The Hundred 2026: Why England’s 100-Ball League Is Suddenly Big News in India

The Hundred returns in 2026 with IPL franchise power and record franchise deals. Here’s everything about the 100-ball format, teams and auctions.

The hundred 2026 (Image Source: Google)

IPL 2026 is scheduled to start from 28 March, but India has suddenly been woken up by the news of a players’ auction to form teams for a white-ball professional league called The Hundred.

This tournament commenced in the 2021 English cricket season, but with our own IPL being the envy of the cricketing world, and with none of the Indian stars participating (in the men’s event), India never seriously paid attention to The Hundred.

Suddenly, this year everything has changed, and another IPL-style men’s and women’s event — though quite different from the IPL — is making news in India. So, what exactly is The Hundred?

Organizers

The tournament is organized by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and is played in the United Kingdom.

Concept

To differentiate it from the already crowded T20 leagues, a 100-ball cricket format (one innings of 100 balls) was adopted. For statistical purposes, performances in the tournament are recorded under the Twenty20 format.

Time for One Match

Around two and a half hours.

Other Important Playing Conditions

One over consists of 10 deliveries. The bowling ends change after every 10 balls. Bowlers can deliver either five balls or 10 consecutive balls (decided by the captain), meaning two different bowlers can share one over if five balls each are bowled.

Each bowler can deliver a maximum of 20 balls per match.

Timeout: Each bowling side gets a strategic timeout of up to two and a half minutes. During the timeout, the coach can walk out to the middle and discuss tactics with the players.

Powerplay: A 25-ball powerplay at the beginning of each innings.

Teams

There are eight city-based teams (from seven cities). The teams for 2026 are:

Birmingham Phoenix (Edgbaston)

London Spirit (Lord's)

Manchester SuperGiants (Emirates Old Trafford)

MI London (The Kia Oval)

Southern Brave (Southampton)

SunRisers Leeds (Headingley)

Trent Rockets (Trent Bridge)

Welsh Fire (Sophia Gardens)

Current Title Holders

Northern Superchargers (now SunRisers Leeds) won the Women’s Competition, while Oval Invincibles (now MI London) won the Men’s Competition for a third consecutive year.

Auction for 2026

For the first time, after retentions (four players) or direct signings (or a combination of the two), the remaining players for both the men’s and women’s teams were acquired through auctions.

After five seasons, The Hundred will be played in a new ‘avatar’ this year, widely seen as a virtual takeover of the event by IPL franchises. The ECB decided to partially privatize the event to raise funds and help county clubs deal with mounting debts. The process — termed “the great Hundred sell-off” — has become one of the most eventful stories in modern cricket.

The extraordinary auction of the eight franchises, based on a total £975 million valuation, brought an initial £520 million into the game’s coffers.

England had never seen a contest like the three-hour bidding battle between Silicon Valley tech titans and an IPL billionaire for the Lord’s-based Hundred franchise, where the price jumped by £3 million every 15 minutes.

Eventually, the Silicon Valley consortium Cricket Investor Holdings Limited, which includes among others the Indian-American chief executives of Google and Microsoft and heads of other major tech companies, valued London Spirit at £295 million and paid £144.5 million for a 49 per cent stake.