Waitrose Dump The ECB

I’d like to welcome back a familiar face to TFT. News broke a few days ago that Waitrose will not renew their sponsorship of the England cricket teams. Who better to react to developments than my old co-editor Maxie Allen? He’s been following events from afar with interest … 

Here are a few thoughts about the recent news that Waitrose have dumped the ECB. The supermarket chain decided, at the earliest possible opportunity, not to renew their sponsorship of the England teams when it expires in early 2017. The deal included all the ECB’s international sides, including the women’s, Lions, and under-19s XIs, as well as grassroots cricket – or at least, what passes for it, under the board’s aegis.

The decision is a major blow to the ECB. £3 million a year has gone down the swanee. Worse, Waitrose are what Giles Clarke would call “exactly the right sort of sponsor for England”: a prestigious but relatable brand which touches on people’s everyday lives. Their sponsorship gave England a precious presence beyond the normal reach of cricket – in supermarkets and retail websites. Cricket’s usual sponsors are more obscure and provide fewer, if any, synergies. Typically, they’re financial service providers whose brands mean little to anyone. The tie-ins do nothing to enlarge cricket’s footprint. When was the last time you went shopping at Investec?

When the ECB and Waitrose first got hitched, the BBC’s cricket correspondent was so excited about it, he did the voiceover for a You Tube advert celebrating the deal. It was a decision he later regretted. This moving film, which featured Stuart Broad, James Anderson, and Katherine Brunt, perusing the aisles for an apple, a loaf, and a bottle of wine, truly made you feel proud to be British. Such was its success, they quickly deleted it from You Tube. Yet more fun quickly followed when Peter Moores and Alastair Cook teamed up for a Waitrose-inspired cookery lesson.

But it was all too good to last. And perhaps the most embarrassing aspect for the ECB is that commerce is the one thing they’re meant to be good at. Lord knows they make a hash of everything else, but sharp-suited Tom Harrison was brought in as chief executive on the strength of his CV as a deal-making whizz-kid. Mind you, judging by his TMS interview last autumn, his inability to string together a coherent sentence probably didn’t help the negotiations.

So why did it all end in tears? There is a very simple reason why Waitrose ditched England, and I take total credit.

Remember my letter?

Let’s just suppose, though, that I wasn’t responsible. Most of the clues in the public domain derive from a report by Charles Sale in the Daily Mail. You could dismiss his assertions as gossip and rumour, sure – but hey, that’s the way the ECB like to do things.

Mark Price, the Waitrose MD who signed the deal with Giles Clarke, has recently left the firm – replaced by new management, who typically like to make changes to stamp their authority and signify a new broom.

The ECB hardly helped themselves, though. According to Sale, the board demanded a one-hundred per cent price increase to renew Waitrose’s sponsorship. One hundred per cent! We all know the ECB are greedy, but even by their mercenary standards, doubling the fee – on no obvious grounds – really takes the biscuit.

Sale also tells us that:

The supermarket giant also felt rather unloved by the ECB top brass – which has changed significantly, especially on the commercial front, since Waitrose came on board in 2013. And they were not impressed that the ECB allegedly hired agency TRM Partners to find new backers before they had officially said they were not going to extend the deal.

So, to put in another way, ECB mis-managed relationships, upset people, snuck around behind their backs, were devious and slippery? What a surprise.

And there are other sponsorship problems beyond Waitrose. Sale also reported that:

Meanwhile, Specsavers are expected to be the next backers of the County Championship after the loss of LV=. A more lucrative deal with Johnstone’s Paint fell through because of minimal TV coverage for the county game.

Minimal coverage? Talk about an understatement.

The Specsavers deal is as yet unconfirmed, so this means the ECB are effectively now looking for new sponsors for both the county championship and the entire portfolio of England teams. As kettles of fish go, this is a pretty one indeed. How did the board get themselves into such a mess at a time when the senior men’s team – having won the Ashes and in South Africa – are doing as well on the field as any potential sponsor could reasonably expect?

I referred only flippantly to my letter to Waitrose, but it’s not impossible the company felt embarrassed by their connection to a sports governing body with as toxic, misanthropic, and inept a reputation as the ECB’s.

The events which played out between February 2014 and May 2015, revealed – to extensive publicity – the board’s pathological culture of acrid mendacity and nefarious incompetence, a kind of cross between Robert Mugabe and the Chuckle Brothers, in corporate form. Why would a brand owned by John Lewis – who pride themselves on ethical commerce – want anything more to do with them?

That said, Waitrose most likely made a cold-blooded business decision, driven by the bottom line, and it relates to the collapse of the Johnstone’s Paint deal. Waitrose probably realised how little bang they were getting for their buck. England have just sealed a landmark victory in South Africa. And exactly how much publicity did that generate for Waitrose? There were barely any photos of the team on the front pages of newspapers. None of the players have since appeared on TV chat shows or magazine covers. The series may as well have taken place on the moon.

English cricket has no celebrities. In the Britain of 2016, heptathletes, track cyclists, and even divers, are more famous than the nation’s top cricketers. Why? Because they’re on mainstream television, while cricket languishes behind a paywall which only the most engaged and affluent viewers are prepared or able to breach.

A mere 467,000 people watched England beat Australia on the final day of the 2015 Cardiff Ashes test. The peak viewing figure for the 2013 Ashes was 1.3 million, and if last year’s ratings were higher, Sky Sports – who will release no numbers – are strangely reluctant to mention it. Meanwhile, on free television, snooker gets audiences three times larger than cricket, and 11.6 million watched England v Wales in the rugby world cup on ITV.

Is it any wonder sponsors are pulling out of cricket? The more money the ECB try to make from the sport, the less it’s actually worth.

James Morgan