T20 franchise leagues around the world, a guide to the circuit

There was a time, not very long ago, when a professional cricketer's year had an obvious shape. You played for your country when your country was playing, and for your domestic side when it was not. If you were good enough and from the right place, you might spend a winter as an overseas professional somewhere warm. The structure was inherited from an age of ships and it survived, more or less intact, into the age of aeroplanes.

That structure is gone. A leading Twenty20 player now moves between six or seven employers in a calendar year, most of them privately owned, several of them owned by the same holding company, in competitions that did not exist when he or she was born. The Indian Premier League gets most of the attention and most of the money, and it is covered separately in our piece on how the IPL auction works. What follows is everything else: the rest of the circuit, how it filled the calendar, and what it has done to the game underneath it.

The leagues

The Big Bash League, Australia

Australia's domestic Twenty20 competition began as a state-based tournament and was relaunched at the start of the 2010s as a city-based franchise league with eight teams, two each in Sydney and Melbourne. It runs through the Australian summer, overlapping with the Test season, and it was built from the start as a free-to-air family product rather than a premium one. That decision shaped everything about it: matches in school holidays, early evening starts, an emphasis on accessibility over exclusivity, and crowds that for a period were among the largest at any domestic sporting event in the country.

The Women's Big Bash League, launched a few years later, matters at least as much. It was the first women's franchise Twenty20 competition of real scale, it gave overseas players from every full member a professional contract when very few existed, and it did more than any single tournament to make full-time women's professionalism viable. Our piece on the growth of women's cricket covers that story in more detail.

The Big Bash's problem is the calendar. It sits in a window that now contains several better-paying competitions, and it has had to work harder to attract the overseas players that once came easily.

The Hundred, England and Wales

The Hundred is the only competition on this list that is not Twenty20. Each side faces 100 balls, delivered in blocks of five, with a bowler permitted to bowl five or ten consecutively and a change of ends after every ten balls. There are eight teams, based on major cities, and the men's and women's competitions are played as a single tournament with double-headers at the same grounds.

It was created by the England and Wales Cricket Board to reach an audience that county cricket does not reach, with the format deliberately made distinct so that it could be explained to a newcomer without reference to anything else. It has been the most contested innovation in English cricket in a generation: supporters point to full grounds, a genuinely new audience and the transformation of the women's professional game in England; opponents argue that it was imposed on a county structure that was not consulted properly and that a second short format fragments the calendar further.

More recently the ECB sold equity stakes in the eight teams, bringing in outside investment including from ownership groups already involved in the Indian Premier League. That has changed what the competition is. It began as a broadcast product owned by a governing body and is now, at least in part, a set of privately held clubs.

The Caribbean Premier League

The CPL was the first of the leagues outside India to establish a distinct identity rather than simply copying the IPL. It is played across the islands in the Caribbean summer, with the tournament moving between grounds in a way no other franchise league attempts, and it leans hard into the atmosphere of West Indian cricket rather than trying to smooth it out.

Its significance goes beyond entertainment. West Indies cricket has spent decades losing its best players to better-paid employers elsewhere, and the CPL gave the region a competition that keeps money and matches inside it. The tournament has expanded with a women's competition and with a linked event staged in the United States, and CPL ownership groups have been among the most active in buying into other leagues.

The Pakistan Super League

The PSL began in the middle of the 2010s in circumstances no other league has faced. International cricket had effectively stopped in Pakistan after the attack on the Sri Lanka team bus in Lahore, and the country's players had gone the best part of a decade without a home crowd. The league was therefore launched in the United Arab Emirates, played entirely abroad, and gradually brought home: first a final, then a set of matches, then the whole tournament.

It is one of the clearest examples of a franchise league doing something for a country's cricket that its board could not do alone. It brought international players back to Pakistani grounds, it re-established the security and logistical apparatus needed to host, and it gave a generation of Pakistani cricketers regular exposure to overseas professionals at home. The quality of fast bowling it has produced and exported is not an accident.

SA20, South Africa

South Africa had tried twice before to launch a franchise league and failed both times, once when a planned tournament collapsed before a ball was bowled and once with a board-run competition that did not find an audience or a sustainable broadcast deal. SA20, launched in the middle of the southern summer, worked where those did not, and the reason is not complicated: the six teams are owned by the owners of Indian Premier League franchises, which brought capital, an existing commercial machine and a guaranteed broadcast market.

