The ECB will spend more than £6 million a year marketing and running the proposed new Twenty20 tournament. The budget completely eclipses anything previously spent on the marketing of English domestic cricket.

The proposed new tournament will see 36 matches played over 38 days, meaning that about £160,000 per match will be allocated for marketing, promoting and operations. By comparison, Surrey, who almost always sell out the Kia Oval for their NatWest Blast matches, spend just £35,000 on the marketing of their T20 campaign.

Most counties use relatively cheap digital engagement to promote their matches but the ECB is expected to launch a huge marketing campaign including television and radio advertising, billboard posters and advertising on public transport.

Financial forecasts for the new tournament prepared by the accounting firm Deloitte and shown to county chiefs last September predict that the central costs of the tournament will be upwards of £15 million a year, half of which will go on budgets for players and coaches and the rest primarily on the marketing and “activation” costs of each of the matches.

The financial forecasting has a separate amount of £700,000 for what is described as management costs. This includes the salaries of ECB staff employed to organise and run the new competition and is in addition to the £1.3 million that the counties will receive. It means the cost of the new tournament will be approximately £40 million a year. The ECB is forecasting the competition will make a loss of more than £15 million in its first year and has privately warned that, like the Australian Big Bash, it may not make a profit for at least the first three years.

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