Asian Cricket's Two Owners: The Quiet Tug-of-War Between Franchise Leagues and National Teams

At an IPL auction table, a twenty-year-old leg-spinner sold for more than a crore. In that very same month, to play a bilateral series for his country, he had to apply to his board for a release — and the final decision on that release depended on the consent of a private franchise. Having watched Asian cricket matches for years, I have stood in front of this scene again and again, and every time the same feeling returns: Asian cricket now has two owners. One stands outside the field, holding money and contracts. The other stands inside the field, holding only a jersey and a group of people. The first decides who plays where; the second decides who feels for whom. The problem is that in Asian cricket, the first voice is heard far more, and nobody does the accounting for the second.

The cricket map of Asia has quietly changed over the past decade. Since the Indian Premier League (IPL) began in 2026, the number of franchise leagues in the region has only grown — the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) in 2026, the Pakistan Super League (PSL) in 2026, the Lanka Premier League (LPL) in 2026, the UAE's ILT20 in 2026, and South Africa's SA20. Add to that domestic T20 leagues in Nepal, Canada and the West Indies. For a young Asian cricketer, the question is no longer 'which country will I play for'; it is 'in which league can I best display my value.'

Behind this shift, the money is plain to see. The IPL's media rights for the 2026-2027 cycle sold for roughly 48,000 crore Indian rupees (about 6.2 billion US dollars). Compared with that single number, one grasps how small the annual budget of an entire cricket board in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Afghanistan is. Money means opportunity, money means physios, money means analysts and a data department. A boy who spends two or three months in an IPL net returns a different cricketer. The league's contribution here cannot be denied.

But the problem begins when this money arithmetic does not match the calendar arithmetic. Under the International Cricket Council's Future Tours Programme (FTP), national teams' bilateral series are fixed in advance. Franchise leagues, meanwhile, place their windows as they please. Almost eight months of the year are covered by one franchise tournament or another — the IPL in May, the BPL and ILT20 in January, the PSL in February-March. National series, the Asia Cup, the World Cup, the Champions Trophy all have to be squeezed into narrow gaps.

Those gaps are filled with No Objection Certificates. A cricketer under a franchise contract needs, to play for his country, not only his board's permission but the franchise's consent as well. In other words, the decision — permission to play for a sovereign cricket board — passes into the hands of a private company. Said that way, it sounds harsh. But it is now reality. And this reality hits small cricket nations hardest, because they have few stars — if one or two stars leave, the balance of the whole team collapses.

This is where the structural question arises, the one I object to most: in Asian cricket, franchise leagues now operate much like football's loan deals. In football we see big clubs take a small club's young talent on loan, develop it for a season or two, then either buy it or send it back. The small club cannot compete in that time, loses its audience, and its plans fall apart. In cricket, franchise leagues are playing exactly this role — developing a small nation's cricketer, taking his best, and then returning him to the national team as a tired, injury-prone or brand-dependent player. Asia's small boards then become farms for the big leagues — producing talent whose fruit is enjoyed by someone else.

In this loan structure, the greatest loss is time. A fast bowler's career is short — maybe ten years, maybe less. If two months of IPL and a month of PSL or ILT20 are cut out every year, very little remains for the national team. For Test cricket, almost nothing. We say Test cricket is dying — but we forget the real reason: the best cricketers simply have no time to play Tests, because the calendar was booked by franchises long in advance. This scarcity of time is slowly reshaping batting and bowling technique — players train for the short format, because that is where the money and the stage are.

The clever part of this structure is that the leagues do not take the risk; they only take the best. If a franchise signs a cricketer, he is accountable to the league for his performance, but his long-term development, his injuries, his mental fatigue — the accounting for all this sits in the national board's ledger. On the league's balance sheet there is no line for the cost of three hundred overs on a boy's knee. The board bears that cost, and then the board is blamed when that boy gets injured or loses form. In every match I have watched, this asymmetry has caught my eye — where the league records the wins, and the national team records the losses.