That model has consequences. It gave South African cricket a financially viable domestic property at a point when the board badly needed one. It also means a significant share of the country's top-level cricket is owned by companies whose primary asset is in another country, and it puts the competition squarely inside the January window that Australia, the UAE and increasingly others are all competing for.

The ILT20, United Arab Emirates

The UAE has hosted other people's cricket for decades, as a neutral venue for Pakistan, as the relocated home of a full IPL season during the pandemic, and as the site of World Cups. The International League T20 was the point at which it started hosting its own. It runs in January, in the same window as SA20 and the Big Bash, with six teams, several of them again linked to IPL ownership.

Its distinguishing feature is the squad composition. The ILT20 permits a much higher proportion of overseas players in the eleven than most leagues, with only a small quota of UAE-qualified players required, which makes it the most internationally staffed competition on the circuit and has drawn criticism for offering limited development value to local cricketers.

Major League Cricket, United States

MLC began in the middle of the 2020s with six teams, a purpose-redeveloped stadium in Texas and a set of investors drawn from technology and from IPL ownership. The commercial case is the South Asian diaspora in North America, one of the wealthiest cricket-watching populations in the world and one that had never had a domestic competition worth the name.

The cricketing case is longer term. The United States has hosted matches at a men's T20 World Cup, and the sport's return to the Olympic programme has given American cricket a target and a reason for public investment. Whether MLC builds a genuine playing base or remains an import-driven summer event is the open question, and the answer will take a decade to become clear.

The rest

Below the headline competitions sits a second tier that is larger than most people realise. Bangladesh has run the Bangladesh Premier League since the early 2010s. Sri Lanka has the Lanka Premier League. There have been leagues in Canada, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Namibia and Kenya, some annual, some sporadic. The UAE also hosts a ten-over competition in Abu Dhabi, one of several attempts to compress the format further.

And there are the older domestic tournaments that are not franchise leagues but compete for the same players and the same weeks: England's county T20 competition, New Zealand's Super Smash, Pakistan's and India's domestic T20 cups. On the women's side, India's Women's Premier League has become the second major property after the WBBL, and has done for salaries in the women's game roughly what the IPL did in the men's.

Not everything survives. Several leagues have launched with fanfare and folded within a season or two when the broadcast money did not appear. The circuit looks permanent from outside, but individual competitions are fragile, and the ones that endure are almost always the ones with either a captive domestic broadcast market or an ownership group with an existing IPL asset.

How the calendar filled up

The crowding did not happen by design. It happened because each board, acting rationally on its own behalf, put its league in the window that suited its weather, its school holidays and its broadcast market. Those windows then collided.

The rough shape of the year now looks like this. The Indian Premier League occupies a protected block in the northern spring, and almost nothing else is scheduled against it because almost nothing else can compete for players. The Caribbean and North American leagues take the middle of the year. England's short-format tournaments run through its summer. The Australian, South African and Emirati competitions all sit in the same southern-summer window either side of the new year, competing directly. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka fit around the edges.

Three things then pushed the situation from busy to genuinely difficult.

Broadcast money moved. Rights fees for franchise cricket grew far faster than fees for bilateral international cricket outside a handful of marquee series. A board could make more from selling six weeks of its own league than from hosting a full inbound tour, and that changed what boards wanted to schedule.

Ownership consolidated. A small number of groups now own teams in four, five or six competitions across different continents. That produces obvious efficiencies, shared coaching and analytics, shared scouting, and the ability to move a player between sister clubs across the year. It also means the interests of those groups increasingly shape which windows exist, and a multi-league owner has an incentive to see the calendar organised around its portfolio rather than around international cricket.

International cricket kept expanding too. The T20 World Cup moved to a two-year cycle, the World Test Championship added a two-year league structure to Tests, the men's and women's global events multiplied, and none of the old bilateral commitments were removed to make room. The Future Tours Programme now describes a year with more scheduled cricket than there are weeks to play it in.

What it means for international cricket

The effects are uneven, and the honest answer is that they depend enormously on which country you are from.

