As much as £5m of additional yearly funding might be pumped into ladies’s cricket as a part of an overhaul of the home recreation.
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) needs three tiers within the sport from 2025 onwards.
It has now invited purposes to run skilled sides, in a departure from the regional mannequin launched in 2020.
Since then eight centrally-funded groups have competed, however counties are being provided the prospect to bid to take over and rebrand these groups from 2025.
As a part of the plans the ECB has pledged to speculate £4m to £5m per 12 months into the ladies’s skilled recreation between 2025 and 2028, taking its annual funding to £16m.
Beneath the ECB scheme the present eight regional groups will develop into tier one golf equipment, owned and run by one of many first-class counties or the MCC, and can compete in T20 and 50-over competitions.
The 18 counties and MCC have till March to submit their bids, with unsuccessful candidates and Nationwide Counties then invited to fill semi-professional and beginner slots in tiers two and three – a course of anticipated to be full by September forward of the launch in 2025.
All three tiers might be closed with no promotion or relegation all through the preliminary 4 season time period.
The ECB says it needs to develop the depth and attain of the ladies’s skilled recreation.
“Since 2020, via the arrival of the ladies’s regional mannequin, we have now seen important progress within the professionalisation of girls’s cricket, however we’re nonetheless solely simply scratching the floor of its potential,” CEO Richard Gould mentioned.
“To proceed transferring ahead, and to make cricket a gender-balanced sport, we’d like a change within the possession mannequin and governance construction underpinning the ladies’s skilled recreation.
“(This) will elevate the standing of girls’s home cricket to allow it to go additional, develop quicker and attain its full potential.”
ECB director of girls’s skilled recreation Beth Barrett-Wild added: “We consider that the subsequent chapter is much less concerning the separate transformation of girls’s cricket and extra about the entire recreation evolving collectively.
“The invitation to tender, growth of the ladies’s home competitors construction and uplift in funding, signify essential subsequent steps in cricket evolving into the game we would like it to be – one with equality of alternative for women and men, girls and boys.”