Services
Challenge
Welsh Fire closed out the 2026 season of The Hundred as the tournament's standout story: the highest ticket sales in the team's history, record crowds for women's cricket in Wales, and a social following growing faster than any point since the franchise began. We partnered with Welsh Fire on audience development strategy and content studios and production to help turn a 12-month ownership change into a season Welsh fans won't forget.
Following the ECB's sale of The Hundred franchises in 2025, Glamorgan Cricket became co-owners of Welsh Fire. That gave the team a rare opportunity: to rebuild its identity as a team that felt genuinely Welsh, in a country where sporting loyalty has long belonged to rugby and football.
The brief went beyond ticket sales. Welsh Fire needed to reach audiences who had never considered cricket as a day out, particularly families and women, while building a following that would stay engaged well beyond match day.
Solution
To turn a 12-month ownership change into Wales' biggest summer sporting story, we built a two-part solution spanning audience development strategy and content studios and production.
We identified and prioritised family and women's cricket segments across Wales and the M4 corridor, using local knowledge rather than a generic sports-marketing template to work out where these audiences lived, what they cared about, and how to reach people who'd never considered cricket as a day out. This shaped both the targeting and the tone of Welsh Fire's family-friendly content.
We produced always-on social content anchored in Welsh Fire's "Fuel the Fire" positioning, capturing the cricket itself, and player-led content featuring Phil Salt, Joe Root and Sophie Devine to give the team recognisable faces beyond the scoreboard.
To capture the attention of a new community unfamiliar with cricket, coverage was built around reactive, in-the-moment storytelling, bold visual design and action-led highlights that brought the excitement of the sport to life for people watching from their feed rather than the stands.
Results
The Welsh Fire community grew across the season, with a clear shift toward the younger and more diverse audiences the campaign was built to reach. The UK made up 40.2% of the overall social audience, followed by India and Pakistan. 18–24 year olds made up 28% of the audience, with a growing 6.7% share from 13–17 year olds, while 25–34 year olds remained the largest single group at 38.1%, with a further 16% from 35–44 year olds.
Beyond the headline numbers, Welsh Fire also recorded its highest-ever Net Promoter Score, with more than 60% of fans saying they'd return next season, and year-on-year attendance growth of nearly 10% across Men's and Women's fixtures. More than 40% of ticket buyers were families, and almost 30% were women, evidence of a genuinely new audience discovering the team.
Across Instagram and Facebook during the 2026 season of The Hundred, Welsh Fire's social content generated:
32m total views
6m+ unique viewers
27m views from Reels
3.7m views from Feed posts
1.5m+ engagements
90% of engagement from Reels
47k+ shares
5000 reposts
23k+ saves
