New Zealand’s Super Smash Exploring Potential Overhaul in Pursuit of Greater Earnings
By Space Coast Daily // July 3, 2025
The 2024/25 Super Smash season was a thrilling one, with the young Central Stags taking the crown for the men’s and Kiwi Amelia Kerr crushing it in the women’s final for the Wellington Blaze.
After a rip-roaring campaign, Super Smash is now looking to reorganise and find new ways to promote and increase the earnings of its gem of a short-form cricket league. As has been explained by New Zealand Cricket chief executive Scott Weenink, there are plenty of options on the table, including shifting to midnight games.
Getting the Top-Quality Competition to International Audiences
There is certainly a divide between the quality of the cricket that’s put on show in the Super Smash each season and the audience figures. At some games, the mounds are fairly sparsely populated with fans, and while local viewership for cricket continues to do better than it did in the 2010s, the international audience isn’t there.
For the most part, this is a time zone issue. The largest markets for cricket viewership and broadcast deals are India and the UK. Wellington is six hours and 30 minutes ahead of New Delhi and 11 hours ahead of London, making both rather difficult markets to reach with traditional start times in New Zealand.
While the quality of cricket is exceptionally high, meeting the standards of nearly any other similar competition bar the IPL, there is a lack of international players brought over to the Super Smash. However, the higher-profile Big Bash across the Tasman was said to lose millions through its first five instalments, while Super Smash has excelled on a much lower budget.
As Scott Weenink says, they’re delighted with the quality of the cricket, so now is the time to capitalise on the competition and sell it further as a top-tier sporting product. They’re now examining the business and game to see how it can be monetised better, with options including moving to a less crowded window and maybe moving to midnight games.
Potential Chain Reaction of Reaching New Audiences
To earn more money as a sports team or league, the aim is to provide a great product on the grass and then making ways for it to reach vast audiences. This is how bigger sponsorship deals come about, including ones willing to pay heftier fees to tap into non-domestic audiences. One of the biggest industries for this in sports is gambling.
While the Super Smash is still fairly local, there are plenty of sites offering their entertainment services to Kiwis. In fact, anyone who wants to have a look for best casino bonus sites will find boosts as high as NZ$10,500 with hundreds of free spins. Many of these would happily pay to be primary Super Smash shirt sponsors.
It may be a different sport, and is in command of a far more substantial audience, but in the English Premier League, 11 shirt sponsors from gambling firms pumped NZ$228 million into clubs each season. With even a fraction of this income, cricket clubs could expand their horizons and start to coax more international stars to the Super Smash.
Other efforts are in the works to increase revenues, too. The retro shirt promotion for the Super Smash this last season proved a huge hit. Not only were titles won in the shirts, but they sold out very quickly. More of this would certainly help the league. NZC also has a stake in one of the US MLC clubs, too, potentially expanding the appeal of New Zealand cricket in the burgeoning market while the MLC grows.
The Super Smash is a fantastic cricketing product and one that’s punching well above its weight when considering its budget. Now is the time to step up, bring it to the world, and grow revenues as much as possible.