Now one might ask, are the leagues actually bad? There is an old line of mine about football that I believe holds true in cricket too: football is not a spreadsheet; football is a crowd learning to breathe. So is cricket. The feeling that rises in a boy's chest when he plays for his national team cannot be captured in any contract figure. Think of the 2026 Asia Cup final — at the R. Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, Sri Lanka were bowled out for 50, Mohammed Siraj alone took 6 wickets, and India won by 10 wickets. The emotion that gathered that night does not gather at a franchise match. Because a franchise jersey changes; a national jersey does not.

Yet it is precisely on the strength of this emotion that the real damage hides. Fans clap for the national team, cry, make it trend. But that team's star arrives on the field only after getting a franchise's permission. When we watch the emotion of an entire nation in an Asia Cup final, nobody calculates how much body several cricketers gave for a league four weeks earlier. Watching the emotion is easy; seeing its cost is hard.

Among Asia's smaller nations, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan deserve a closer look. Bangladesh cricket has no shortage of talent, but when its best cricketers spend much of the year in franchise leagues, the domestic structure weakens. In Sri Lanka's case we have seen domestic cricket almost freeze during an economic crisis, even as its players found value in overseas leagues. For Afghanistan the question is sharper — a team whose core players have grown heavily dependent on one particular league, as Rashid Khan has been the central figure of the same franchise for years. Here talent is exported, but in return the board holds only a 'thank you'.

At the control centre of this whole system sits the International Cricket Council (ICC), and that is where the real unease lies. A large share of the ICC's revenue comes from the Indian market — India's contribution to broadcast and sponsorship is far greater than other countries'. So India's board carries more weight at the decision-making table. I am not blaming any country here; I am only talking about the structure. In a structure where the money comes from one place and the game is played in many places, the interest of the game always falls behind the interest of the money. Asian franchise leagues are exploiting this imbalance, not creating it.

Auction arithmetic is another face of this structure. At an IPL auction, an unknown name lands a multi-crore contract in seconds, while the same cricketer's national-team match fee is a fraction of it. This gap sends a simple message to a young player: the national team is your identity, but the league is your future. As a result, some prioritise league training camps over national bilateral series, and some play through minor injuries for a league but rest for the national team. The question is not one of morality; it is one of incentives — people respond the way a system rewards them.

Writing this piece, I remembered an old lesson of my own. In May 2026, when all cricket had stopped, I watched a Borussia Dortmund match in an empty stadium and posted on social media that crowd noise was overrated. That claim had one flaw — I had assumed Schalke's poor performance was structural, when in fact ten of their players were injured. The fans showed me that. From that lesson I add at least two counterarguments to every claim, and I keep a part-time fact-checker. My best takes start as feelings and end as receipts. Verifying before making a claim about cricket is now my habit — because I learned more from the take I lost than the ones I won.

So in this tug-of-war between franchise and national team, I too may be wrong. Even if we accept my best argument — that leagues are draining small nations' cricket — two counterpoints must be kept in mind. First, without these leagues, many Asian cricketers would never have had an international career. Players from places like Nepal, Oman or the UAE came before the world's eyes through these leagues. Second, league money circulates back to the boards through taxes, fees and player sales. So the picture is not entirely black and white.

There is one more counterargument, and it runs against my own thesis. What if the real fault is not the franchises but the ICC's revenue-distribution system? Suppose the ICC shared revenue more equally among member boards, invested more in domestic structures, and made protected windows for national teams mandatory. Then the leagues would do no harm by themselves — they might even do good. That is, the problem is not the existence of leagues; the problem is the design of the structure. I am willing to accept this argument, and it makes my core claim more nuanced. Behind every contract is a human being pretending not to shake — a cricketer, a board official, even a franchise owner.

Now to the prediction with which I will close, one that can be tested. Within the next two to three years, the No Objection Certificate will become the new battleground in Asian cricket. We will see cricketers choosing franchise leagues over national duty, and boards growing stricter — some saying 'no', some attaching conditions, some quietly stepping aside. The result will be a two-tier Asian cricket: one tier of stars who play leagues almost year-round and return to the national team occasionally; another tier of players who, finding no league door, treat the national team as their only address. The gap between these two tiers will keep widening unless the calendar and the revenue model are redesigned.

The question, in the end, is one: will the jersey in Asian cricket reclaim its own time, or will the contract become the permanent address? For me the answer is clear, but before saying it I will wait to see next season's NOC list.