slowly and then all at once. A governing body that needs the consent of eighteen county chairs to change the shape of the season will not change it quickly. When a proposal does get through — a new competition, a new ball, a sale of equity in eight franchises — it tends to have been horse-traded into a form nobody argued for at the start.

This page sets out the actual machinery: who the members are, which committee decides what, where the revenue comes from, and which parts of the game the board has deliberately handed to somebody else.

Three bodies became one in 1997

Before 1997 the running of cricket in England and Wales was split three ways. The Test and County Cricket Board looked after the professional game and the international side. The National Cricket Association looked after the recreational game. Above both sat the Cricket Council, which was meant to coordinate them and largely did not.

On 1 January 1997 all three were folded into a single body, the England and Wales Cricket Board. The consolidation was overdue. Having separate organisations for the top and bottom of the same pyramid meant no one was accountable for the join — for whether a child in a club in Lancashire had any realistic route to the county second XI, which is precisely the question a national governing body exists to answer. How the resulting pyramid actually looks in practice is covered in the guide to how English domestic cricket is structured.

Wales is in the name for a reason. Glamorgan competes in the English county system, Sophia Gardens in Cardiff stages internationals, and Welsh recreational cricket sits inside the same structure. There is no separate Welsh national cricket team at senior international level.

The forty-one members

The ECB is a company limited by guarantee. That legal form matters: there are no shareholders taking a dividend, and the constitution points the organisation at the long-term health of the sport rather than at a return on capital.

Its members are:

Member group	Number	What they are
First-class county chairs	18	The professional clubs, from Surrey to Durham
Non-first-class county cricket boards	21	The county-level bodies for the recreational game
National Counties Cricket Association	1	The competition below the first-class counties
Marylebone Cricket Club	1	Owner of Lord's and custodian of the Laws

Two features of that list are worth pausing on. First, the recreational side has more members than the professional side, which sounds like a check on county power and in practice is not — the eighteen first-class counties are the organisations with paid staff, grounds, broadcast exposure and lobbying capacity. Second, the MCC sits in the membership as a single club with a seat alongside the counties, which is a hangover from the years when it effectively ran English cricket. What the club does now is set out in the guide to the MCC's role in the modern game.

The board, and the committees that do the work

The ECB board mixes directors drawn from cricket with independent directors brought in from outside it. The composition is deliberately balanced: a chair, a senior independent non-executive director, a set of independent non-executive directors, a set of cricket non-executive directors, plus the chief executive and the chief financial officer as executives.

Richard Thompson, previously chair at Surrey, has held the chair since 2022 and had his term extended towards the end of the decade. Richard Gould became chief executive in February 2023, arriving from Surrey as well, which prompted a certain amount of comment about how narrow the pool of English cricket administrators is.

Below board level the substantive decisions are made in committees:

• Professional Game Committee — the men's and women's professional domestic game. This is where decisions on the county schedule, playing conditions and competition formats are argued out, and it was this committee that accepted the counties' verdict on the Kookaburra ball trial covered in the guide to the Dukes ball.
• Recreational Game Committee — clubs, leagues, facilities and participation. It and the Professional Game Committee were both created in late 2023, following an independent review of the recreational game, on the reasoning that two sectors with almost nothing in common should not be governed by one committee.
• Recreational Assembly — the representative forum through which the recreational network feeds into the board.
• Audit and risk, nominations and regulatory committees — the standard governance apparatus. The nominations committee runs the appointment process for non-executive directors, which is the quiet mechanism through which the character of the board changes over time.

The executive is organised around the teams rather than the committees. There is a managing director for England men's cricket, a role held by Rob Key since 2022, covering the senior men's side and the performance pathway beneath it. Clare Connor, who captained England and then spent fifteen years running the women's game at the board, is deputy chief executive and managing director of England women's cricket — a deliberate move to make the two roles equivalent rather than one a subsidiary of the other. The consequences of that alignment show up in the story of England's women's cricket.

Why regulation was moved out of the building

The most significant governance change of recent years was structural rather than sporting.

For most of its existence the ECB both promoted cricket and policed it: the same organisation that sold the game's broadcast rights also investigated discrimination complaints against its own member clubs. Two events made that untenable. The first was the handling of Azeem Rafiq's allegations against Yorkshire, which exposed how badly a system without independent teeth performs when a member county is the accused party. The second was the report of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket.

