The 18th edition of the Indian Premier League begins on Sunday, March 23, with the final scheduled for May 25. This year, the Pakistan Super League will overlap with the IPL, because it had to make way for Pakistan’s hosting of the ICC Champions Trophy.

Compared with the IPL’s 74 matches, the 10th edition of the PSL will feature 44, opening on April 8 and ending on May 19. As further evidence of the expansion of T20 franchise cricket, this number is set to change in 2026.

The Pakistan Cricket Board hopes to expand the PSL from six teams to eight. The existing franchises operate under a 10-year agreement which ends after this season. Expansion outside of the current four cities — Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Multan — is under consideration whilst media and sponsorship rights will be up for sale with the aim of strengthening the PSL’s commercial appeal and competitiveness.

A part of this recalibration will need to focus on the optimal time to hold an expanded tournament. The previous window in January to February now faces competition from SA20 in South Africa and ILT20 in the UAE. In addition, an increasingly intense battle for the top overseas players is a corollary of expanded franchise leagues.

It remains the case that the IPL attracts the best of those players. It has shown its strength by imposing penalties on any overseas player who, having been picked for a franchise, withdraws before the start of the season for other than medical or family reasons. England’s Harry Brook, who has just done so, faces a ban from participating in the IPL for two seasons. The decision may have something to do with him being touted as England’s next white ball captain.

Despite having separate windows in previous years, there are few players who have participated in both the IPL and PSL in the same season. Indeed, there have been few who have played in both leagues in different seasons. Fears that a clash of dates for the first time might lead to some acrimony over player choices were not realized until this week. Then, South African all-rounder Corbin Bosch withdrew from the Peshawar Zalmi squad in the PSL to join the Mumbai Indians in the IPL to replace an injury withdrawal. Subsequently, the PCB has served Bosch with a legal notice for breaching his contractual obligations.

Pakistan’s poor showing in the Champions Trophy has reinforced concerns its players and administrators are being left behind in cricket’s ever-changing landscape. These have led to the non-selection of Pakistan players for The Hundred, which occupies August in England and Wales. Fifty of them — 45 men and five women — registered for the draft. It is the first time no Pakistani players have been selected. The purchase of equity in four of the franchises by Indian investors has prompted murmurings of a possible “soft ban.” Pakistan players have not played in the IPL since 2008 and the global spread of Indian franchise ownership has led to suspicions of tacit discrimination.

As far as The Hundred is concerned the reality is likely to be more prosaic, as the Pakistani players have overlapping international commitments. Pakistan is scheduled to play ODIs and T20Is in the West Indies from late July to mid-August and may play a T20I series against Afghanistan before the Asia Cup begins mid-September. Franchises are also likely to be worried about the PCB’s stance towards releasing players with domestically contracted obligations. There are already tensions. 

Another concern is the value which Pakistan’s players currently bring to the franchise. Recent performances have been disappointing and they may be caught in a vicious circle of not being able to improve because they are not getting picked. Additionally, they are not being exposed to the latest developments, coaching and analytical tools.

It is easy to assume franchise cricket is all about money; it is, to a large extent. Players cannot be blamed for cashing in, investors and sponsors require a return on their investments, whilst some administrators have regarded it as a lifesaving device for ailing domestic structures. However, the leagues should be more than that, acting as a platform to promote those structures and develop better talent. ILT20 in the UAE has been criticized for having too many overseas players but its long-term objective is to develop domestic cricket.

National boards have been able act unilaterally in setting up leagues, only requiring sanction from the ICC, which rarely refuses. Outside this largely unregulated market a new entrant is rumored to be at its gates. Cricket’s media machine is rife with the story that a new league is being discussed with the potential to produce a seismic twist to the game’s landscape.

The rumor appears to have emanated from Australia. It focuses on competitions for both men and women modelled on tennis and its Grand Slams, with eight new teams which assemble and play matches in four different locations during the year. Neither the proposed identity and composition of the teams, nor the times of year when the matches could be played, have been revealed. There are few vacant windows in an already crowded calendar. This has led to immediate pushback from several national boards, keen to protect their domestic franchises.