For the boards with the largest domestic markets, franchise cricket is additive. India, England and Australia can pay their leading players enough centrally that turning down a franchise contract is a rational choice, and all three restrict overseas league participation in some form. India's men's players do not play in foreign leagues at all, a rule that has shaped the entire global market by keeping the best-paid players out of everyone else's competition.

For boards with small domestic markets, franchise cricket is a competitor. West Indies has lived with this longest and most painfully: for two decades its selectors have been picking from a pool that is partly unavailable, and the region's players have generally made the entirely reasonable choice to take guaranteed money over intermittent international selection. South Africa, New Zealand and increasingly Sri Lanka and Bangladesh face versions of the same problem. Sending an under-strength Test side on tour because a franchise window clashes with it has stopped being scandalous and started being normal.

For Test cricket specifically, the pressure is on the middle. The Ashes and India's biggest series are protected absolutely. Everything else is negotiable, and two-Test series are now the default for most pairings. The World Test Championship was designed in part to give those matches a reason to exist, and it is covered in our explainer on the format.

There is a counter-argument worth taking seriously. Franchise cricket has professionalised players from countries whose boards could never have afforded to, has given Afghan, Irish, Nepali, Namibian and American cricketers routes into the top level, and has raised the technical standard of the short game everywhere. It has also funded women's professionalism in a way that no governing body was going to fund it unprompted. The circuit is not simply a drain on the international game. It is a parallel economy that the international game now depends on and does not control.

How contracts and availability actually work

The mechanics are worth setting out plainly, because a lot of reporting assumes knowledge of them.

Central contracts. Most boards offer a limited number of annual contracts to players they want to guarantee availability from. Increasingly these are split by format, so a player may hold a red-ball contract, a white-ball contract, or a full one, with the fee reflecting how many days the board expects to use. Some boards have moved to shorter or partial contracts specifically so that players can take franchise work in agreed windows without leaving the international set-up entirely.

No objection certificates. A contracted player who wants to appear in an overseas league needs written permission from their home board, usually called an NOC. This is the main lever boards hold. An NOC can be refused outright, granted for part of a tournament, or made conditional on availability for a particular series. Leagues, in turn, will not sign a player who cannot produce one, which means the auction and draft rooms are full of availability caveats.

Auctions and drafts. The IPL runs an auction, which is described in detail elsewhere on this site. Most other leagues run a draft, where teams pick in order from a pool of players sorted into salary bands, with retentions carried over from the previous season and a wildcard or two available late. Drafts are cheaper to run, easier to control and produce more even squads; auctions produce more drama and higher prices for the very top players.

Salary caps and quotas. Every league runs a cap on total squad spend and a limit on how many overseas players may appear in the eleven, typically three or four, with the ILT20 as the outlier at a much higher number. Quotas for local or emerging players are common, and some leagues mandate a minimum number of appearances for players below a certain age.

Partial-tournament deals and replacements. Because windows overlap, a large share of contracts are now for part of a season. A player may join after a national commitment ends, or leave before a tournament finishes, with a replacement signing covering the gap. Replacement players have become a category of professional in their own right.

Freelancers. A growing group of players hold no international contract at all and build a year entirely from league work. Some have retired from international cricket to do it; some were never selected. For a specialist finisher or a death-overs bowler from a smaller nation, it is now a viable career, and a better paid one than most international cricket outside the largest boards.

The compensation question. When a franchise signs a player developed at another board's expense, the board receives nothing. Various models have been proposed, including transfer-style payments and a share of league revenue directed to the player's home union, and none has been adopted at scale. It is the single largest unresolved issue in the economics of the sport.

Where it goes

The obvious end point is a properly defined global calendar with fixed windows for international cricket and fixed windows for leagues, negotiated once and respected. Something like it is discussed at every governance meeting and never quite agreed, because agreeing it means at least one powerful board giving up a window it currently owns.

In the meantime, the practical advice for anyone trying to follow the sport is to stop thinking of the leagues as interruptions to the real thing. They are a substantial part of the professional game, they employ most of the players you will see in a World Cup, and squads, form and injuries now move between them continuously. If you want to know why a national side looks the way it does in a given month, the answer is often in a draft that happened three continents away.