Two Charges, One Headache
If you are the treasurer of a grassroots cricket club, you already know the money comes in two shapes. There are the annual or seasonal subs - the membership fee that keeps the lights on whether it rains all May or not - and there are the match fees, the per-game charge that covers the cost of actually playing on the day. Subs pay for the year. Match fees pay for the match.
The subs are the easy part to collect: one charge, once a season, and most members expect it. The match fee is the part that grinds you down. It is the classic "fiver in the tea interval" - eleven players times however many Saturdays, across the firsts, the seconds, the Sunday friendly side and the colts, every single week of the season. Miss one and you are out of pocket. Chase it and you are the villain. Do that for six months and you understand why treasurers burn out.
This guide covers both halves of the job: how to work out what to charge so the club breaks even, and how to collect it without chasing so you get your Saturdays back. It is written for the volunteer holding the cheque book, not for an accountant.
The Cricket Money Model: Subs Plus Match Fees
Cricket's structure is slightly different from most team sports, so it is worth being clear about why clubs split the charge in two.
Subs (annual or seasonal) cover your fixed costs - the bills that arrive whether or not a ball is bowled. These are the same every year regardless of how many games get played. Charging them as one membership fee means everyone contributes to the upkeep of the club, not just the people who happen to turn out most often.
Match fees cover the variable, day-of-play costs - the things you only spend money on when a game actually happens. They are paid per appearance, which is fairer in a sport where one member plays thirty games a season and another plays five. The occasional player is not subsidising the regular, and the regular is not propping up the club single-handedly.
Crucially, not everyone pays the same. A typical club has several tiers:
Who Pays What: Typical Cricket Fee Tiers
- Full adult members: the standard seasonal sub plus the full match fee per game. The backbone of your income.
- Juniors / colts: low or token subs and a reduced match fee - often nothing at all - because junior cricket is where your senior teams come from.
- Batting-only colts & new starters: a junior who is not yet a full member may pay a small per-session rate rather than full subs, until they commit.
- Students & under-25s: a reduced sub, recognising that they are home only in the holidays and short of money the rest of the year.
- Second-claim & occasional players: sometimes match-fee-only, with no seasonal sub, for those whose main club is elsewhere.
- Social / non-playing members: a small sub that keeps them connected and the bar ticking over.
Get these tiers right and the fee structure quietly does a lot of your retention work for you. Price a colt or a student like a full adult and you will lose them.
How to Work Out What to Charge
The number that matters is not what the club next door charges - it is what your club actually costs to run, divided by your realistic playing numbers. Start by listing every cost honestly, then split it into fixed (subs) and variable (match fees).
Your fixed, cover-with-subs costs typically include:
The Real Costs Behind Your Fees
- Square and ground maintenance: the single biggest line for most clubs - mowing, rolling, loam, seed, the groundsman's fuel and kit, end-of-season renovation.
- League and affiliation fees: your county board affiliation, ECB-related registration and league entry fees for each side.
- Nets and indoor hire: winter sports-hall or indoor-school bookings for pre-season practice, which add up fast over the off-season.
- Insurance: public liability, equipment and personal-accident cover.
- Pavilion running costs: electricity, water, rates, repairs and licences.
- Match balls: a genuine per-game cost - good league balls are not cheap, and you get through them.
- Teas: still expected in much of recreational cricket, and a real cost whether home-made or bought in.
- Umpires and scorers: match-day fees or expenses where your league requires them.
Once you have the totals, the maths is straightforward. Take your fixed annual costs, knock off any sponsorship, grant or bar income, and divide what is left by your number of paying members - that is your sub. Take your variable per-game costs (balls, teas, umpires, match-day ground prep) and divide by the players you expect across a fixture - that is your match fee. Build in a little headroom for a washed-out season, set your concession tiers, and you have a fee structure grounded in reality rather than guesswork.
The Real Pain: Collecting Match Fees Every Saturday
Working out the numbers is the easy bit. The grind is collection - and specifically, collecting match fees in cash, every week, across every team. Picture the reality: someone has to remember to bring a float, walk round the changing room or the boundary, catch the bloke who has "left his wallet in the car", reconcile it against the team sheet, and somehow account for the three who never quite paid. Multiply that by four teams and twenty-odd Saturdays and you have a part-time job nobody volunteered for.
Cash makes everything worse. It goes missing, it never quite balances, and it leaves you with no clean record when the AGM asks where the money went. Meanwhile the unpaid fees pile up - not because anyone is dishonest, but because chasing a fiver is awkward and easy to put off. The treasurer ends up personally subsidising the club's forgetfulness.
The fix is not to chase harder. It is to take the chasing out of human hands entirely.
The Cure: Digital Collection and Automatic Reminders
Moving subs and match fees online does three things at once. It removes the cash, it removes the chasing, and it gives the treasurer a clean record. The mechanics are simple:
Collect subs automatically. Set the seasonal sub to be taken by recurring payment, or split it into instalments so a £100 sub becomes a more manageable few pounds a month - which both helps members on tight budgets and improves the odds you actually get paid in full.
