No more international cricket live on free-to-air TV as ECB fails to agree deal

The England men’s and women’s cricket teams are set to return fully behind the Sky Sports paywall next season after an extension to the BBC rights deal in which the ­corporation opted out of showing live internationals.

The Guardian has learned that the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has been unable to secure a free-to-air television deal for some of its teams’ Twenty20 ­internationals in a blow to its attempts to broaden cricket’s appeal. The ECB has been seeking to sell live rights to two men’s T20s and two women’s T20s a year on a four-year contract starting next summer, but has yet to receive an acceptable offer at the end of the tender process.

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The BBC, however, is understood to have reached a deal for live rights to 15 Hundred matches each season – seven in the men’s competition and eight in the women’s – as well as securing Test highlights.

For the past four years the BBC also broadcast two men’s and one ­women’s T20 each summer in the only regular international cricket shown on terrestrial television since the 2005 Ashes. England’s 2019 World Cup win against New ­Zealand at Lord’s was broadcast live on ­Channel 4, although that was a ­one-off, with Sky Sports offering to share its ­exclusive rights as it was deemed an event of national significance.

The Guardian has learned that the new contract will not include the four T20 games, however, as the BBC has offered a lower rights fee than it paid over the previous cycle, which ­finished last summer.

While the BBC was eager to extend its coverage of the ­Hundred, as well as securing a daily Test ­highlights programme and ­near-live ­digital clip rights for BBC Online, the ­corporation’s ­interest in the T20 internationals was more lukewarm.

In its attempts to secure a ­free-to-air partner, the ECB is understood to have offered the T20 matches to Channel 4 and ITV in recent months without receiving a bid they deemed acceptable. As a result the games are likely to be shown solely by Sky Sports, who pay the governing body £220m a year for live rights to all home internationals as well as men’s and women’s domestic cricket.

The ECB has found selling its ­free-to-air rights extremely ­challenging and struggled to ­create a real market to put pressure on the BBC, whose budget for sports rights has been squeezed by the previous government’s decision to freeze the licence fee for two years in 2022 ­followed by below-inflation increases for the next four years.

The ­extension of Sky Sports’ ­contract until 2028 was announced in June 2022, but almost two and a half years later there has been no clarity on the free-to-air package.

To compound matters, viewing figures for the Hundred dropped by more than a quarter this summer, although they held up ­better on the BBC than on Sky Sports despite ­clashing with the Paris ­Olympics, which convinced executives in ­Salford to stick with the ­competition. ­Audiences for the ­women’s ­Hundred fell by 41% on Sky compared with 2023, with a 28% decline for the men’s ­competition, while on the BBC the men were down 25%, with the women’s figures ­dropping by just 2%.

The BBC has also retained live audio rights for Test Match Special until at least the end of the 2028 season in a deal that includes every England Test, one-day ­international and T20, for both men’s and women’s teams.

The ECB declined to comment when contacted.