The range of viable investors in the Hundred teams is "way broader and bigger" than anticipated ahead of Friday's first-round deadline for bids. That is according to the ECB's senior leadership team, who defended the Hundred's projected valuations of overseas broadcast rights on Wednesday by insisting: "We are confident in our product".
The ECB sent investment prospectuses to around 100 interested parties last month, who were set a deadline of October 18 to register their initial interest in buying a stake in one of the eight Hundred teams. The teams are currently owned by the ECB but will become franchises run as joint-ventures with host counties (or the MCC) once the sale process is complete.
The Hundred's overseas broadcast rights are currently valued at around £2 million per year. Financial projections in the prospectuses distributed by Deloitte and the Raine Group - who are running the sales process - involve a jump to £33 million by 2030, with a year-on-year growth rate of 42%.
One prospective investor, who has since withdrawn from the sales process, told ESPNcricinfo that those figures "make no sense" and had not been fully explained. "It seems like they first thought of a valuation then made up the numbers to justify it - things like the sudden and exponential growth in broadcast revenue from India and North America," they said.
Richard Gould and Richard Thompson, the ECB's chief executive and chair respectively, are in Multan this week during England's second Test against Pakistan, ahead of the first-round deadline. They said the board has fielded interest from a "full gamut" of potential investors and defended the projected increase in revenue from Indian broadcast rights.
"We are not making an assumption that India's men's players will be released, because that has not been what has happened," Gould said. "We are confident in our product, in terms of the window we occupy and the players we've got available. There are loads of T20 and short-format franchise competitions out there at the moment, and I don't think they are all going to last, in truth."
Gould said that "about 100 or so" interested parties had requested access to the ECB's "data room", including "a lot of Indian interest" with the majority of owners of IPL and WPL franchises understood to be involved in the process. He said there has also been interest "from America, from other sports and investment houses".
He said: "We're getting towards the end of stage one this week… at the moment, they can express an interest in all eight clubs. We'll have a better indication over the next week or two. Thereafter, we'll spend a month or so going through those. At the end of that process, they will be able to go and meet the county clubs and see where their relationships work best.
"During that period they can have an interest in up to four teams. When we get to the crunch time, which is the next phase, they can only put their name in for two teams, and they can only win one. Clearly, we want to maximise the value, because the value the ECB holds is on behalf of the game."
Gould said there were "a few tyre-kickers" among the parties to initially register their interest, but Thompson insisted that the ECB had outstripped expectations overall. "Raine originally said they thought there'd be three to four bidders per team," he said. "The investment base is way broader and bigger than they expected."
Vikram Banerjee, the ECB's director of business operations, said last month that the sale process could be delayed beyond next year if the right bids do not come in. Thompson suggested that the 2025 season could be a "hybrid" model, with some teams still owned by ECB and others by private investors.
"What we don't want is to just feel bounced into selling all of them and thinking, 'We could have got a lot more if we'd held back because that particular team wasn't ready to go,'" he said. "The worst thing we could do would be to undersell the game and look back thinking, 'We let some of these franchises go at prices that weren't full market value.'"