The new London Spirit will massively increase off-field cricket staff salaries in a bid to boost the caliber of recruits when the turbocharged Hundred is launched in August.
With the league’s salary cap only covering the playing team, Spirit hopes the signed backroom staff will help the team thrive. One source described the wages offered to coaches and analysts during the first five years of the competition, when their salaries were funded by the England and Wales Cricket Board, as shameful.
Spirit will be hoping to benefit from the combination of a huge funding boost following the sale of 49% of the team for £145m to a consortium of entrepreneurs unofficially known as the Tech Titans at last year’s team auction, and the lure of living in the English capital to hire staff of sufficient caliber to transform their fortunes. It is clear that their expenditure on support staff will be tripled.
While the women’s team won the tournament in 2024 and reached the eliminator last year, the men have finished last or penultimate in four of the five seasons.
“We will deploy our support staff in a way that goes far beyond previous years,” said Mo Bobat, London Spirit’s director of cricket. “It’s now up to the teams to pay their coaches – and their science and medicine staff or their analysts – whatever they want. We’ve had a good level of support from the board and that’s allowed us to recruit and attract really good people.
“Our job is to bring in high quality people. We have excellent coaches, we have started to build really strong support teams and we want to try to ensure that our systems and processes ensure that success becomes inevitable. That won’t happen overnight, but we are trying to do that as quickly as possible.”
Bobat is also director of cricket at Royal Challengers Bengaluru, who won the Indian Premier League for the first time in 2025, and has recruited a number of their support staff, including their head coach Andy Flower, as well as team analyst Freddie Wilde and physio James Pipe. The women’s team is coached by Jon Lewis, with Heather Knight taking on the role of general manager.
On Monday, Spirit announced eight immediately signed players, including South Africans Marizanne Kapp – player of the match when she won the 2022 final with Oval Invincibles – and Dewald Brevis, Australian spinner Adam Zampa, Englishmen Jamie Overton and Liam Livingstone and 19-year-old English seamer Mahika Gaur.
They also unveiled a new logo – a pared-back effort compared to some of their rivals, consisting of the letters L and S, with the L slanted in a nod to the slope at Lord’s – and an official color palette that focuses on blue, but also reflects MCC tradition by including ‘bacon’ (a shade previously better known as red) and ‘egg’ (yellow).
With local rivals Oval Invincibles rebranded as MI London, it means the capital’s 200 franchises will both wear blue and have London in their names. “Ideally they could have been different colors, but I didn’t think about that too much,” Bobat said.
“There are plenty of teams wearing blue in the IPL and there is no shortage of rivalry there.”
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