Seventeen matches in three days (July 29 – 31, 2019). That was the entire footprint of the first European Cricket League back in July 2019, played in front of a handful of spectators at a resort in Spain. Seven years later (2026), the same organisation runs dozens of tournaments a year, some packing more than 140 matches into a single month, and its content is streamed to millions of screens well beyond Europe’s borders. This is the story of how the European Cricket Series streaming boom happened, and why the T10 format turned out to be the perfect vehicle for it.
Where It All Began
The European Cricket Network, known widely as ECN, was founded in 2019 by Daniel Weston, an Australian-born cricketer who represented Germany at international level. Weston teamed up with Roger Feiner, Thomas Klooz, and Frank Leenders, two of whom had previously helped build the UEFA Champions League, to design a cricket competition using the same “best clubs from each country” format that had worked so well in football.
The first tournament, held at La Manga Club near Murcia in Spain from 29 to 31 July 2019, featured eight club champions from countries including Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Romania, Russia, and the Netherlands. VOC Rotterdam of the Netherlands won that inaugural title, beating SG Findorff of Germany in the final. What made the event notable was not the standard of cricket but the reach of its broadcast. Every one of the 17 matches was streamed live across more than 100 countries, and the organisers later claimed the tournament reached somewhere between 120 and 140 million viewers over those three days, an astonishing number for a competition nobody outside the sport had heard of a week earlier.
Why T10 Became the Format of Choice
None of this works without the T10 format itself. A T10 match, ten overs a side, wraps up in around 90 minutes, which changes the entire economics of cricket broadcasting. A traditional Test can run five days. Even a T20 match takes three hours or more. A T10 fixture fits comfortably into a lunch break, and several of them can be packed into a single afternoon on a single ground.
That compression is exactly what streaming platforms wanted. European Cricket Series streaming schedules now regularly show back-to-back matches, sometimes six or seven fixtures in a single day, from the same venue. Fans get constant content instead of waiting days between innings, and broadcasters get a steady stream of finishes, tight run chases, and highlight-worthy sixes to clip and share.
A Numbers Game
The scale involved is genuinely large for what began as a grassroots idea.
- The 2025 edition of the European Cricket League alone ran to 144 matches across roughly four weeks.
- The ECS Spain Encore series in late 2024 featured 92 matches inside a three-week window.
- Smaller regional legs, such as ECS Sweden or ECS France, still typically run 24 to 34 matches in under two weeks.
That kind of match volume simply did not exist in cricket before organisers realised the T10 format made it possible.
FanCode and the Streaming Machine Behind ECS
Very little of this reaches an audience without a distribution partner, and that partner has largely been FanCode, the Indian sports streaming platform. FanCode carries live coverage of nearly every European Cricket Series fixture, alongside scorecards, points tables, and highlights packages, and the app has been downloaded more than 30 million times according to its own figures.
The pairing makes sense once you consider the audience. Cricket fans in India, and across the wider South Asian diaspora in the Gulf and elsewhere, are used to consuming the sport constantly, across formats and time zones. European club cricket, played largely by amateurs and part-timers in Spain, Italy, or Sweden, would never have found that audience through traditional broadcast deals. Through an app already sitting on millions of phones, it did not need to.
ECN itself also runs its own YouTube channel and digital properties, which handle matches that fall outside FanCode’s coverage window, giving the whole operation a second layer of reach in markets where FanCode is unavailable.
The Different Faces of the European Cricket Series
It helps to understand that “ECS” is not one single tournament but an umbrella covering several related competitions run by ECN.
- European Cricket League (ECL) – the flagship, Champions League style event bringing together domestic club champions from across the continent.
- European Cricket Series (ECS) – standalone club tournaments held in individual host countries, from Spain and Italy to Portugal, France, Belgium, and England.
- European Cricket Internationals – weekend fixtures between national teams, played throughout the year rather than in one concentrated event.
- European Cricket Championship – often nicknamed the “Euros of cricket,” bringing national sides together in a single tournament window.
Each of these formats generates its own stream of content, but they share the same production model, the same T10 rules, and largely the same streaming partners, which is why viewers on FanCode or YouTube see a nearly constant rotation of European club cricket almost every week of the year.
Growth, Criticism, and Where It Stands Today
Not everyone in cricket has been comfortable with how quickly this grew. Critics have pointed to the sheer volume of matches, sometimes involving amateur or semi-professional players facing packed schedules, as a strain that traditional cricket boards never had to manage. There have also been questions raised in cricket media about how sustainable a model built around near-daily streamed content really is, and about integrity safeguards for competitions involving so many low-profile matches.
ECN has responded by expanding under ICC-recognised structures and building in anti-corruption education for participating clubs, treating those concerns as part of scaling responsibly rather than dismissing them. Whatever the debate, the numbers suggest the appetite has not slowed. The European Cricket League expanded from eight teams in 2019 to over 30 national champions within a year, and by 2025 the reigning champions, a club called Farmers, were competing in a tournament format that would have been unrecognisable to the eight sides who turned up in Murcia in 2019.
FAQ: European Cricket Series and T10 Streaming
What is the European Cricket Series?
It is a set of T10 club cricket tournaments organised by the European Cricket Network, held in individual host countries across Europe, distinct from the flagship European Cricket League which brings national champions together in one combined event.
Why is the T10 format used for these tournaments?
T10 matches last around 90 minutes, which allows organisers to schedule multiple fixtures per day from a single venue, making the format ideal for streaming platforms that want a constant supply of short, high-scoring content.
Where can I watch European Cricket Series matches live?
FanCode is the primary streaming partner for most ECS tournaments, alongside coverage on the European Cricket Network’s own YouTube channel and digital platforms for matches outside FanCode’s window.
Who founded the European Cricket Network?
Daniel Weston founded ECN in 2019, working alongside Roger Feiner, Thomas Klooz, and Frank Leenders, with the latter two having previously helped establish the UEFA Champions League format in football.
About the Author
