“Well, we didn’t steal cricket,” Trevor East, the Sky Sports presenter turned executive, is purported to have said two decades ago. “The ECB gave it away.”

It is now more than 20 years since Sky Sports started broadcasting all home Test cricket exclusively, and the end of the game’s free-to-air age. As the ink was drying on the lucrative deal, signed in late 2004, David Morgan, the England and Wales Cricket Board chairman, described it as “an emotive issue”.

Two long and busy decades on, it remains exactly that: an emotive issue. England played their first Test behind a paywall in May 2006, against Sri Lanka at Lord’s. This week, they are back at Lord’s for their 133rd home Test of Sky hegemony, a contract which has been extended four times.

Time has not healed any rifts. In this debate, there remains little room for nuance. Some will tell you the narrowing of the game’s reach put it on life support, others that without the revenue brought in by the Sky deal, matters would be far more perilous.

How Sky became such a central figure in the game

To understand how we got here, it is worth skimming through a short history of English cricket and TV. The BBC first showed cricket in 1938 and dominated the broadcast of live home Tests until 1999. A year earlier, Test cricket had been “delisted” – removed from the government’s list of sporting crown jewels that had to remain free to view. This happened at the ECB’s request, as it sought to maximise the value of its broadcast contracts.

From 1999, Channel 4 and Sky shared the rights, with the move away from the BBC a seismic moment. Channel 4 showed all home Tests, and Sky the one-day internationals, plus one Test per summer. Sky had also shown many of England’s winter tours since 1990.

In December 2004, the ECB announced that Sky would pay £220m across four years (2006 to 2009) to broadcast all home cricket exclusively, with Channel 5 picking up a highlights package. The BBC did not bid, pulling out two days before the deadline. This was in stark contrast to the late 1990s when Tim Lamb, then ECB chief executive, remembers BBC executives bursting into tears at the loss of the live rights. ITV also showed no interest. Channel 4 did bid, but only for the second Test series of each summer. Its initial bid was half of what it had been before.

Channel 4’s on-screen product, courtesy of Sunset and Vine, was innovative. The figures from the 2005 Ashes, which was a series like no other, were staggering: the Oval Test averaged three million viewers throughout; as the game was declared drawn and the urn secured, Channel 4 had a 23.2 per cent audience share; 8.4 million had tuned in for the conclusion at Trent Bridge, where England took a 2-1 lead. By comparison, four years on, Sky had 1.92 million for the denouement at the Oval, as England won the Ashes again. During the stunning Edgbaston 2023 Test, 2.12 million tuned in on Sky.

Of course, Channel 4’s figures were not always so high and the picture was not as rosy off-screen. The channel was said to be losing £16m each year showing cricket. Halfway through its final deal with the ECB, Channel 4 had tried to renegotiate terms, “pleading poverty”, says Lamb, who adds: “We turned them down flat. All our financial projections were based on the broadcast revenue, which was about 70 per cent of our annual revenue.”

Critics of the deal argue the ECB did not work hard enough to keep Channel 4 at the table. What the ECB did do, led by Giles Clarke, the chairman of its marketing committee, was wring extra money out of Sky. Speaking to Wisden Cricket Monthly recently, Clarke said, after the rejection of an initial bid, Sky increased its offer by £30m. The deal was done.

Lamb announced in May 2004 that he was leaving the ECB in September, and was not involved in negotiations. “I was disappointed that the rights went off terrestrial TV, but given the market, I had a lot of sympathy for Giles and the ECB, and understood that the money was too good to turn down,” he says.

While Sky retained the rights again and again, a watershed moment in its relationship with cricket came in 2017. At a time of wild inflation in the sports broadcast rights market, the ECB went to market a year early, to complete the deal before the next round of Premier League rights were due. With BT Sport a credible rival, Sky agreed new terms with the ECB worth £220m per year for five years, starting in 2020. The ECB had more than doubled its previous deal. To make things even sweeter for the governing body, it had managed to lure the BBC back to show highlights and broadcast a handful of short-form matches live. Sky agreed.

Some, including former ECB employees, have been critical of the initial Sky deal with the ECB, arguing an extra few million pounds each year was not worth it for the exposure that was lost. Sky’s bid in 2017, though, was in a different financial stratosphere to anything the free-to-air broadcasters could consider. They had not even been at the auction table for a generation.

This cemented the sense that this was not any old sports rights deal. The ECB and Sky described themselves as “strategic partners”. Sky was producing world-class coverage, which cost about £600,000 per Test before it even considered the wages of its on-screen talent. But the broadcaster was also bankrolling the game. In exchange, it had a say in its direction, including developing the Hundred.

The true impact

One of the reasons the Sky deal was so contentious was its timing. People thought the 2005 Ashes could be special, because it was clear in the previous two years that England were building a side to challenge the great Australians, who had held the urn for 16 years. But nobody could have predicted it would be that special.

