London Spirit use huge Hundred windfall to treble spending on off-field talent

The new-look London Spirit are hugely increasing salaries paid to off-field cricket staff in a bid to boost the calibre of recruits when the turbocharged Hundred launches in August.

With the competition’s salary cap including only the playing squad, Spirit hope that the backroom staff attracted will help the team flourish. One source described the wages offered to coaches and analysts for the first five years of the competition, when their salaries were funded by the England and Wales Cricket Board, as embarrassing.

Spirit are hoping to benefit from the combination of a massive funding boost after the sale of 49% of the team for £145m to a consortium of entrepreneurs unofficially known as the Tech Titans in last year’s team auction and the pull of life in the English capital to hire staff of sufficient calibre to transform their fortunes. It is understood that their spending on support staff will be trebled.

While the women’s side won the tournament in 2024 and reached the eliminator last year, the men have finished last or second-last in four of its five seasons.

“We’ll be resourcing our support staff in a way that far exceeds previous years,” said Mo Bobat, London Spirit’s director of cricket. “The onus is now on teams to pay their coaches – and their science and medicine staff or their analysts – whatever they want to pay them. We’ve had a good level of backing from the board and we’ve been able to recruit and attract really good people because of that.

“Our job is to get high-quality people in. We’ve got excellent coaches, we’ve started to build really strong support staff teams and we want to try to make sure that our systems and processes allow success to become inevitable. That doesn’t just happen overnight, but we’re trying to do that as quickly as we can.”

Bobat is also director of cricket at Royal Challengers Bengaluru, who won the Indian Premier League for the first time in 2025, and has recruited several of their support staff, including their head coach, Andy Flower, as well as the team analyst, Freddie Wilde, and the physio, James Pipe. The women’s team will be coached by Jon Lewis, with Heather Knight taking on the role of general manager.

On Monday, Spirit announced eight directly signed players, including the South Africans Marizanne Kapp – player of the match when she won the 2022 final with Oval Invincibles – and Dewald Brevis, the Australian spinner Adam Zampa, Englishmen Jamie Overton and Liam Livingstone and the 19-year-old English seamer Mahika Gaur.

They also unveiled a new logo – an austere effort compared with some of their rivals, composed of the letters L and S, with the L slanted in a nod to the slope at Lord’s – and an official colour palette that focuses on blue, but also reflects MCC tradition by including “bacon” (a shade previously better known as red) and “egg” (yellow).

With local rivals Oval Invincibles rebranded as MI London it means the capital’s two Hundred franchises will both wear blue and have London in their names. “Ideally they might have been different colours, but it’s not something I’ve spent too much time thinking about,” Bobat said.

“There’s plenty of teams that wear blue in the IPL and there’s no shortage of rivalry there.”

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