IPL and other T20 leagues are ‘pushing cricket towards soccer’s club-centric format’

With each passing season, the Indian Premier League (IPL) gets bigger. Every time it comes around, it is one of the largest cricket events in the world, rivalled only by World Cups.

The IPL is in its 18th year and has inspired the establishment of ­similar leagues around the world, such as England’s The Hundred and South Africa’s SA20.

Having started as an experimental extension into what was a polarising new format in the form of T20 cricket, the IPL is now a behemoth that shapes the cricket landscape around the globe.

Its biggest impact is that it ensures players end their careers having made stacks of money that will hopefully sustain them after they retire from the sport.

However, the perpetual growth of the annual tournament (which takes place from 28 March to 31 May) has also been a major needle-­shifter when it comes to the shape of international cricket.

At the beginning, cricket traditionalists viewed it as a disruptive gimmick, but the league is now fully immersed in the cricket calendar. It is a competition be­tween March and May each year that myriad cricket followers and professionals look forward to and around which the global season must be shaped.

The IPL’s impact

“It’s a fantastic league and it’s great for the players. And the reasons for that really are that it offers a very high standard of cricket for players in the T20 format,” said World Cricketers’ Association board member Tony Irish, speaking to Daily Maverick about the impact of the IPL since its inaugural season in 2008.

“Just about every match is played in front of full stadiums and broadcast to millions of people. It’s very well organised and players are paid well in comparison to what most of them earn in their own countries. So, for those reasons it’s very good for cricket.

“But we also have to be realistic about the impact that it has on the rest of the game. For one, players now prioritise the IPL ahead of anything else for the reasons previously stated.

“Because they can make a lot of money out of [the IPL], a lot of players will tend to retire prematurely from international cricket, or they will retire from particular formats of international cricket, Test cricket in particular, just so they can focus on white-ball cricket.

“So, you have early retirements and you can see a number of examples of South African players who’ve done that. But it’s not just South African players – it’s players from other countries who’ve also retired from international cricket prematurely just so they can focus on T20 cricket,” Irish said.

The shifting cricket landscape

In South Africa, prolific wicketkeeper and batter Quinton de Kock is one high-profile player who made himself unavailable for Test cricket by retiring from the longest format of the sport in 2021.

At the time, he said he was stepping away from that particular format to spend more time with his family. He was 29 years old.

“It’s become a challenge keeping the players playing the longer formats. So far South Africa has done relatively well in doing that. But it will become more of a challenge as time goes on,” Irish said.

“But you can’t blame the IPL for these things. That’s just how it is.”

In New Zealand, the custodians of cricket have found innovative ways to give players the flexibility to pursue T20 franchise ­cricket around the world without having to choose between that, representing their country and physical self-preservation.

In 2025, the Kiwis announced the inception of casual playing contacts for some of their most important players. This is a move away from the traditional central contracting system that some countries still use.

Finn Allen, Devon Conway, Lockie Ferguson, Tim Seifert and Kane Williamson all agreed to casual contract terms for the 2025-26 season. These deals allow the players to be absent from most matches, except for World Cups and bilateral series against nations such as Australia, England and India.

Soccer-centric cricket format

Irish said the expansion of T20 leagues globally may soon lead cricket to adopt a template similar to soccer. This would mean that players play for a single T20 franchise team across different countries, such as the Sunrisers Eastern Cape and the Sunrisers Hyderabad. Soccer players make most of their money at club level, with national team appearances an added bonus.

Irish feels a similar approach to cricket would probably cause problems for Test cricket in particular. But he stressed that his concerns were for the whole ecosystem of international cricket and not just Tests.

Already, bilateral series that feature all three formats are rare, unless it’s a series played between India, England or Australia. The “big three” dominate the international ecosystem, leaving the remaining scraps for countries such as South Africa, New Zealand, the West Indies and others.

“The value of Test cricket is dropping. That has to do with the broadcast pie slice for bilateral series being smaller and smaller. But it’s also because people, especially the younger audiences in cricket, are drawn to T20 cricket and less to the longer formats,” Irish said.

“The growth of the IPL and other T20 leagues has an impact on bilateral cricket. If you think about bilateral cricket, it includes Test cricket. But there’s less and less money available to fund Test cricket, especially for the small countries – the countries outside of India, Australia and England. So, the smaller countries are scheduling less and less Test cricket.

“But if you look at many of the cricket countries, one of their biggest cost items comes from breeding four-day cricket, because you need a first-class competition for that. Yet the revenue in Test cricket is shrinking,” Irish said.

“How much longer those smaller countries can continue to do that, I’m not sure.

“Of course, we can’t just blame the IPL for that. But it is a fact that the IPL and the International Cricket Council’s events are taking a bigger and bigger slice of the broadcast market, which results in smaller and smaller slices left for bilateral series rights.

“And it’s not just the IPL, it’s the other T20 leagues as well. It’s also the growing dominance of the T20 format versus bilateral international cricket.

“Bilateral cricket series are going down while the T20 leagues are going up. So, we’ll see more leagues and more T20 cricket being played in future,” Irish said. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.