Analysis: NZ Cricket CEO Scott Weenink may be bullish on New Zealand’s aspirations to field a men’s and women’s team in the Australian BBL, but if that move is being sold as a pathway to develop better T20 players, don’t buy it, writes TVNZ's Scotty Stevenson.
In essence, this appears to be an attempt by NZC to board a money train that is yet to arrive, while further depowering the major associations that constitute its membership.
There is no doubt the BBL has enjoyed a resurgence in the last 12 months. Free to air broadcaster Seven hailed the season as an unmitigated televisual and streaming success, reaching 11.9 million people on Seven and 7plus Sport. That number represented a 21% lift in audience year on year, though it pays to note it was also the largest audience on Seven in five years, suggesting there had been a significant drop off in recent seasons.
According to the network’s own reporting, the 2024/25 BBL final, contested between the Hobart Hurricanes and Sydney Thunder, attracted a total audience of 2.98 million, which represented a 40% increase on the previous year’s final viewership.
It’s a big business thanks largely to Australia having something New Zealand never will have: Population scale. The Australian domestic media rights deal alone for the six years through to 2031 was valued at AU$1.5 billion (NZ$1.7 billion), but even then, all that glitters is not gold. Profitability for the league is volatile and not guaranteed, and rising contract and event costs add enormous pressure to Cricket Australia’s bottom line.
As such, a recent Boston Consulting Group report recommended Cricket Australia sell partial stakes in its eight BBL teams, something the central body and its state associations are now considering. It is not coincidence that NZ Cricket, through its CEO, has taken the opportunity to have a “don’t forget about us” moment. Name a sport that does not like the smell of private equity in the morning!
There is a growing sense of urgency in corporate cricket circles when it comes to bringing in the cash. The ECB has recently sold minority stakes in teams playing in its The Hundred competition, netting the organisation hundreds of millions of pounds. Private investment has flowed into the Caribbean-wide CPL, and Major League Cricket in the US, while the IPL franchises have claimed their own stake of the US competition, and South Africa’s SAT20.
That makes the BBL and New Zealand’s equivalent, Super Smash, rare specimens in the T20 world: leagues that are wholly reliant on central control and central funding. The Super Smash, which has proved to be more than a decent development ground for both men and women (Rachin Ravindra, Mo Abbas, Georgia Plimmer, Izzy Gaze, Tim Robinson to name a few of the latest crop) and a vital shop window for the sport’s major domestic associations, could do with some further funding investigation here before the organisation begs for a bowl of sloppy seconds across the ditch.
New Zealand Cricket says it carved out the Super Smash from their recent television rights deal with SKY, citing a desire to have a free to air partner*. But could it be the pay TV broadcaster had no appetite for the production cost, and New Zealand Cricket had no appetite to fight for it? If that was the case, it wouldn't go over well with the major associations, and the push to further erode the value of Super Smash by hitching New Zealand’s T20 wagon to a hypothetical equity injection at some undisclosed future time is misguided and should be maligned.
As it is, the BCG report has, according to Australian media sources, recommended the BBL holds off on expansion until stakes have been sold in the existing teams. That process could still be some way off, if it is begun at all. With an Ashes series set to fill Cricket Australia’s coffers this summer, there also may be no need to make such a drastic change to the BBL set up at all.
It would also pay to note that in the 14 years since the launch of the BBL, Cricket Australia has displayed zero appetite to throw their neighbours a bone. Why would they now? If expansion is on the cards, then in the best traditions of our friends to the west they would most likely look within before turning their attention across the Tasman. Adding international travel to a schedule that already shoehorns 44 games into six weeks would also appear to be problematic.
The Super Smash has already proved itself to be a competition from which other, bigger leagues select talent, which they in turn further develop at no expense to the national body. Trying to artificially replicate the free market movement of players by plucking out the best from your own domestic league to earn a buck in someone else’s is counter-productive to the point of absurd. New Zealand’s next gen players will in fact have less development. The players they should be learning from won’t be there.
Granted, there is significant pressure on domestic leagues across all sports in New Zealand. Netball’s ANZ Championship and Rugby’s National Provincial Championship are two examples of competitions that once shone far brighter in the national consciousness than they do now but remain necessary to the health and future of their respective sports. Reinvigorating those competitions will require more care and investment than has been shown to date. New Zealand Cricket should be open to other ideas around how to strengthen and financially sustain its Super Smash competition rather than fold the cards.
Either that or prove to be yet another New Zealand sports body happy to play the adjunct to the Australian sport-media-entertainment complex and live off the scraps that provides.
*TVNZ and TVNZ+ Currently broadcast international and Super Smash cricket free-to-air in New Zealand.
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