How 'Happy Hampshire' came to be part of a multi-million dollar international cricket franchise

In late November, a small crowd at Providence Stadium, Guyana, watched a piece of history being made. When Tom Prest tucked an offbreak from Mahedi Hasan to the leg side, Hampshire became the first English county cricket club to play a match under foreign ownership.

On the back of Prest's shirt was the logo of GMR Sports, a subdivision of the Indian infrastructure conglomerate GMR Group and Hampshire's new majority shareholders. Few were conscious of it as Prest scampered back for two, but this match in Guyana's Global Super League - an invitational tournament staged across two weeks - marked the start of a new era.

Two months earlier, Rod Bransgrove announced that his plan to sell his shares in Hampshire Sports and Leisure Holdings Limited had come to fruition. Bransgrove was sent a hand-written letter by the UK's then-prime minister Rishi Sunak congratulating him on his "retirement" when he stepped down as chairman of Hampshire Cricket in 2023, but it was entirely premature. He will remain chair of the club's parent company until September 2026 at the earliest, and is likely to be involved in some capacity thereafter.

Yet Bransgrove, 75 this year, officially ceased being a person with significant control last October, with GMR's corporate chairman, Kiran Kumar Grandhi, now the club's majority shareholder, according to documents filed to Companies House. The deal, worth around £120 million (US$159 million approx at that time), marked the start of a wave of Indian investment into English cricket and was confirmation that the era of counties being member-owned societies is reaching its endpoint.

GMR became further ensconced on the UK's south coast in February, becoming outright owners of Southern Brave in a deal that valued the Hundred franchise at around £100m ($133m). The Brave - and Hampshire - are now part of GMR's global cricketing network along with Dubai Capitals (ILT20) and Seattle Orcas (MLC), as well as their flagship Indian franchise Delhi Capitals, whom they co-own with JSW Sports. Industry sources suggest that further investment could soon follow in the Caribbean, or even Australia.

In his 25 years with the club, Rod Bransgrove has taken Hampshire from being nearly bankrupt to a world-class international facility with million-dollar foreign investment into its future © Getty Images

"We were basically insolvent"

"This has seen me through being an enthusiastic middle-aged flyer to a knackered old man," Bransgrove jokes as his coffee order arrives at the Hambledown Suite of Hampshire's home ground, the Rose Bowl - or Utilita Bowl, after a lucrative naming-rights deal with an energy company. "It's taken far more time and money than I ever expected. I just got too involved to get out, really… It has been all-consuming."

October will mark 25 years since Bransgrove took over as chairman of a county club that is unrecognisable from its present form. They played at Northlands Road, a small ground in Southampton (now a housing estate), and had enjoyed limited on-field success in the 1990s. Even signing Shane Warne on a lucrative contract in 2000 could not prevent them from relegation to the second division of the County Championship. More pressingly, they were running out of money. "The club was basically insolvent," Bransgrove says.

Now, Hampshire are at the vanguard of English cricket's new era. Bransgrove had long flagged that he was looking to sell his position as Hampshire's majority shareholder. He was first introduced to GMR midway through 2023. The deal was confirmed in late September last year, a day after the end of the County Championship season, and made them the first county to be owned by an investor from outside of the United Kingdom. They will not be the last.

Hampshire have finished in the top three of the Championship for the last three seasons - without managing to break their 51-year drought - but have won three men's T20 titles and four List A trophies in the Bransgrove era. They have been at the forefront of the progress in the women's game since Charlotte Edwards' arrival in 2016, first as a player and then as coach. The Hundred franchise they run, Southern Brave, are one of two to have won both the men's and women's titles. They play at a 25,000-seater venue on a 150-acre site that boasts a hotel, golf course and spa. It has been a remarkable transformation, not so much a face-lift as a full-body reconstruction.

Shane Warne was one of Hampshire's most prominent overseas stars. In 2005 he led them to victory in the C&G Trophy and they finished the County Championship as runners-up, having been promoted the previous season Rebecca Naden / © PA Photos/Getty Images

"We've always had to think on our feet," says Giles White, Hampshire's director of cricket since 2008, who doubled up as head coach for six years and also played for the club from 1994-2002. White recalls a "small run-down county club with one office, not many staff and a slim squad" during his playing days, and a level of apprehension at the move to a new venue. "We thought, 'Is this sustainable? Is there really any money in cricket?'"