Request match fees digitally with automatic reminders. Instead of you sending the awkward nudge, the system does it - a polite, automatic reminder that the human treasurer never has to type. No tin, no float, no boundary-edge maths.
Offer concessions and instalments cleanly. Reduced rates for colts, students and second-claim players can be set once and applied automatically, so nobody is calculating who owes what by hand.
Keep the records the treasurer needs. Every payment logged against a member, every balance visible, and a clean export at year end instead of a shoebox of receipts and a spreadsheet that never quite reconciles.
This is the same shift that takes selection and availability off your plate - our guide to running a junior cricket team walks through the wider season admin, and many clubs find the money side is the part that frees up the most time.
Where Teamo Fits the Money Side
One way clubs handle this is with a whole-club app, and the one built by the same team behind this site is Teamo (full disclosure: it is made by Sportplan Ltd). It is worth a look specifically because it was designed around the cricket money problem rather than bolting payments onto a chat app.
On fees, the picture at the time of writing is this: collecting subs by Direct Debit costs about 2% + 20p, which is cheaper than card for recurring payments, while card is about 2.5% + 20p. Because there is a fixed 20p on every transaction, the auto-pay bundling matters: it packages a member's subs, match fees and event payments into a single collection, so you pay that 20p once rather than several times over a season.
The feature that actually kills the chasing, though, is no-pay-no-play status on the team sheet. When the captain sits down to pick the side, each player's payment status is shown right there at selection - so an unpaid balance surfaces at exactly the moment it has the most gentle leverage, rather than in an awkward chase a fortnight later. Clubs using this collect the large majority of what they are owed without anyone walking round with a tin. And it stays private: managers see only a treasurer "traffic-light" health indicator, never who individually owes what, so the dressing room never becomes a debtors' list. For the treasurer, payments post automatically to Xero, so there is no spreadsheet to reconcile at the end of the season. If the money side is what is wearing you down, it is worth seeing how Teamo collects cricket subs and match fees.
To be clear about what it is and isn't: a club app like this handles your day-to-day money, membership and communication, but it does not replace the ECB's Play-Cricket, which remains the official system for results, leagues, averages and registration. The two work side by side - our guide to using Teamo alongside Play-Cricket explains exactly how that split works.
One More Win: Gift Aid
If your club is set up as a CASC or a charity, there is money on the table beyond subs and match fees. Membership subs and many donations can qualify for Gift Aid, letting you reclaim 25p from HMRC for every eligible £1 - a meaningful boost to the same income you are already collecting. The admin has historically put clubs off, but it can now be automated. Our Gift Aid for cricket clubs guide covers who qualifies and how to claim without the paperwork.
Get Your Saturdays Back
Setting fair subs and match fees is arithmetic - your real costs, split into fixed and variable, divided by realistic numbers, with sensible concessions for colts, students and occasional players. Collecting them does not have to be a weekly grind. Take the cash out, let the reminders run themselves, make payment visible at selection, and keep clean records for the treasurer. Do that and the fiver in the tea interval becomes a thing of the past - and the time you save goes back where it belongs, into the cricket. When you are ready to spend that time coaching, the full Cricket drills library has hundreds of practices to build your next session around.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much are cricket club subs and match fees?
It varies hugely by club, but most grassroots clubs run two charges. Annual or seasonal subs - the membership fee that covers your fixed running costs - commonly sit somewhere between £40 and £150 for an adult member, with juniors, students and second-claim players paying less. On top of that comes a match fee paid per game, often £5 to £12 for adults to cover that day's balls, teas and ground costs, with colts paying little or nothing. The right figure for your club is whatever your real costs divided by your realistic playing numbers come to - work it out from your own accounts rather than copying the club down the road.
Should colts pay match fees?
Most clubs charge colts a reduced match fee or none at all, and keep their seasonal subs low. The thinking is simple: junior cricket is where your future senior teams come from, and a high fee at the gate is exactly what stops a family coming back. Many clubs cover juniors' match-day costs out of the senior subs, a sponsor or a fundraising pot, and charge colts only a token amount - or let a batting-only junior who is not yet a full member pay a small per-session rate rather than full subs. Keep it cheap, keep it simple, and never let an unpaid £3 be the reason a child drops out.
How do I stop chasing players for match fees?
Stop collecting cash in the tea interval and move the whole thing online. Set subs to collect automatically by Direct Debit or instalments, and have match fees requested digitally with automatic reminders so you are not the one sending the awkward nudge. The single biggest change is making payment status visible at selection: when the captain can see who owes before they pick the side, the money tends to sort itself out and the treasurer stops being the bad guy. Clubs that do this collect the large majority of what they are owed without anyone walking round with a tin.
Are there card fees on collecting club payments?
Yes - any platform that processes payments charges a small fee, the same as a shop paying for a card machine. At the time of writing, taking money by card through TeamoPay costs about 2.5% plus 20p per transaction, while recurring Direct Debit is cheaper at about 2% plus 20p, which is why it suits regular subs. Because there is a fixed 20p on every charge, bundling a member's subs, match fees and event payments into a single auto-pay collection saves you paying that 20p several times over. Always check the current published rates before you budget, as fees change over time.
