The new-look London Spirit are hugely increasing salaries paid to off-field cricket staff in a bid to boost the calibre of recruits when the turbocharged Hundred launches in August.<\/p>\n
With the competition\u2019s salary cap including only the playing squad, Spirit hope that the backroom staff attracted will help the team flourish. One source described the wages offered to coaches and analysts for the first five years of the competition, when their salaries were funded by the England and Wales Cricket<\/a> Board, as embarrassing.<\/p>\n Spirit are hoping to benefit from the combination of a massive funding boost after the sale of 49% of the team<\/a> for \u00a3145m to a consortium of entrepreneurs unofficially known as the Tech Titans in last year\u2019s team auction and the pull of life in the English capital to hire staff of sufficient calibre to transform their fortunes. It is understood that their spending on support staff will be trebled.<\/p>\n While the women\u2019s side won the tournament in 2024<\/a> and reached the eliminator last year, the men have finished last or second-last in four of its five seasons.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll be resourcing our support staff in a way that far exceeds \u00adprevious years,\u201d said Mo Bobat, London Spirit\u2019s director of cricket. \u201cThe onus is now\u00a0on teams to pay their coaches \u2013 and their science and medicine staff\u00a0or their analysts \u2013 whatever they want to pay them. We\u2019ve had a good level of backing from the board and we\u2019ve been able to recruit and attract really good \u00adpeople because\u00a0of\u00a0that.<\/p>\n \u201cOur job is to get high-quality people in. We\u2019ve got excellent coaches, we\u2019ve started to build really strong support staff teams and we want to try to make sure that our systems and processes allow success to become inevitable. That doesn\u2019t just happen overnight, but we\u2019re trying to do that as quickly as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n Bobat is also director of cricket at Royal Challengers Bengaluru, who won the Indian Premier League for the first time in 2025<\/a>, and has recruited several of their support staff, including their head coach, Andy Flower, as well as the team analyst, Freddie Wilde, and the physio, James Pipe. The women\u2019s team will be coached by Jon Lewis, with Heather Knight taking on the role of general manager.<\/p>\n On Monday, Spirit announced eight directly signed players, including the South Africans Marizanne Kapp \u2013 player of the match when she won the 2022 final with Oval Invincibles<\/a> \u2013 and Dewald Brevis, the Australian spinner Adam Zampa, Englishmen Jamie Overton and Liam Livingstone and the 19-year-old English seamer Mahika Gaur.<\/p>\n They also unveiled a new logo \u2013 an austere effort compared with some of their rivals, composed of the letters L and S, with the L slanted in a nod to the slope at Lord\u2019s \u2013 and an official colour palette that focuses on blue, but also reflects MCC tradition by including \u201cbacon\u201d (a shade previously better known as red) and \u201cegg\u201d (yellow).<\/p>\n