County Recruitment & Transfer Fees

1st June is a critical date for county recruitment, as it is the day which counties can formally approach out of contract players with a view to signing them for upcoming seasons.

An organised management group will have this planned out well in advance, with a database of players contract expiry, who their agent is, and if the recruitment department is really good, have additional data analysis and playing role based depth charts as well.

This is certainly an approach which I strongly advocate, and is something which I’ve implemented at counties which I’ve worked with in the past.

However, my experience of the industry is that this approach is not commonplace, and the effect of management change may even mean that teams that I’ve previously worked with don’t even take this approach now. Just by doing this basic recruitment work, a county team would have an edge over many of their rivals.

The recruitment work of many counties is far too driven by agents. Counties have this the wrong way around, relying on agents to push players to them, as opposed to creating their own list of players and then contacting agents once their think-tank has decided that player is of interest.

This doesn’t mean I’m anti-agent at all. I know pretty much all of the U.K. based ones, and a lot of the worldwide ones - the majority are good people who help their clients both with getting better deals and to navigate the various off-field pressures that come from being a professional cricketer.

However, the relationship between many teams and agents is completely the wrong way around - it should be a ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ relationship between teams and agents. Any team who relies on agent recommendations for signings is doing their recruitment completely wrong.

Cricket agents, and their players, have probably never had it as good. Both from the perspective of the influx of money into T20, but also from having more and more player power over teams.

The 1st June dynamics are a clear example of this. Once a player’s doesn’t agree a contract renewal at the end of the season before it is due to expire (eg end of 2024 for a 2025 expiry), the player holds all the aces. They can hold their county to ransom, and my experience tells me that the longer it takes a player to sign a new deal with their current team, the less chance they will actually do so. If a player’s contract slips into July of the expiry year, and they’re in demand, they’re likely to move on - particularly from a smaller county.

How can county cricket address this issue?

Transfer fees, in line with football. Just as in football, cricket teams might look to move on players with one year left on their current deal, to get a fee. This then changes the balance of power to some extent, because the club are no longer held to ransom by a player whose contract will expire soon - if a player won’t sign a new deal with a year to go, then a county can say ‘fine, well we will look to move you on this winter’.

The other added benefit of transfer fees is the levelling of the playing field between the richer and poorer teams. Those teams who are more financially challenged can aspire to a Brighton/Brentford data-driven recruitment model, reinvesting transfer profits (and that approach would be even more successful in cricket than football due to smaller financial differences between the haves and the have nots).

I’d also be in favour of counties getting loan fees from overseas franchises for their players.

For example, Richard Gleeson and Jonny Bairstow missed the start of the Blast to go to the IPL as replacement players. This doesn’t benefit their county in any way, and now Gleeson got injured at the IPL, he’ll miss the majority of the Blast anyway - the only format he actually plays for Warwickshire.