New owners, team names and much bigger budgets: the 2026 Hundred explained

Since the last ball of the Hundred last season, change has been afoot. Stakes in all eight teams were sold to private investors, meaning an influx of more than £500m into the domestic game and a raft of changes in the Hundred from pay, to coaches, players and even logos. Here is the Guardian guide to what’s new.What’s changed for 2026?On the face of it, not a lot. There are still eight teams, based in the same eight places, and they still play innings of 100 balls delivered in sets of five or 10 rather than your traditional overs of six. Each team play six of their rivals once but their nearest neighbours twice, the women and men playing back-to-back on each occasion, and getting four points for a win or two each for ties and abandonments. Whoever tops the table at the end of the group phase – which starts on Tuesday and ends on 12 August – goes through to the final, while the teams who finish second and third play off to determine who faces them. But beyond that, more or less everything. All of the teams are under new or significantly altered ownership and three have new names, designed to echo the Indian Premier League sides whose owners they now share: Oval Invincibles, winners of the first two women’s titles and the past three for the men, are now MI London, Northern Superchargers are now SunRisers Leeds, and Manchester Originals have become Manchester Super Giants, complete with a widely derided – but very lovely if you happen to like elephants – new logo.Are the teams going to be better?They are certainly going to be better paid: salary pots have gone up by 45% for the men (to £2.05m per team) and by 100% for the women (to £880,000). In practice, the best-paid men went from receiving £125,000 in 2024 to £200,000 in 2025, and Harry Brook is said to be earning £465,000 for his work at SunRisers Leeds this year (the minimum salary for men is, as last year, £31,000). Australia’s Beth Mooney and New Zealand’s Sophie Devine landed the biggest salaries in the women’s tournament, both getting £210,000 (minimum salaries for women have risen from £10,000 to £15,000). But they might be unfamiliar: with a maximum of four of each team’s 16 signed through what might be termed traditional methods – the rest were selected at an auction in March – it has been much harder for them to simply gather the old gang. So whereas squads had previously been pretty settled – more than half of the men involved in the 2025 competition were playing for the same teams in 2024 – they have now been scattered, and that figure has slumped to just a fifth. London Spirit have seen the greatest change: of the 34 men and women they signed up this year, just three were at Lord’s in 2025. Those involved include four of the world’s top five men’s T20 bowlers, according to ICC rankings, and five of the top 10 batters (three of them English), and in the women’s competition all of the world’s top five batters and five of the top 10 bowlers (four of them English).What about the coaches?The amount of change here dwarfs the comparatively minor meddling with the players, with only two of the 16 head coaches across the men’s and women’s competitions still in the positions they held last year. But a lot of musical chairs has been played, and seven of last year’s coaches have simply swapped sides. With the England Test team presently coachless there’s bound to be extra attention given to those pulling the strings, particularly given that Andy Flower, who was considered favourite for the job before he ruled himself out of the running last week, is involved having moved from Trent Rockets to London Spirit, while Justin Langer, the combative Australian who now leads the betting to replace Brendon McCullum, is equally around having swapped London Spirit for Manchester Super Giants.Will the players look different?Absolutely – the kits, and the companies who make them, have all changed, and we are about to find out what happens to the Hundred when the chips are down. Not just the chips, either: also the popcorn, the nuts, the Hula Hoops, and the “uniquely fizzy, melt-in-the-mouth” prawn cocktail flavoured curiosity that is Skips. The snack brands that adorned the front of the teams’ shirts through its first five seasons have become victims of shrinkflation, their logos miniaturised and shunted sideways to the sleeves, to be replaced by the significantly less playful likes of “global business payments and finance platform” Sokin, health and life insurer Vitality, and big bank Barclays. The message is clear: the grownups have arrived. Some teams have felt honour-bound to keep their old colours, so Trent Rockets might now be sponsored by Vitality but they continue to look somewhat Skippy. Interestingly one team has not made replica kits available to purchase: instead Manchester SuperGiants plan to give, for free, replica shirts to every fan who comes to watch them.That is a lot of change, but at least it’s all settled now?I wouldn’t bank on that. Notably when the England and Wales Cricket Board reluctantly gave teams still seeking front-of-shirt sponsors special dispensation to partner with betting companies for this year only, having previously decided gambling did not suit the tournament’s family-friendly ethos, it used “the transitional nature of 2026” to excuse it. And there might be another two years of minor meddling before the current broadcast deals with Sky and the BBC expire after the 2028 season and genuine transformation is on the table, including the possibility of adding more teams – described last year by the ECB’s director of business operations, Vikram Banerjee, as “almost a no-brainer” – and the potential abandonment of the controversial 100-ball format altogether in favour of the more familiar T20.