Free-to-air Test cricket is being discussed more seriously than at any point since 2005, and for the first time there is a broadcaster willing to say so out loud. The Guardian’s Matt Hughes reported on Thursday 27 August that the England and Wales Cricket Board will offer more rights packages to free-to-air broadcasters in the next set of television contracts, which begin in 2029, with the aim of broadening the sport’s appeal.
ITV, according to that report, is open to showing a Test match for the first time since 1968. The qualification matters, though. What the ECB is actually placing on the market is the Hundred and a run of white-ball internationals. Home Test cricket is not part of the offer, and no amount of enthusiasm from ITV changes that.
What the ECB is putting on the table
The mechanism is unusual. Rather than carving out a standalone terrestrial package, the ECB intends to make more of its rights available on a non-exclusive basis, which would allow its long-term partner Sky Sports to share parts of its portfolio. The obvious beneficiary is ITV, whose £1.6bn takeover by Comcast — Sky’s American parent — is expected to complete next year.
ITV is understood to be interested in the Hundred. Alongside it, the ECB will offer free-to-air packages covering a number of England men’s and women’s white-ball fixtures, the sides captained by Harry Brook and Nat Sciver-Brunt. Sky has privately signalled a willingness to share some of its sports rights with its incoming partner for promotional purposes, which is a rather different proposition from selling them.
Why free-to-air Test cricket stops short of home Tests
The ECB will not follow Cricket Australia, which offers a bespoke free-to-air package for its domestic Test matches. That is the line in the sand, and it explains why an ITV Test would most plausibly be a one-off or an overseas fixture rather than a summer of them.
The history is instructive. The BBC broadcast Test cricket from 1938 until 1998, when it lost the rights to Channel 4. Sky Sports then outbid Channel 4 and Test cricket disappeared behind a paywall in 2006, the exclusive domestic package beginning the year after Channel 4’s coverage of the 2005 Ashes. Channel 4 picked up England’s Test tour of India at short notice during the 2021 lockdown, but no home Test has been shown free-to-air in 21 years.
What it means next
Nothing is signed, and formal discussions with ITV have not begun while the Comcast takeover awaits regulatory approval. The contracts themselves do not start until 2029, three years and an Ashes cycle away. Treating this as a done deal would be premature.
What has changed is the direction of travel. The ECB has spent two decades defending exclusivity as the price of funding the county game, and is now conceding, in public, that reach is a problem worth spending money on. The Hundred is the realistic first prize; England’s white-ball cricket, including the ODI tri-series in Pakistan this autumn, is the natural follow-on.
For anyone hoping to watch a home Ashes Test without a subscription, this is not the answer. It is, however, the first concrete indication that the ECB regards the closed shop as negotiable — and it lands in a summer when the relationship between cricket and its broadcaster has already been tested, not least by the PCB’s formal complaint to Sky at Lord’s. The next serious marker will be the completion of the Comcast deal.
