Special report: How cricket ate itself

Game has long abandoned even the pretence of being coherently run and for fans and players alike, the product has become unfathomable

On Monday, England left for the Caribbean for their limited-overs series while the third Test in Pakistan was due to be on its final day, had England not already lost. Before the series in the West Indies ends, the Test squad will arrive in New Zealand.
England are compelled to pick virtually entirely separate squads with only fringe players, Jordan Cox and Rehan Ahmed, travelling from Pakistan to the Caribbean. This bizarre scenario is merely one snapshot of a fragmented sport, however. More than 20 short-format leagues featuring significant overseas talent – be it played over 10 overs, 20 overs or 100 balls – are taking place in men’s cricket across the world this year.
In July, Mohammad Amir played for three different teams in three different leagues in a week. Players now regularly pick-up contracts in other leagues after their sides are knocked out early in a previous competition – so they stand to earn more money if their first team loses.
Welcome to cricket in 2024, a game that has long abandoned even the pretence of being coherently run. For fans and players alike, the sport is increasingly unfathomable.
And although cricket is sometimes described as following the “football model” – that is, revolving more around club matches, with the main focus of internationals on tournaments. Yet there is one salient difference: footballers are only contracted to one club. Leading cricketers now routinely represent half a dozen different professional teams in a calendar year; Alex Hales, for instance, has already played for seven different teams in 2024. The situation has no parallel with other major sports.
Cricket has more money than ever, and is watched by more people around the world than ever before, yet the game has never felt so disjointed. Is this a sport eating itself?
The creation of Twenty20 in 2003 marked the start of cricket’s embrace of short-format leagues. This accelerated from 2008, when the Indian Premier League launched. But many consider 2023 a tipping point: the moment at which the schedule reached a state of saturation, as major new leagues launched in UAE, South Africa and USA. Other competitions continue to proliferate; the latest is the Global Super League in Guyana in November, which will feature five sides, including Hampshire.
Exactly how these tournaments all fit together is clear. They do not.
The problem is not the number of leagues – football, after all, has dozens of thriving professional leagues in Europe alone. Rather, it is the way that they coexist: all fighting for the same overseas talent and the same broadcasting cash.
Competitions are stacked on top of each other, overlapping as players flit in and out, sometimes flying thousands of miles to play a single game. Rather than local fans watching at the ground, many leagues rely on gambling sponsorship.
At Lord’s this year, the MCC hosted World Cricket Connects, a forum to bring together some of the sport’s most influential voices. The consensus was that the game tries to cram 500 days of cricket into 365 days. If only the observation were hyperbole. While the suits agreed that the schedule was too chaotic, no one wanted to give up anything of their own. Such self-interest embodies the game’s administration since at least 2014, when India combined with Australia and England to orchestrate a power grab at the International Cricket Council.
“It is each country for themselves,” laments a senior figure who works with national boards. “There is really no one setting up a global schedule and structure for the game, and setting the direction for it. It’s a demonstration of what happens when you’ve got no one steering the ship.”
“A lot of players almost hope you lose,” explains one international cricketer. “You’re looking at it before the play-offs going ‘if we lose here, then I can go somewhere else and earn more cash’.”
Cricketers have come to call this “double dipping”: earning from two competitions being played at the same time.
With short-format leagues now played 12 months a year and no restrictions on the amount of teams that someone can represent, elimination from one tournament opens up new possibilities for enrichment elsewhere. Many county white-ball specialists, for instance, would have earned more had they been eliminated from the T20 Blast before this year’s knockout stages – freeing them to play in the entire Caribbean Premier League season.
Franchises are currently recruiting players for the leagues in South Africa and the UAE in January. Some cricketers who have signed for the Big Bash, which is played at the same time, have been promised lucrative deals; they will only be able to play if they are eliminated before the final stages of the Big Bash. Their bank balances will benefit if their Australian teams are knocked out early. The individual players are not at fault; the entire structure of the sport is.
Payment structures within tournaments exacerbate the problem. In most leagues – the IPL is an exception – prize money is only a small percentage of a player’s earnings, generally under 10 per cent of their basic tournament fee. Players often receive a set total fee for a league, earning nothing extra for making the knockout stages. Perversely, then, players reaching the later stages end up earning less per game than those in teams knocked out early. Swift elimination means less time away for the same money.