The ICEC was set up in 2021 and published Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket in June 2023. It ran to more than three hundred pages, drew on evidence from over four thousand respondents, and concluded that racism was structural and institutional in the game, that women were treated as subordinate at every level, and that class-based discrimination and elitism were pervasive. Around half of respondents reported experiencing some form of discrimination in the previous five years, with markedly higher figures among people from ethnically diverse backgrounds. The commission made forty-four recommendations, including that the ECB apologise unreservedly. The board published its formal response in September 2023.

In December 2023 the ECB established the Cricket Regulator as a ring-fenced function with its own leadership, responsible for monitoring and enforcing compliance with the game's regulations. Its first interim director came from policing rather than cricket. Whether ring-fencing inside the same corporate entity delivers genuine independence is a fair question, and it has been asked loudly, including by Rafiq himself. The counter-argument is that a wholly external regulator would need statutory backing that does not exist. Sport England confirmed in January 2025 that the ECB remained compliant with the government's Code for Sports Governance.

Where the money comes from

English cricket is a broadcast business with a ticketing sideline, and has been since the mid-1990s.

The board's central income is dominated by domestic media rights. Its long partnership with Sky was extended by four years to run from the start of 2025 to the end of 2028, with more guaranteed hours of live coverage each year, a substantial increase in televised Blast fixtures, and one match per round of the Blast shown free on a streaming channel. Free-to-air exposure has been the central criticism of the Sky era, and the concessions in recent deals are a partial answer to it rather than a reversal.

Money flows out to the counties along two main channels. The larger is direct grant funding under the County Partnership Agreement, which underwrites the running costs of the eighteen first-class clubs. Alongside it sits a second stream tied to the board's growth strategy, funding facilities, talent pathways, community work and the women's domestic structure. Both are conditional, which is the board's principal lever over clubs it does not own.

The 2025 equity sale

The single largest financial event in the board's history was the sale of stakes in the eight teams of the Hundred in 2025. The ECB disposed of its own minority holding in all eight sides, and several host counties sold part or all of the majority stakes they held, raising in the region of half a billion pounds for central distribution.

The distribution formula was negotiated rather than obvious. The first and largest tranche was divided nineteen ways — the eighteen counties and the MCC — in equal shares. A further tranche went exclusively to the eleven counties that do not host a Hundred team, on the reasoning that they had no franchise asset of their own to sell. A fixed percentage of the board's proceeds and of each host county's proceeds was directed straight to the recreational game. Selling counties kept the bulk of their own sale price and shared the remainder.

Whether this was a windfall that secures the county game for a generation or the sale of the family silver is the most consequential open argument in English cricket. Both positions are held by serious people. What is not in doubt is that eleven clubs with no Hundred team received sums far beyond their normal annual turnover, and that the private investors now hold long-term interests in a competition the board still runs.

What the ECB does not decide

A surprising amount, and the confusion is routine.

• The Laws. The MCC writes and revises the Laws of Cricket. The ECB writes playing conditions, which sit on top of the Laws for a particular competition — how many overs, how many balls, whether a review system operates.
• International scheduling and global events. The ICC runs the World Cups and the World Test Championship and agrees the tours programme. The board negotiates within that, it does not set it.
• County selection and county business. The eighteen first-class counties are independent clubs. They own their grounds, hire and fire their own coaches, sign their own overseas players and pick their own sides. The ECB funds and regulates them; it does not manage them.
• Who owns Lord's. The MCC does. The board's offices are at the ground, which reliably misleads people into thinking otherwise.
• The National Counties. The tier below the first-class game runs its own competitions through its own association.

Following what the board actually decides

The documents are public and they are more informative than the press releases. The annual report and accounts show where the money went. The annual governance statement lists the committees and who sits on them. Playing conditions for each competition are published before the season and are the place to look when a rule seems to have changed. Announcements about the season's shape usually surface after a professional game committee meeting rather than after a board meeting.

For the competitions themselves, start with the guides to the County Championship and the T20 Blast, or with the wider picture on the cricket in England hub. The long institutional story behind all of it is in the history of England cricket.

Sources and method

This page is built from the ECB's own published governance material — the corporate governance pages describing its membership and legal form, annual governance statements listing board committees, announcements on the formation of the Cricket Regulator and on executive appointments, and the published County Partnership Agreement funding structure. The ICEC report and the board's response to it are quoted from the published documents. Details of the Sky rights extension come from the joint announcements by the board and the broadcaster. Figures for the 2025 Hundred equity sale are given in approximate terms because the final totals depend on transactions completing and on the treatment of individual host-county stakes; where a precise number could not be verified against an official statement it has been left out. Named officeholders are current at the time of writing and will date. This article is descriptive rather than data-led.