How Nat Sciver-Brunt Could Break Cricket’s $1 Million Barrier

(Bloomberg) -- Nat Sciver-Brunt, an all-rounder for England and the Mumbai Indians, is closing in on becoming the first English women’s cricketer to earn over $1 million.

Cricket has a reputation as the traditional and sometimes stuffy pastime of privately-educated Englishmen. Yet it’s equalizing pay between the sexes faster than many other sports, with new formats giving female players the chance to hit the jackpot.

Sciver-Brunt was bought in the first-ever Women’s Premier League auction for the equivalent of £305,000 — or $386,000 — last year, the biggest payout ever received by an English female cricketer.

“I was a bit like: ‘Oh my god,’ and really excited,” says Sciver-Brunt, 31, when we met recently in Loughborough, a market town where the England team trains. “But also I wanted to concentrate and sort of ignore it.”

Money in the women’s game has finally taken off. Central contracts from the England and Wales Cricket Board — used to remunerate players for representing their country — were around £22,000 ($27,800) in 2015, and £24,000 in 2021 following the pandemic. They nearly doubled the following year and now a top female player can earn £122,000 from the contract and about a further £180,000 from match fees.

Although this still lags behind the sums given to male players, the discrepancy is not as extreme as with some sports; men’s central contracts can be worth £800,000 according to The Cricketer, while men and women earn the same England match fees, a situation that would be extraordinary in other corners of the sporting world.

The situation is very different in Britain’s most popular game — football. The highest earning female player in the English Women’s Super League is reported to be Australian Sam Kerr on slightly more than £400,000 a year, roughly the same amount that Manchester City star Kevin De Bruyne earns every week.

Much of cricket’s pay boost has been driven by the WPL in India, the women’s version of the IPL, a short format men’s tournament worth billions. Although the men’s game remains far more lucrative — Australia’s Mitchell Starc was bought for about £2.35 million for the upcoming season — the WPL pours so much money into the women’s game that it was described to a sports channel as “life-changing” and “unheard of in our game” by Lydia Greenway, a former England batter, who said it had the potential to reshape the sport.

The level of interest is not very different between Indian men and women, with 46% of women saying they are fans compared with 54% of men, according to YouGov. The research also found that attitudes towards the women’s game are more progressive than in many other countries, with two-thirds of cricket fans saying players’ pay should be linked to talent not gender. 

Sciver-Brunt’s WPL fee for this year’s competition was roughly the same as last year’s $386,000. The competition started last week when the Indians beat Delhi Capitals. Sciver-Brunt’s team currently sits second in the table and she’s expected to line up against Royal Challengers on Saturday afternoon.

She also plays in The Hundred, a short-form game designed to attract new fans in England which pays its top female players £50,000, as well as Australia’s Big Bash, in which top players can earn A$133,000 ($87,000).

In total, her earnings from these competitions could already exceed $900,000, with the million-dollar mark not far away given the burgeoning popularity with the women’s game — and that’s before any personal sponsorship and other marketing opportunities.

The life-changing amounts of money offered by the WPL “made other franchises sit up, and probably other countries as well, and take notice,” Sciver-Brunt says. Despite being one of the best female cricketers on the planet she is modest and unassuming, saying that the enormity of her own WPL deal “didn't actually register with me up until I got my tax bill.

Her financial success has been so unexpected that she has been forced to be more organized. She has spent most of her professional sports career so far without an agent, employing one only a few years ago. “I didn’t really feel like I needed it, and also I didn’t really want to give any money away,” she says. 

In recent years she’s started working with a financial advisor who was introduced to her through cricket. They help her to “learn from the experience of some of the guys” that it’s best not to splash out on a Ferrari before you’ve paid your tax bill, she says.

The women’s game has “changed massively since I was at school,” says Sciver-Brunt, which was when she picked up the sport. She grew up in a middle-class family that traveled around the world following the diplomatic postings of her mother Julia Longbottom, the current UK ambassador to Japan. 

As a teenager she was sent to Epsom College, a boarding school in Surrey. It didn’t have a girls’ team so she played with the boys and joined a local club before representing her county. Her talent was immediately apparent: so much so that her brother and sister avoided the sport for fear of not measuring up. “They actually decided not to play cricket because they didn’t want to compete with me,” she laughs.

The turning point came at university where she was coached by her now-wife, Katherine, who shares the same surname and also became a cricketer. Until then she had treated tours like holidays but Katherine convinced her to treat the sport more seriously and do everything possible to play for England. It was a wake-up call.

Despite the rise of women’s cricket, there remains work to do. “We haven’t been, I guess, treated as equals.” Sciver-Brunt says that at some sports grounds, England’s female internationals are still not “given the right changing rooms or given the right training facilities.”

One of the recent success stories in women’s sport has been the rise of England’s Lionesses, the football side that plays to nearly 90,000 sell-out crowds at Wembley and has recently had a train line in London named after them. She says cricketers have “been on a similar journey…It feels like every year we have the best summer we’ve ever had.”

The Lionesses have benefited from public support from several male players in the England squad. I ask whether there has been any similar support between the men and women in cricket, though Sciver-Brunt replies: “We’re not that close.” The two squads rarely even see each other given they’re on “pretty packed” international schedules. 

Just as Sciver-Brunt’s game rapidly improved when she started to take herself seriously, the England team is trying to encourage a more aggressive and professional approach, she says. “Cricket historically has been quite a traditional sport that you have to stick to the mold… Otherwise, you get looked at funny or judged or whatever.” But now, coaches are encouraging the women to “break boundaries, try and make history,” she says. “The ceiling of what we can do probably hasn’t been achieved yet.”

There still appears to be a cultural difference between cricketers from various parts of the world, at least in their attitude to the windfall of money from Indian game. England’s women were about to play a match against New Zealand when news from the inaugural WPL auction emerged. Many of the English team decided they didn’t want to know whether they had won lucrative contracts, in case it distracted them from the upcoming match. A group of Indian players, who were nearby, took a different approach.

 “They were like literally clapping every person who got sold so we could just hear all of it,” remembers Sciver-Brunt. The Indian camp was livestreaming the auction on a projector with loud speakers, embracing the drama.

Some English players managed to wait until after their game before finding out who had been bought — and who hadn’t. “That was the most awful part,” Sciver-Brunt recalls. “People obviously having a lot of excitement, and a lot of people having a lot of disappointment as well.”

Her wife was among those who missed out. Katherine was “really disappointed, really quite upset” about not getting signed, which meant they had to cope with “both of us being happy for me as a couple, but then also major disappointment.”

Without the WPL deal, Katherine retired from the sport last August.

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