Bransgrove is not a lifelong Hampshire supporter. "I thought I was a pretty good cricketer when I was young, but Surrey told me otherwise," Bransgrove says, recalling an unsuccessful trial as a young man. "I followed the game in Kent and Sussex, and now here. This is where I've made my home." He lived in the county while running a pharmaceuticals business in the 1980s and '90s, and his involvement with the club first came about through his friendship with former England batter Robin Smith. Along with Mark Nicholas, who retired from playing in 1995, Smith was one of the personalities who made Hampshire attractive despite their modest results, and was instrumental in bringing Warne to the club in 2000.

New beginnings

Hampshire's move away from Northlands Road was long developed by the time Bransgrove was elected chair in October 2000, but the project's costs had spiralled out of control. "I think they knew they were running out of money," he says, with a wry smile. "I got suckered in, really. It took me about a month to realise that it needed a lot of investment, or it would have no real future." They moved into an incomplete new home at the start of the 2001 season, with players changing in a marquee and using temporary showers while the pavilion - known for its distinctive canopy roof - was finished.

Bransgrove swiftly summoned an extraordinary general meeting of the club's members with an ultimatum. "I explained to them the extent of the debt and said I was prepared to fund it - but not as a members' club. We had to get real and move into the 21st century by structuring ourselves as a proper business. That would mean having professional directors doing professional jobs. It was the only way, really, that we could make the business work."

Two young players, James Vince and Liam Dawson, were instrumental in turning Hampshire into a champion white-ball side © Getty Images

Hampshire's members voted his plan through, converting the club from a mutual society into a limited company. This was an unprecedented move within English cricket, empowering Bransgrove to operate without relying on club committees and member votes, and has proved pioneering: ultimately, it enabled him to sell up to the GMR Group.

Durham and Northamptonshire have since demutualised, and Colin Graves has similar plans at Yorkshire. "A number of clubs will be looking at their own status," Bransgrove predicts. "They need to be able to move on with their business and some can't do that without additional financial support."

The club were renowned as "Happy Hampshire" at the turn of the century: never too concerned by results and playing in the spirit of their former captain Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie, who listed "wine, women and song" as the reasons behind their 1961 Championship title. That quickly changed in the new era. Warne's return in 2004 - as captain - was the catalyst for their promotion back to Division One; the following summer, they finished second, and won the 50-over C&G Trophy. Bransgrove framed the Rose Bowl as the country's most modern venue: it launched the Twenty20 Cup in 2003 (with girl group Mis-Teeq booked to play post-match), hosted five Champions Trophy fixtures in 2004, and staged England's first men's T20I against Australia in 2005.

Staging county cricket alone was never likely to turn Hampshire into a sustainable club. Bransgrove was an early proponent of a city-based T20 tournament - he claims to have "done most of the work" on the Bradshaw-Stewart plan in 2008, which outlined the vision for a competition similar to the Hundred - and was single-minded in his desire to secure Test cricket at the Rose Bowl. He did so in 2008, with the award of a match against Sri Lanka in 2011, but concerns about the ground's transport links and Bransgrove's frosty relationship with ECB chair Giles Clarke contributed to an underwhelming allocation in the following cycle.

"It was pure torture," Bransgrove says. "The truth was, nobody wanted us. All the other [Test match] grounds would say to me, 'Look, Rod, if we don't have our Test match, we will lose £5 million.' I used to say, 'Well, welcome to the club: that's a club we're in permanently at the moment.'" It meant another period of financial worry, soon after the global financial crash. "We had the operating costs of a Test ground, but without the income from international matches," White recalls.

Bransgrove struck a deal in 2011 which saw Eastleigh Borough Council buy the lease to the Rose Bowl site and invest heavily in the hotel and golf course on site. It is an arrangement that continues to this day: Hampshire Sport and Leisure Holdings, the club's parent company, retains an option to buy the site back from the council until late 2032, and the finance lease liability comprises the majority of the £64 million of debt reported in their most recent accounts.

Bransgrove considers the wider site lease to be "the inefficient part" of Hampshire's balance sheet, and intends to use some of the club's windfall from the sale of stakes in Hundred franchises to pay down debt.

By the time that deal was secured, the club were undergoing a successful transition towards a younger squad containing two academy products who would become the core of the side for the next 15 years: James Vince and Liam Dawson. Dawson was ever-present in their 2009 Friends Provident Trophy win, aged 19; Vince was a regular in their 2010 T20 campaign, which culminated in a chaotic victory over Somerset at the Rose Bowl in the final; and both were regulars when they repeated their T20 success in 2012. Captained by senior pros Dominic Cork and Dimitri Mascarenhas, Hampshire became the best white-ball team in the country.

