British snack producer KP Snacks has extended and altered its deal through which it sponsors The Hundred, the short-format, eight-team cricket competition across England and Wales.
A multi-year contract renewal between KP Snacks and the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has been unveiled today (August 7), and will get underway in 2026 – with the current tie-up around The Hundred (both men's and women's teams) coming to an end at the conclusion of the 2025 season, which began earlier this week.
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Next year, a range of KP Snacks brands, including McCoys, Pom-Bears, KP Nuts, and Hula-Hoops, will become sleeve sponsors of the eight teams.
This will represent a change in KP Snacks' inventory – up to now, each team has had one brand from that firm as its main front-of-shirt sponsor.
This extension has been unveiled with six of The Hundred teams now having completed stake sales to private investors. Next season, when all eight new investors are in place – and those with majority stakes take operational control – each team from the competition will be able to secure their own front-of-shirt sponsor, Sportcal (GlobalData Sport) understands. This, therefore, creates the need to reallocate KP Snacks' branding assets on the teams' kits, to the sleeves.
The initial ECB-KP Snacks tie-up was valued by GlobalData – at the time – as worth almost $5 million in total.
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By GlobalDataThe new tie-up is separate from an agreement announced by KP Snacks and the ECB in late April, through which the snack provider has become a sleeve sponsor of the men's and women's England national teams, across both match and training kits.
The Tyrrells brand now features as a sleeve partner for test match kits, KP Nuts for One Day Internationals, Hula Hoops for Twenty20 kits, and the Whole Earth brand is now featuring on England training kits.
Aside from the sleeve sponsorship element of this deal, KP Snacks will also continue with its community and grassroots cricket investment – three years ago, it launched a campaign entitled 'Everyone In' with the aim of "creating one million opportunities for people across the UK to get active through cricket."
Alex Perkins, commercial director of the ECB, has now commented: "We’re delighted to be continuing our partnership with KP Snacks, who were the first partner to come on board with The Hundred and have played a huge role in the growth and development of the competition over the past six years.”
Other tournament sponsors for the current season – which began on August 5 and will come to an end on August 31 – include Sage, Vitality, Toyota, and New Balance (as kit supplier).
The six teams to now formally have stakes held by private owners – encompassing both the men's and women's teams – are: Nothern Superchargers in Leeds, now 100% owned by the Sun Group; Manchester Originals, now 70% owned by RPSG Group; London Spirit, now 50% owned by US-based consortium Tech Titans; Welsh Fire in Cardiff, of which team the Washington Freedom outfit now owns 49%; Southern Brave in Southampton, 49% owned by the GMR Group (although that entity also owns the host county cricket club, Hampshire); and Birmingham Phoenix, 49% owned by Knighthead Capital Management.
If and when the sales of the stakes in Oval Invincibles (London) and Trent Rockets (Nottingham) are completed, Indian heavyweight Reliance Industries will own 49% of the South London team, while Cain International & Ares Management will hold the same size stake in the Rockets.
In total, over £500 million (currently $671 million) has been generated by the sale of these stakes.
The new stakeholders are likely to have an influence on the central sponsors brought into the competition as a whole, not just the brands that partner with their specific teams.