Leagues played at the same period scramble to sign the same players. January, with four major leagues running in tandem, is particularly hectic. Now, the height of the English summer is almost as crammed, with the T20 Blast and Hundred played alongside Major League Cricket, Canada’s Global T20 league and Sri Lanka’s Premier League; the Caribbean Premier League then begins in late August.
This smorgasbord of leagues creates abundant opportunities. Some players have ceased to regard contracts as final – instead banking an early offer, but then being prepared to switch to a different league in the same period if they are offered more money.
Shaheen Shah Afridi was signed for this year’s Hundred. He then withdrew from the competition and signed up with the Global T20 Canada, which were offering to pay him more – only for the Pakistan Cricket Board to deny Shaheen permission to play. The affair was symptomatic of a rudderless game. In this season’s Bangladesh Premier League, several players signed for one side, then withdrew from their contracts, and then promptly signed with another franchise.
Ostensibly, there has never been a better time to be a professional cricketer. Never have players had more opportunities to convert their talent into financial riches. And while previous generations depended on winning international selection, today’s cricketers can gain fulfilment by winning trophies throughout the world.
Sam Billings has won five different franchise tournaments around the world. Earlier this year, Billings left the Big Bash before the play-offs to fulfil a pre-existing contract with the ILT20 in the UAE, missing Brisbane Heat’s victory. Even as a beneficiary of the T20 landscape, Billings believes that the game’s structure needs reform.
“Everyone loses out in the system,” Billings says. “Bar short-term financial gain, of course, but fulfilment definitely takes a hit for everyone, because it turns into meaningless mercenary cricket. I think it’s wrong, the overlap between tournaments – even though we all benefit.”
The scheduling, he laments “is pretty stupid from a player welfare point of view because you’re only going to break down – it’s unsustainable”. In July, Nicholas Pooran played a Major League Cricket match in Texas. Thirty-six hours later, after sleeping on a transatlantic flight, he played for Northern Superchargers at Headingley.
“You don’t really have the team continuity – players just coming in and out the whole time. It’s become more and more of a gun-for-hire thing,” says David Wiese, who has played for 19 different franchises and called his podcast Hitman for Hire. “Mercenaries coming in for two games, then leaving to go to the next tournament. I don’t know how long that can be sustainable.”
Most players crave long-standing relationships with teams. Instead, for many, their careers are akin to being supply teachers, always on call to fill any gap.
“I’ve gotten used to that – some players find that a bit more challenging,” says England’s Tymal Mills, who has represented 16 teams in T20 leagues. “I don’t know what else you can do, really. You’ve just got to be ready to go at the drop of a hat sometimes.
“If you have the opportunity to continue working somewhere else, it’s a bit of a no-brainer, if the money’s good enough. It’s your job – you fly in, fly out. It’s unpredictable, and you’ve got to be very flexible.”
For this year’s T10 tournament in Texas, Mills only learned of which team he would be playing for on the league’s Instagram page. “You learn to just turn up and get on with it.”
There are tales of players flying to T20 leagues after being told by their agent that they will have a contract waiting for them – but not knowing which side they have signed for until they land. Earlier this year, Leus du Plooy boarded a plane to the ILT20 expecting to play for Sharjah Warriors. While he was in the air, Sharjah were eliminated. Du Plooy arrived to find out that he was playing for Dubai Capitals instead.
International selection, especially for those without national central contracts, is often a case of seeing which players do not have competing – and far better-paid – commitments at the same time. It has long been this way for the West Indies. Now, even the game’s wealthiest countries are suffering similarly. When England toured Bangladesh in early 2023, they ended the series picking from just four specialist batsmen, with non-centrally contracted players preferring to play franchise cricket.
“Everyone wants to play for their country,” says Mills. “But most people that I speak to would choose to play in leagues rather than bilateral international series if they aren’t centrally contracted. The money’s significantly better for playing in leagues than it is for playing three to five T20 internationals that ultimately don’t mean an awful lot. World Cups and such are different.”
From T20 competitions in Canada and the UAE, and even the new Cayman Islands T10 league – which attracted David Warner this year – many lucrative tournaments have only a smattering of fans in the ground. Training facilities, and even the pitches used for matches, are often dire. At last month’s T10 league in Texas, which was sanctioned by the ICC and attracted considerable overseas talent, sides were banned from bowling pace because it was too dangerous. Fast bowlers were forced to bowl spin instead.