Our stomping ground: the Rose Bowl in 2001 (above) and 2023 © Getty Images

They did so while playing under a new moniker: in 2010, Hampshire Hawks became Hampshire Royals as part of a planned global tie-up which never made it off the ground, but looks increasingly prescient. Thanks primarily to Warne's involvement with both clubs, Hampshire and Rajasthan Royals announced a trailblazing partnership which would also include Cape Cobras, Victoria and Trinidad & Tobago. The vision was eerily similar to the multi-club model that most IPL franchises are now using, with plans to share talent and an annual "Royals festival".

But despite Hampshire's name change in one-day cricket, the deal was never officially signed. Rajasthan were embroiled in legal wranglings with the BCCI which saw them briefly thrown out of the IPL, then reinstated, and the ECB were unimpressed. "They thought I was selling out to the Indians," Bransgrove says with a smirk. "They'd be more than happy with that now, but that was a very different administration." The plan was quietly shelved, and it would be another 14 years before Indian investment in cricket finally arrived on the south coast.

The Edwards era

Hampshire's fortunes dipped later in the decade, and they would have been relegated in 2016 but for Durham's hefty points deduction for their own financial issues. But in that same year, the club made their best signing of the Bransgrove era, recruiting Charlotte Edwards to join the Southern Vipers in the first season of England's new domestic T20 competition, the Kia Super League. The timing was perfect: Edwards signed a month before she controversially lost the England captaincy, a move which prompted her international retirement, and committed wholeheartedly to the Vipers project, leading them to the inaugural title. Bransgrove offered her a role on the club's board, and when she opted to retire from playing after the 2017 season, she became director of cricket and then head coach.

Charlotte Edwards has transformed women's cricket in Southampton as player, captain, coach and administrator Julian Herbert / © Getty Images

"Things happen for a reason," Edwards reflects. "After what happened with me and England, I wanted to be attached to something new. I really fell in love with the club: the people, the ground, and the area too, because I love being by the sea… I can't see myself really ever being too far away from Hampshire." Bransgrove describes Edwards' effect on the club as "stunning", saying: "She lives and breathes it. It's very, very much her team: her personality is all over it."

The Vipers were the most successful team under England's most recent domestic structure, winning the 50-over Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy in 2020, 2021 and 2023 and the T20 competition - named after Edwards - in 2022 and 2023. They will relaunch as Hampshire this year: "It's a new era now for women's cricket, but the Vipers legacy will live on," Edwards says. "We've always felt part of Hampshire, so it's never been about our name, but it does feel really right now and the players are really looking forward to playing double-headers in the T20 Blast. It's going to be brilliant."

Edwards has first-hand experience of facing Delhi Capitals, with her Mumbai Indians side twice pipping them to the Women's Premier League title in India, and considers GMR's investment in Hampshire to be "exciting" for both the men's and women's teams. "I can only think it's a positive thing, with the money coming into the game and the opportunities that will create."

Her success with the Vipers has made her the outstanding candidate to become England's next coach - with the position vacant after Jon Lewis' sacking - if she wants the job. "We'll make sure it costs them," Bransgrove says, laughing. "I'm very happy that she's here, and we all are. If and when England make the call, she'll have a big decision to make - and we will need some compensation."

The next transition

In Hampshire's first home game under Indian ownership, their long-serving captain will be in Pakistan. Vince has led the club in first-class cricket since midway through the 2015 summer, and remains captain of their T20 side, but will follow their first block of Championship games this season while playing for Karachi Kings in the PSL. "I'll flick the stream on and be looking at the scorecards," he says. "That's when it will really hit home… It will be a strange feeling." His absence is another sign of the shifting sands in English - and world - cricket.

On brand: GMR's logo graces the Hampshire jersey in the Global Super League in Guyana last year Ashley Allen / © GSL T20/Getty Images

Vince's decision to step down as their Championship captain was multi-faceted. He had previously floated the prospect of becoming a white-ball specialist with White, but a series of violent attacks on his family home last summer - which remain unexplained - prompted him to accelerate the process. He has now relocated to Dubai, and playing in the Championship would be a significant financial sacrifice for tax reasons. The ECB's new hardline stance on No-Objection Certificates then prompted him to renegotiate his contract with Hampshire, ruling out the prospect of a late-season appearance.

While he never quite cracked Test cricket, Vince has an excellent record for Hampshire with over 12,000 first-class runs, including 29 centuries, at an average of 41.22. "There is a different feeling around the squad," says Ben Brown, the experienced wicketkeeper who will captain Hampshire's Championship side in Vince's absence. "He's been so instrumental in his leadership and with his batting. We have to find a different way to do things moving forward."

