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The Hundred London seating guide →
The Hundred rebuilt the basic arithmetic of cricket. Each side faces 100 balls rather than a set number of six-ball overs. Overs are five balls long instead of six, and a bowler may deliver up to twenty balls in an innings, in consecutive spells of either five or ten. The powerplay covers the first twenty-five balls.
Every one of those changes serves the same goal: compression. Matches finish in roughly two and a half hours, which is shorter than a Twenty20 and deliberately comparable to a football match or a film. The competition was designed to be watchable in a single evening by an audience that would not commit a full day to cricket.
The five-ball over is the most quietly significant change. It gives captains more frequent bowling decisions and end changes, and it removes the familiar rhythm of the six-ball over that shapes how tactics work in every other format. Bowlers can also bowl ten consecutive balls from the same end, which has no equivalent elsewhere in the professional game.
London Spirit are based at Lord’s, which gives the team the most storied home ground in world cricket and a very different matchday character from the rest of the competition. MI London — known as the Oval Invincibles until the 2026 season — play at The Oval in Kennington and are the most successful franchise in the competition’s history.
The two grounds sit barely four miles apart on opposite sides of the Thames, which makes The Hundred the only professional cricket competition with a genuine London derby. Both teams field men’s and women’s sides, and fixtures are generally staged as double-headers, with the women’s match followed by the men’s on the same ticket.
That double-header model is one of the competition’s most significant features. It has given women’s cricket consistently large crowds and equal billing at major grounds, which no other domestic structure in the sport had previously achieved.
The Hundred changed hands in a way few domestic competitions ever have. In 2025 the ECB sold equity stakes in all eight teams, in a process that valued the franchises collectively at more than £975 million, with over £500 million earmarked for reinvestment into cricket in England and Wales, including a £50 million commitment to grassroots.
Both London teams attracted major investment. A consortium of Silicon Valley technology figures bought the 49 per cent stake in London Spirit for £145 million, the highest valuation of any team in the competition — a reflection of the commercial pull of Lord’s. The 49 per cent stake in the Oval Invincibles went to Reliance Industries, owners of the Mumbai Indians, for £60 million, with Surrey retaining 51 per cent.
That Reliance deal is why the team’s name changed. Completed in December 2025, it brought the franchise into the Mumbai Indians stable alongside teams in the IPL, SA20, ILT20 and Major League Cricket, and the club was rebranded MI London from the 2026 season. The men’s and women’s teams both carry the new name.
The Hundred has been the most divisive development in English domestic cricket in decades. Its supporters point to measurable success: new audiences, large crowds, a genuinely transformed profile for the women’s game, and now an equity sale that has injected more money into the sport than any previous domestic initiative.
Its critics argue that it was created at the expense of the existing county structure, that it duplicates Twenty20 without adding enough to justify a separate format, and that the city-franchise model cuts across the county loyalties that sustain the domestic game. The competition occupies a peak midsummer window, which necessarily pushes county cricket to the edges of the season.
Both cases have substance, and the ownership sale has sharpened rather than settled the argument. What is no longer in dispute is the competition’s permanence: the scale of investment now committed makes The Hundred a fixed part of the English summer rather than an experiment.
The Hundred was priced and scheduled to bring new audiences into cricket, and that shows on a matchday. Tickets are cheaper than international cricket at the same grounds, families are a large share of the crowd, and the compressed format means an evening fixture finishes at a reasonable hour.
Both London grounds are compact urban venues reached by public transport rather than car. The Hundred London seating guide covers where to sit at each, and the transport guide the routes in. For ground-specific detail the Lord’s seating guide and Oval seating guide go further.