Millions were inspired, the nation was gripped, the game had new superstars in Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen, who were household names and tabloid darlings. And then, overnight, it was no longer viewable in every home. With Channel 4 went the great Richie Benaud; that Lord’s Test against Sri Lanka in 2006 was the first in England without Benaud’s commentary since 1962. Against this backdrop, natural nostalgia for the free-to-air era is even easier to understand. Little foibles like missing passages of play for horse racing are quickly forgotten.

Nostalgia does not make up for cold, hard cash, and the bullish Clarke, who became ECB chairman in 2007, has long warned of what would have awaited cricket had the deal not been done. At the time, he said “major cuts” to the England team and county cricket were the alternative. Speaking to Wisden Cricket Monthly recently, he said “at least seven counties would have had to close”.

An 18-county system, by hook or by crook, remains and Clarke argues Sky’s money has led to counties investing in their venues, whether through floodlights or superior drainage systems, which allows the game to be played more often. Grounds for England matches, men’s and women’s, this summer will be rammed, a sign that the game is thriving.

Sky’s money preceded transformational investment in the women’s game, disability cricket, grass-roots projects such as All Stars and Dynamos. The ECB accounts last month painted a healthy picture, with the number of recreational fixtures rising and millions poured into the grass-roots game.

And yet on the ground, not paper, the game does not always feel so healthy. Politicians rarely miss an opportunity to opine on the game’s retreat from the national conversation. Many would argue cricket has become the preserve of the elite, as it is increasingly only played in private schools, which is reflected in the composition of the national teams. With wider societal issues involved, the TV deal cannot bear sole responsibility for that, but it may have contributed.

Some believe TV coverage is a red herring. “The argument is that by putting it on paid TV you take it away from kids,” Barney Francis, Sky’s former director of cricket and managing director told The Cricketer in 2024. “The supposition is that kids don’t live in multi-channel homes, and that is just pathetic.” Others say that young people, the game’s fantasy “new audience”, do not sit down for hours and watch live sport.

The search for a new audience is endless in sport. There are those who believe that English cricket, for all the money, has spent years trying to make up for the mistakes of the mid-2000s. The Hundred, ostensibly, was to find a new audience, and open the game to the masses and future-proof its fanbase. In 2024, Bryan Henderson, the Sky director of cricket, said the broadcaster’s average Test-match viewer is a 57-year-old white male. The Hundred has served to diversify the game and bring in money, but at some cost; it has not been a harmonious chapter in cricket history.

One thing is for sure. In the paywall years, English cricket has become both the envy of other sports and a cautionary tale to them. The envy, because English cricket developed a shorter, sharper format that serves as a gateway in an era of diminishing attention spans: Twenty20. A cautionary tale because the game is perceived not to be as popular as it once was, with a lack of free-to-air TV blamed.

What next?

The ECB’s Sky deal ends in 2028. Shortly before he departed the ECB in 2022, CEO Tom Harrison agreed a four-year extension of the 2017 deal at a flat rate. When the ECB goes to market next year, industry insiders believe another flat deal would represent good business for cricket – assuming Sky is keen. There are unlikely to be credible rivals at the table. TNT Sports prefer ad-hoc winter appointments, which do not require the long-term investment, and it would be one hell of a deal for a new player in the market to take on. Aarti Dabas arrived at the ECB as chief revenue officer earlier this year, and her brief is mainly to thrash out this one deal. Even after attempting to diversify its business model with the sale of the Hundred, broadcast rights remain that important.

There are cricket fans frustrated with Sky’s attitude to overseas rights, possibly exacerbated by TNT’s poor performance in Australia this winter. In addition to its ECB deal, Sky pays plenty to the International Cricket Council to show global events, and there is at least one of those each year in the men’s or women’s game. While fans complain they would like to see more domestic cricket, Sky’s numbers do not back that up. And in one form or another, it shows a lot of cricket; rare is the day between mid-May and September that it is not showing something live.

Its outlay on the game is vast, and it is a smartly run commercial operation. Beyond its core products, it seems to have decided that winter tours do not bring in enough subscriptions to justify the outlay. Or, to look at it another way: when it does not have the rights, it does not lose enough subscribers to move the needle commercially. The bilateral rights market is a total mess. This winter, England embark on five tours to four countries; as it stands, none of them has broadcast deals in place. That will change, but maybe not until the 11th hour, and for a pittance. It is a confusing, expensive time to be a cricket fan – especially when September ends.

Channel 4 famously capitalised on this malaise to show England’s Covid-era tour of India in 2021, which at least ensured that one of Joe Root’s 41 (and counting) Test hundreds was broadcast to the masses. But the prospect of any free-to-air broadcaster showing Test cricket regularly again is surely over. The BBC even offloaded the four T20 internationals (two men, two women) it showed from 2020 to 2024 at the first opportunity, with Channel 5 stepping in to pick them up for a small fee. These rare, random glimpses of live, free-to-air international cricket normally pass by even dedicated fans, let alone converting the masses.

In an age of dodgy sticks, vertical video and streaming, the sports-broadcast landscape is fractured and uncertain. But 20 years on, cricket is still debating the rights and wrongs of a broadcasting deal, still dependent on Sky’s money, and still impressed by its coverage. It is an era that does not look like ending soon.