Back in 2010, Vince was the beneficiary when Hampshire controversially decided not to pick one of England's best players. Kevin Pietersen was released for match practice ahead of a Test series, but Hampshire selected a teenaged Vince at No. 3 instead. Pietersen had already signalled his intention to leave the club to be closer to his home in Chelsea; when he played for them in a T20 against Surrey, he had to be reminded of his team-mate Chris Wood's name during a post-match interview.

"We picked Vince instead of him for that game down in Canterbury, and it felt like the start of a whole new cycle," Bransgrove recalls. "But I get on very well with KP to this day." In fact, Pietersen played a small role in the sale of the club, introducing Bransgrove to Grandhi - whom he knew from his time at the IPL - and attending one meeting between the two parties. He has since been appointed as a "mentor" by Delhi Capitals.

Kevin Pietersen (left) with GMR group chairman Kiran Grandhi, Delhi Capitals' co-owner and now Hampshire's majority shareholder © BCCI

Hampshire's new status within a multi-club network should unlock some opportunities for talent-sharing: Joe Weatherley was due to play for Dubai Capitals in the ILT20 but missed out through injury, while Faf du Plessis - Delhi's vice-captain in the IPL - will play for Southern Brave. Hampshire deny that the decision to let go of their Pakistani overseas player Mohammad Abbas had anything to do with their new owners, instead citing the need to rebalance their squad to help cover for Vince's runs. White also points to Hampshire's desire for John Turner and Sonny Baker - two young seamers on England development contracts - to play first-team cricket, and highlights Shan Masood's involvement in their GSL squad as proof that they will continue to hire Pakistani players.

While Vince will clearly be a huge miss this year, Brown believes that Hampshire's "winning mentality" will still enable them to compete for the Championship - a trait that attracted him to the club when he left his boyhood team Sussex three years ago. "Everything about Hampshire - the leadership, the players, the facilities - made it a club I wanted to join. Nobody shies away from setting out a plan to win every trophy we are competing for."

The Ashes arrives

The summer of 2027 will mark the realisation of Bransgrove's dream for Hampshire, when the Utilita Bowl stages its first Ashes Test. England's captain, Ben Stokes, said he was "a bit devastated" that the series would not feature any Tests north of Nottingham when the itinerary was announced in 2023, but Hampshire paid little attention. "It was a long, long time coming," Bransgrove says.

The pandemic was a boon to the venue's reputation. The on-site hotel made it the ideal home for Covid-safe Test cricket: it staged three Tests and six white-ball internationals in the 2020 summer, then hosted the inaugural World Test Championship final the following season. "It gave us the opportunity to audition," Bransgrove says. "Even without anyone here, we put on some pretty good Test matches and showed that we produce good wickets.

It's a multiverse: it will be increasingly common to see players featuring for GMR teams across franchises. Delhi Capitals vice-captain Faf du Plessis has signed on to play the Hundred for Southern Brave this year © Associated Press

"I'd already felt that we needed to get some third-party investment - I was going to run out of money - and knew that if we could get onto the Test match map, we could encourage good investment. The only way for this business to really prosper is to be one of the really big clubs. "We've got one of the biggest grounds - a big facility, with big management and real-estate overheads - and I realised early on that domestic cricket alone wouldn't support it. The Ashes coming here was the best news we have had in 20-odd years… That is the focus of our business now, really."

Bransgrove has not taken a back seat just yet, but was thrilled to get the GMR deal over the line last year after a legal process that lasted nearly 12 months. "I had expressions of interest from India, the UK, America, and one group that was based partly in Singapore, partly in Australia. We liked GMR straightaway: they're a family-based business, and we were drawn to their culture immediately. We had a shortlist of five, and two of those couldn't match our valuation so fell away. GMR were tough: everyone thought [the price] was a bit heavy, but I told them there were so many indefinable upsides. We stuck to our guns, and eventually it came off."

In two years' time, he will have the chance to reflect on the transformation from an also-ran to an Ashes host that Hampshire have undergone on his watch. "I'll be spending it with friends, family, wandering around the ground and soaking it all up. It is a massive occasion for us, because it finally legitimises us as an international Test match ground."

Bransgrove's investment has paid off, with the GMR deal ensuring a significant personal return for his two-and-a-half decades of involvement. "That's what I do for a living," he says. "I'd like to think that if it hadn't been Hampshire, it would have been another company that I'd be leaving in good order - it just took me a long time this time."

Matt Roller is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo. @mroller98

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