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- T20 World Cup generated 10% of entire projected ticket revenue in first 20 hours of going on sale
- Tournament aims to double total attendance record set at 2020 Women’s T20 World Cup in Australia
- The Hundred team sales “nearly there”, according to Barrett-Wild
The 2026 Women’s T20 World Cup is aiming to be the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) most commercially successful women’s event ever, the tournament’s director Beth Barrett-Wild has revealed.
Next year’s competition will take place in England and Wales from 12th June to 5th July. It will feature 12 teams for the first time following the last expansion from eight to ten countries in 2014. The 33 matches will be held across seven cricket grounds, including Lord’s, the Kia Oval, Headingley and Old Trafford.
According to Barrett-Wild, the tournament’s guiding ambition is to make 2026 “the year that women’s cricket breaks into the mainstream and stays there”.
“We very much see the Women’s T20 World Cup next summer as a moment in time to affect long-term change [in women’s cricket],” she told SportsPro.
Barrett-Wild, who also serves as director of the women’s professional game at the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), said organisers are approaching the event “a little bit differently” to achieve its goals. This has included integrating the tournament’s local organising committee into the ECB’s existing operation and unveiling the full schedule nearly a year ahead of the competition.
In contrast, the complete schedule for the 2017 Women’s Cricket World Cup, which was also hosted by England and Wales, was released about three months ahead of the opening fixture.
“It demonstrates how far women’s sport and women’s cricket has come in the sense of that pre-planning and that attention to detail,” Barrett-Wild said.
Tickets for the opening match, semi-finals and final of the Women’s T20 World Cup went on sale last week. The first wave of priority tickets for the final, which is being held at Lord’s, sold out within 24 hours, while ten per cent of the projected ticket revenue for the entire tournament was generated in the first 20 hours.
“We’ve got ambitions around delivering unprecedented levels of revenue through this event,” added Barrett-Wild. She then confirmed it was “one of our objectives” when asked if the goal was to make the 2026 T20 Women’s World Cup the ICC’s most commercially successful tournament to date.
More broadly, Barrett-Wild said the intention is for next summer’s competition to transform women’s cricket from being “a one-off, big event mentality into an embedded, lifelong fandom”. Organisers believe the women’s game is ready to move beyond a challenger mindset and start thinking like a market leader.
As for overall attendance, organisers hope the tournament will double the record set at the 2020 Women’s T20 World Cup in Australia. Barrett-Wild said achieving that would demonstrate “the commercial sustainability” of women’s cricket and create a “ripple effect” that extends to the ECB’s own competitions.
Among the tournaments operated by the national governing body is The Hundred, the fifth season of which will take place in August. According to Barrett-Wild, last year’s campaign attracted 321,000 spectators for the women’s matches.
The 100-ball competition, which features eight men’s and women’s franchises, is set to receive a substantial financial windfall following agreements reached in February to sell stakes in the teams. The auction process raised UK£520 million (US$702 million), valuing the clubs at nearly UK£1 billion (US$1.4 billion) in total.
However, the deadline to finalise the sales was extended by the ECB in March after delays in negotiations. The Hundred’s managing director Vikram Banerjee told SportsPro at the end of April that the process was “in the final straight” and discussions with investors remained in “a really good place”.
More than six weeks on from Banerjee’s comments, Barrett-Wild declined to say whether sign-off on the deals was imminent. However, she did note that the parties were “in the final, final elements of the contract negotiations”.
“We are nearly there,” Barrett-Wild continued.
“I think it’s going to bring incredible levels of support and investment into women’s cricket. We’re seeing both from the ECB and through The Hundred in the future more and more money being poured into women’s cricket.
“[It] is why I cannot stress enough how important the [Women’s T20] World Cup next year is in terms of that long-term change, because it is our big shop window and it’s our big moment in time.”
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