The farce illustrated how easy it is to set-up a short-format league. Any league can be sanctioned by a member board. For private leagues, the organisers generally pay the board a token amount – sometimes as low as $50,000 in Associate nations – for permission to start a league.
After conducting a player draft, new leagues then seek out broadcasters, and often find far less interest than hoped. The Scottish Super 10, a T10 league featuring players including Hales and Rashid Khan that was scheduled for August, was among the leagues to be cancelled before a ball was bowled.
“We actually expect half of these new tournaments to either be cancelled or postponed,” says Eddie Tolchard from the player agency Insignia Sports. “Governing bodies are just allowing every Tom, Dick and Harry to start a tournament.
“They’ll promise money, which they haven’t got, and they’re banking on money coming in from sponsors or TV rights and the franchise owners themselves to be able to filter through and pay the players. We find that a lot of the time, when tournaments happen, we’re saying to the league, ‘our players haven’t been paid’. You go to the team owner, he says, ‘well, the league’s supposed to be paying you. I’ve paid my fee to the league’. And the league go, ‘well, no, they haven’t paid the fee, so we can’t pay you’.”
Understandably, for most players, their priority is to be paid on time. In Canada in 2019, players, including England head coach Brendon McCullum, refused to get off the team bus to play a game until they were guaranteed their cash. Players in Bangladesh have also reportedly threatened not to play a match the following day unless they were paid.
If they make money at all, many leagues are largely reliant on sponsorship from betting companies, who are ubiquitous on their shirts, and matches that are at times for the south Asian market to gamble on.
At best, many sides are playthings for millionaires. “Some owners want their pound of flesh,” explains one experienced England player. “You need to understand that and make sure you go to the team dinners or the functions and whatever. You have to understand your particular role and what your team wants from you – you’re an employee.”
At their worst, some franchises losing money are vehicles for corruption. With the teams not otherwise financially viable, some owners appear to have decided to make sure that their teams are defeated, and bet on them to lose.
This year, the co-owners of Pune Devils, in the Abu Dhabi T10 league, were banned after admitting to corrupt activities at the league in 2021. There are claims about several other leagues, including the Global T20 Canada and various legends leagues. The Bangladesh Premier League does not enlist the ICC to provide anti-corruption cover; instead – like many other leagues – they do the job themselves on the cheap. There were over 30 allegations of corruption in the BPL in the last two years, yet none have led to bans. Those suspected of corruption are often allowed to remain in the game for years before charges may be proven against them.
“A lot of players are scared to report things,” says one insider. “Because a) they think that they might not get paid. And b), they might not feel totally safe. They will report things if it’s a direct approach, but just on suspicion alone, it is hard.”
An England international acknowledges having doubts about integrity in some leagues. “You’d have to be very morally aligned for it to impact your decision in terms of whether you’re going to go to a league or not. Ultimately, you have a responsibility to yourself and the game to just do the right thing, and if anything’s happening outside of that – we’re not investigators.” As more leagues proliferate, so will the questions about who owns the teams and why.
This all adds up to a game in havoc. Myriad steps could help the sport to function a little better. For example, players could be banned from pulling out of one contract and then taking up another in a different league during the same period. More importantly, players could be barred from switching to another league while their original league is ongoing – stopping the financial benefit of early elimination from one tournament. 
Billings supports players being compelled to commit to one league exclusively during a period: “Once you’re playing in one tournament, you can’t then switch to another.” Greater financial incentives for progressing to the knockout stages of competitions, with a higher proportion of salaries in prize money, would also create a less dysfunctional sport.
To safeguard against corruption, one prudent reform would be for leagues and franchises to prove that they have all the money to pay players before tournaments begin. “If you can’t afford insurance,” says a figure who has worked with leagues around the world, “you can’t afford the car.” All leagues should be required to enlist the ICC’s anti-corruption unit, or a body of similar quality, to protect the integrity of their tournaments.
One leading administrator believes that there will be a “stacking” of leagues. This would entail multiple competitions being played at the same time, but with a distinct hierarchy between them.
Perhaps the most logical suggestion is of designated windows in the calendar for international cricket. Short-format leagues would then be scheduled in the distinct blocks between the internationals. Such changes will require more leadership from the ICC. Yet the ICC, as its employees lament, is less a governing body than a members’ club.
Rarely has a game so needed shrewd administration – or found it so lacking. These failures leave cricket stumbling into a future that, for players and fans alike, is increasingly bewildering, unsatisfying and unsustainable.