The 161 year-old Middlesex County Cricket Club (MCCC) is kicking off a secret review of its mutual ownership status as it seeks to place the Lord’s-based outfit on a sustainable long-term financial footing.
Sky News can exclusively reveal that Middlesex has drafted in Oakvale, a specialist sports and gaming corporate finance advisor, to explore a range of options, which insiders confirmed on Tuesday would include the longer-term possibility of a demutualisation and partial sale.
Prospective investors are already understood to have begun being sounded out about the early-stage plans.
Sources said there were no plans for the club to move away from or stop playing at Lord’s, adding that demutualisation and ceding its member-owned status were not “immediately” on the agenda.
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The review is the latest to involve one of English cricket’s 18 professional counties and follows the recent sale of a controlling stake in Hampshire to the GMR Group, the owner of the Indian Premier League franchise the Delhi Capitals.
News of Middlesex’s review comes within weeks of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) securing a landmark windfall of £520m to be injected into the professional and recreational game from the auction of its 49% stakes in the sport’s eight Hundred tournament franchises.
The most lucrative of those came from the sale of the Lord’s-based London Spirit team, which was valued at £295m after being at the centre of a fierce bidding war eventually won by a group of American technology billionaires.
These included the Indian-born chief executives of Google and Microsoft, with the consortium led by Nikesh Arora, the former SoftBank executive.
Cricket insiders tipped the consortium to explore whether a bid to inject funding into the MCCC would also make sense.
The Hundred auction will rank as a financially transformational moment for the sport, coming at a time when many of the professional counties…
