Benefit season

A benefit season is a method of financially rewarding professional cricketers that is used by English county cricket teams to compensate long serving players.

The system originated in the 19th century to help out professional cricketers who were paid low wages and generally could not play professional cricket much beyond the age of forty. Early "benefits" typically comprised the gate receipts of a designated match. Nowadays, a benefit season comprises a sequence of events such as dinners and auctions of memorabilia over the course of the summer cricket season or the whole year in which the relevant cricket season falls. In almost all cases only one player from a club is given a benefit in each season in order to avoid two or more players competing to attract money from the same people. Until recently, players with less service might sometimes be given a "Testimonial" season or match: the difference appears to have been largely semantic, but for almost half a century one of the less financially sound English first-class county clubs, Derbyshire, made a point of not awarding benefits, but giving testimonials instead. The Australian cricketer Colin McCool was awarded a testimonial in 1959, only three years after joining Somerset

The player will appoint a "benefit" committee to help him organise his benefit, composed of other current and former cricketers, and any business and professional people with relevant skills and contacts who are willing to help out. All the profits go to the player and they are exempt from tax following the ruling of the House of Lords over the benefit for James Seymour, the Kent cricketer whose benefit in 1920 was the subject of a protracted legal case brought by the Inland Revenue and not fully resolved until 1926.

A player may be rewarded with a benefit season by his county committee about ten years after receiving his county cap, but this varies from player to player, partly because in order for his benefit to qualify for tax exemption a player must not have had a contractual expectation of a benefit. Occasionally a player stays with a county long enough to be awarded a second benefit. Sometimes this is also known as a "testimonial": an example is Graham Gooch of Essex who had a benefit in 1985 and a testimonial in 1995.

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