What the looming sale of Melbourne Renegades means for fans and the BBL

For cricket fans who just want to head to Docklands every few weeks and watch some folks in red shirts whack a white ball bowled by someone in a gold shirt, a lot of the talk of privatisation and franchise sales feels a little outside their purview.

But it’s becoming increasingly relevant as leagues grow into international businesses and our romantic notions of playing “for the love of the game” become fantasies of yesteryear, leaving us wishing we’d paid a little more attention to the dialogue in the last season of Succession.

The latest chapter came with reports of a merger between sworn enemies the Melbourne Renegades and Melbourne Stars.

Water and oil! Capulets and Montagues under one roof. Cats living with dogs.

Surely it can’t be.

As it turns out, no. Not really.

So what exactly is going on?

Which BBL team is being sold?

Basically, the Stars and Renegades Big Bash League licences are owned and run by Cricket Victoria.

The Renegades’s licence is being sold to a private investor.

The exact details of that deal are still to be finalised but the new owners are likely to receive the players’ Big Bash League contracts, pending approval from the Australian Cricketers’ Association, and venue hire agreement.

But team staff and sponsorship are with Cricket Victoria, and it’s that side of the Renegades that is “merging” with the Stars in a sense.

Cricket Australia has not been shy about its interest in pursuing private ownership in the BBL in a bid to help fill its coffers, and Cricket Victoria chief executive Nick Cummins said this sort of decision could help the sport’s national governing body “balance the books”.

Cummins told the ABC there is a chance the Renegades could still play under their current name if the sale isn’t resolved before the season starts.

“We should know who the buyer is by next summer [2026/27],” he said.

“What we won’t know is whether the buyer wants to change the name of the team before next summer or not. That’s to be decided in the coming months.”

Cummins said both BBL teams will remain in Melbourne, with the Stars side of things also changing its name.

The state association is hoping to snap up some of those Renegades fans in need of a team but is aware they’re not likely to join a bandwagon tied to the Stars’ brand.

And that’s not only because the Stars are the last team left in the Big Bash League yet to win a title across 26 seasons in the men’s and women’s leagues.

“They’ve spent the last 15 years hating the Stars, so we wanted to create a new team and new name that would unify Victorian cricket fans,” Cummins said.

“We’re working on that at the moment. We’ll launch that brand later in the month most likely, and we believe that’s something both our Stars and Renegades fans will be able to get around.”

Has this happened before?

Cummins said there was interest from buyers all around the world.

“From within Australia, from Europe, from Asia. Particularly India, unsurprisingly. But also the USA,” he said.

The interest from India echoes a similar situation that has just unfolded in the British Hundred competition where stakes in all eight teams were sold to private entities.

Large stakes in London Spirit, Birmingham Phoenix and Welsh Fire were sold to American-based companies, while Chelsea owner Todd Boehly bought a 49 per cent stake in the Trent Rockets.

The Southern Brave, Oval Invincibles, Manchester Originals and Northern Superchargers were bought by Indian interests.

The Spirit, Phoenix, Fire, Rockets and Brave kept their names, while the remaining three clubs underwent controversial changes.

The London-based Invincibles have been renamed MI London after being sold to the owners of the IPL’s Mumbai Indians.

The Superchargers are now Sunrisers Leeds, in line with the IPL’s Sunrisers Hyderabad.

The Originals’s name is now, ironically, a carbon copy of the Super Giants of Lucknow in the IPL and Durban in South Africa’s league.

“The T20 landscape around the world is getting more and more competitive and we want to make sure we are able to keep up with that,” Cummins said.

The new owners have also brought in new kits and colour schemes, changing a large part of how fans identify with teams.

You’re Sydney Magenta? Well, I’m Sydney Green, so we can’t be friends.

It may sound trivial and surface level, but the surface is what most fans see and those cosmetic changes are indicative of the power that a billionaire can wield with relative impunity over a team that once felt like it belonged to a city.

It’s possible the new owners could change very little, but major alterations may leave Renegades fans with a tough choice: stick with a team that is ostensibly the one you supported before but no longer resembles it, or align with a squad that is essentially the Stars wearing a more generically inclusive Melbourne-themed skin suit.

And that’s before we even get into the potential for private owners to move teams from one city to another, although there has been no indication yet that that is part of the plan.

Fans of Premier League clubs or any US sporting franchises will be familiar with this model but it is relatively alien to Australian sports, with only the occasional mining magnate dipping their toes in before quickly deciding the water was a little too hot.

Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg said last month the investment of private capital in the BBL was inevitable and necessary for the Australian league to keep pace with not only the IPL and SA20, but leagues in the Caribbean, Pakistan and even the US.

The imminent sale comes as the Brisbane Heat put their hand up to play in a proposed 2026/27 BBL season opener in India.