Cricket is the world’s second most popular sport. From Kingston to Karachi, Melbourne to Mumbai, cricket has a global reach and presence rivalled only by football. 

As with football, the heart of cricket is not the billions of pounds generated every year. It’s not even in days like Boxing Day 2025, when over 94,000 spectators watched the first day of England vs Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The heart of cricket is the communities that have built up around the sport, and which serve as the backbone of the sport at all levels and in all places.

There are few places where this is more true than for Yorkshire.

On 8th January 1863, Yorkshire County Cricket Club was officially formed. From its inception it has been a members’ club, with membership beginning at ten shillings and six pence. Since then, the club has gone on to win more than 25% of total county championships, with a record 33 to its name, and its most recent title coming in 2015. A lot has changed at Yorkshire CCC throughout the last 163 years, but one thing that has remained constant has been the club being owned by its members.

However, this status is far from guaranteed. Since the return of Colin Graves as chair in 2024 – an appointment the charity Sporting Equals said would “make a mockery” of the victims of institutional racism at Yorkshire – there have been consistent, repeated pushes to demutualise the club. 

Such a move would strip members of their democratic control over the cricket club, placing control in the hands of private groups with no guaranteed tie to the communities within Yorkshire and around the world for whom this cricket club means so much.

Those at the top of Yorkshire CCC argue it is necessary to demutualise in order to increase the amount of investment into Yorkshire – that the move would allow it to spend more to attract test match cricket and to invest on the field – to allow Yorkshire to compete at the top domestically.  For both issues, it is clear that demutualisation is not the answer.

The idea that private ownership is necessary to ensure that test matches continue at Headingley flies directly in the face of the fact that, after the culmination of the England vs Pakistan series this September, England will have played 44 consecutive home test matches at grounds owned by members’ clubs (excluding 2020 where covid protocols meant only grounds with onsite hotels could be used, and no fans were able to attend). During this period Headingley itself has hosted five matches, including two against Australia and two against India.

When it comes to success on the pitch Yorkshire has never been short on achievements, having won the County Championship a record 33 times, including twice since the last time a privately owned county won the competition in 2013 (2013 also being one of only three championships won by privately owned counties since 1890).

That does not mean that the current situation is perfect. Many counties have had difficulties in investing to improve their stadiums, and greater public support is needed to allow these counties to compete financially with privately owned clubs. However, examples such as those of German football clubs who have shown an ability to compete with some of the richest privately owned football clubs on earth without handing control over to those more interested in personal profit than the game, show that it is possible to compete while maintaining members control.

We also must not avoid mentioning that for far too long, cricket has been a sport where discrimination has been embedded within the structure of the game. In 2023 the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket published ‘Holding up a mirror to cricket’, a report that demonstrated “that elitism alongside deeply rooted and widespread forms of structural and institutional racism, sexism and class-based discrimination continue to exist across the game”. 

The report also identified current county memberships are “often not representative of their local communities, nor of the recreational playing population, remaining dominated by older, white and often (but not exclusively) middle class men”.

It is clear that cricket remains too exclusive, and that diversification at the top of the sport is vital. However, demutualisation would be a clear step backwards, moving away from a structure that allows meaningful democratic control and the ability for all communities to say how their club and their sport is run and instead further entrenching these problems. 

A structure that puts all that power into the hands of a wealthy and privileged few would be a betrayal of what the report states cricket should be: “A game for everyone that belongs to everyone”.

For that reason, it is vital that when members consider demutualisation, they vote to reject this option and instead work towards building a more inclusive and diverse club that uses the promise of its co-operative structure to build a club and sport for everyone in Yorkshire.