Sanjay Patel interview: Yorkshire CCC must never get into this financial state again

This, after all, is a man who helped to create The Hundred, a concept which has just brought more money into English cricket than it has ever seen before, the sums so eye-watering that they might cause a calculator to have a nervous meltdown.

From the sale of the eight teams/franchises, including the Headingley-based Northern Superchargers, a total enterprise value of over £975m was generated, which will inject more than £520m into the professional and recreational game, clear Yorkshire’s debts of around £25m and give the club some £30m-£35m to play with – money that would buy a whole fleet of yachts if the club so wished.

“It’s been a good few days,” says Patel, an affable Scotsman devoid of any kind of frippery – or indeed triumphalism – as we sit in an office that is no more remarkable than one might imagine.

There is, for the record, an office chair (always helpful), a computer and a desk (ditto), a few soft chairs and a meeting table, plus a bird’s eye view of the famous old field.

Patel, 51, is dressed not in the flowing gold robes of some Roman emperor but in a sensible jumper to keep out the chill. He even nips out of his office to make this chancer a coffee; why, if Yorkshire were minded to be lavish after recent developments, he’d surely have a lackey or three for that task.

Not that Patel is counting his chickens before they have hatched, or before the windfall has landed in Yorkshire’s account. When I ask if he is turning cartwheels after Sun Group’s purchase of Superchargers for around £100m, and the consequent financial boost to the club from the sales process generally, he says with an appropriately raised eyebrow: “I wouldn’t say I’m over-celebrating yet. There’s still eight weeks of legal work to do, negotiations, just to make sure we get this deal signed.

“As soon as the deal’s signed, then the future of the club is safe, and actually we can look to a very different and brighter future because we can invest and grow, which is a big change from where we’ve been. It’s more that we’ll breathe a sigh of relief, though, than any kind of cartwheeling.”

It almost goes without saying that the cash will be transformative. Above all, it will help ensure that there is any kind of office at Headingley full stop, let alone a cricket club and an international ground.

“The key thing, and the key objective, particularly for Colin (Graves, the Yorkshire chair) and I is to make sure that this club never again gets into the financial state it has been in during the last five years,” says Patel. “We literally had nowhere else to go. We couldn’t borrow any more money. We were facing administration. That’s the harsh reality, so without this cash injection, I’m not sure where we’d be.”

It highlights the effect of The Hundred funds – not just for Yorkshire but, says Patel, “another five or six counties that will survive on the back of it”, and why the issue of demutualisation (changing from a members’-owned organisation to a private limited company) has gone a bit quiet at Headingley of late. Not that the subject – unlike the cat on the Titanic – is dead in the water.

“When you go back several months when Colin took over and I joined the board, we were just trying to think about ways to get ourselves out of the financial picture we were in, and one of those ways was demutualisation, so I think we’re now a little bit more open to thinking about that as one option of a few that might be on the table,” says Patel.

“It’s still an option, 100 per cent, but the proceeds from The Hundred open up your options. A lot was made of it (demutualisation) but as long as the club still remains ‘the club’, and members still have their rights and their privileges, then it doesn’t really change much in terms of the experience for people.”

Patel is adamant that the cash does not give Yorkshire a licence to crack open the champagne and to unwrap the cigars, but instead a platform to be “a financially thriving business creating revenue that can be re-invested back into the ground, players, facilities, volunteers, coaches, all the things that make cricket strong in this county”. Prudence, in fact, is very much his watchword.

“It’s really important that the club looks after the money and that the club is run in a way that generates its own revenue and its own profit in order to reinvest,” he adds. “This is an opportunity not for the club to sit back and live off this money, but an opportunity for the club to grow, and the club has to grow because when I look at some of the other bigger grounds in the country, like Manchester, like Birmingham, like The Oval, etc, this club is behind when it comes to things like revenue and things like facilities, and things like the ground, and actually that’s not appropriate for a club like Yorkshire.

“There’s a lot that needs to be done. What we’re not going to do is rush into things. We need a proper facilities plan over five years which looks at every single aspect of the ground and how we can improve it, how we can improve the customer experience, how we can drive attendances, and so on.

“There’s a cricket aspect to that – things like our indoor nets that need a bit of investment, practice pitches that require investment, there’s a number of things, but we need to be very strategic about it and invest sensibly and make sure the club remains strong, healthy and hungry in its own right.”

How much of this change Patel will be around to facilitate remains to be seen. He is the club’s “interim” chief executive, after all, a word that does not suggest permanence. “I’m definitely here until September. Colin and the board asked me to do it for a year because we were in a certain financial situation, and we needed to sell The Hundred team to get ourselves out of that situation.

“Given that I was on the board, and given that I wasn’t actually working, the third time he asked me I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it for a year.’ But, seriously, I’ve enjoyed it. Right now, I just want to get to the end of March. I just want to get these contracts signed. I just want to make sure the club’s financial future is secure.”

With a background in playing (Patel represented Scotland at national and age-group level as an opening batsman), it would be wrong to think of him as someone oblivious to the pull of traditional cricket.

Patel says he “loves red-ball” but that “the unfortunate nature of it is our four-day (Championship) cricket loses us money on a per-game basis”. He hopes that The Hundred will sustain the Championship and indeed protect it, and warns that prudence must pervade cricket per se, not just Yorkshire specifically.

“If the game chases dreams that are probably not achievable, then the danger is that the game is in the same place again in 15 years,” he says. He wants cricket to be sustainable and the sport to grow, too.

Patel feels that the ECB, where he worked as chief commercial officer when Graves was chair, later becoming managing director of The Hundred, has “a big job on its hands” to make sure the competition is looked after and “led the right way”. He thinks franchise cricket will continue to grow globally, and that there is “enormous pressure” on bilateral and Test cricket outside the ‘Big Three’, but believes that not all franchise leagues will survive and that “there’ll be probably five or six strong leagues around the world”, perhaps easing pressure on the crowded schedule.

As he ponders it now, Patel says The Hundred has grown a game whose audience was in decline, helped to give it a new audience and revitalised its finances.

He recognises that it will never be to everyone’s liking and has a pragmatic take on that. “There’s critics of The Hundred. That’s ok. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion and their view of the world. I think what they’ll say is, ‘Yeah, it’s maybe done a job, but do I like it? No. I want to go and watch red-ball cricket, and that’s what I love.’ And that’s absolutely fine.”

And with that, Patel is back to his day job with down-to-earth busyness. There are no luxuries, fripperies or extravagances here.