The Hundred Has Worked for Women's Cricket — Even If You Hate the Format

The Hundred has spent five years dividing English cricket. To traditionalists, it's a gimmick: 100 balls instead of 120, an artificial competition designed to draw casual eyes from a sport that has perfectly good T20 leagues. To the ECB, it's the format that finally cracked the British family audience and brought women's cricket into prime-time mainstream view.

Both can be true. But on the question of whether it has worked for women's cricket, the data is not ambiguous.

The Attendance Story

Before The Hundred (2020), the average attendance for a Women's KSL match was under 2,000. In The Hundred's first season (2021), the average women's attendance was several times higher. By 2024 it had climbed past 10,000 a match — a step-change against the pre-tournament baseline that no other women's domestic competition in the world has matched.

The TV ratings tell the same story. The 2024 Women's Hundred final on Sky drew a peak audience over a million UK viewers. The equivalent slot for the KSL final five years earlier was a fraction of that figure.

The Player Salary Story

In 2019, the highest-paid female English domestic cricketer earned in the low tens of thousands of pounds per year from her contract. In 2024, top-tier players in The Hundred earned five-figure sums for a six-week tournament — roughly five times higher in cash and effectively far more when annualised against the time commitment.

For the first time in the history of the women's game in England, the top players can be full professional cricketers without supplementing their income through coaching or other employment.

The Generational Story

ECB participation data shows girls aged 8–13 entering organised cricket clubs at the highest rate since records began. Coaches across grassroots clubs attribute the surge to the visibility of The Hundred — specifically, to children seeing women playing in front of full houses on free-to-air television.

This is the single most important development in English women's cricket since the abolition of the apartheid-era amateur structure decades ago.

The Counter-Argument

Critics argue that growing women's cricket on the back of a format that the men's audience views as inauthentic creates a fragile foundation. The day the men's Hundred ends, they argue, the women's competition loses its broadcaster funding.

This may yet be proven correct. But it would be true regardless of format: women's cricket in England has always depended on the men's competition for cross-subsidy. The Hundred has simply made that cross-subsidy explicit rather than incidental.

The Verdict

You can dislike the format. You can wish that the same growth had been achieved by a women's T20 Blast equivalent. You can argue that 100 balls is a gimmick. None of that changes the empirical record.

Women's cricket in England in 2025 looks fundamentally different from women's cricket in 2019. The Hundred is the proximate cause.