Currently, the cricket economy is based largely on income received from broadcasters and distributions from ICC events. It is weighted heavily in favor of India, followed by Australia and England. Smaller nations struggle financially, a situation which will worsen if sales of broadcasting rights in the next cycle generate less than the current one, a possibility given concerns over value provided during the 2024 World Cup. Boards may be attracted by an alternative revenue source.

If the rumors are true, a major backer of the proposed league — to the tune of $500m — could be SRJ Sports Investments, a subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund. Clearly, there is much that needs to be fleshed out — not least player availability, especially those from India; the economic model to be adopted; and the impact on existing structures, both spatial and temporal. It is questionable if those structures can cope with even more pressure.

ISLAMABAD: On a recent Ramadan night, Mamoon Sabri, 27, slipped into a tracksuit an hour after the iftar meal and headed to his new favorite getaway: a padel court.

Racket in hand, he walked onto the artificial turf at The Pad, Islamabad’s first padel club, as a group of his friends also arrived. Soon they began hitting forehands and backhands across the net, slamming the ball off the back wall, scooping it over the net and teasing each other with shots close to the wall — and so went on an hour-and-a-half long game of padel.

The racket sport, a mix of tennis and squash that is the fastest-growing sport in the world, is also gaining traction in Pakistan, especially in Ramadan, with its culture of sports and physical activities in parks, streets, and sports grounds after iftar and until the pre-dawn suhoor meal, fostering a sense of community and promoting health at the same time. 

At The Pad and other padel courts in the Pakistani capital, padel games are offering people both a fun-filled pastime and an opportunity to socialize and exercise in the hours between iftar and suhoor. A Ramadan tournament is taking place at The Pad currently, with more than 50 teams participating in all-girls, mixed doubles and advanced team categories. 

As of 2024, there are approximately 30 million amateur padel players worldwide, with the sport, founded in Mexico in the 1960s, now played in over 130 countries, according to the International Padel Federation.

“Padel is a great time and Ramadan is always a great time for sports in Islamabad anyway because everyone wants to play, everyone wants to stay awake till sehri [suhoor] one way or the other,” Sabri, a sports broadcaster and consultant, told Arab News shortly after winning a men’s doubles game.

Mustafa Mirza, a co-founder of The Pad, said the club was fostering an atmosphere of camaraderie in Ramadan.

“Padel is a social hub and it is linked more with the lifestyle,” Mirza said. “We have an excellent response in Ramadan. We feel that the people who were not familiar with padel, because they ventured out in Ramadan and they found this sport to be so challenging and rigorous, and then they have taken part in it.”

Indeed, from dedicated sports clubs to pop-up facilities in upscale neighborhoods, there is a surge in courts and players this Ramadan, with families, friends, and even corporate groups gathering late into the night and enjoying the sport’s social nature. Many players said they would cap off their matches with post-game hangouts at nearby cafés and restaurants where they could enjoy suhoor in groups. 

Mahnoor Khan, a 27-year-old employee at a telecom company, said she had come to the courts for the first time with her husband and a group of friends, describing padel as a “very good sport for family and friends.”

“In Islamabad you don’t have a lot of options other than dining out, so this is the very first time that they have introduced something that is other than dining out for socializing,” she told Arab News. “You have a good game, and you go out after iftar or whenever … I think the concept is now spreading really fast.”

Zainab Ameen, who manages The Pad club with her husband, another co-founder Ameen-ud-Din Hafeez, said though the club had only launched a few months ago, the response was “tremendous.”

“We never thought that we will get this kind of response. We just started with two courts and when we got a very good response, we opened two more. And now, we are going to open a futsol [arena],” she told Arab News.

What makes padel particularly appealing during Ramadan is that as a low-impact sport, padel lets one enjoy exercising without any hard strain on the muscles, thus serving as an effective means of staying fit without feeling exceedingly overwhelmed in Ramadan.

“It’s a very low skill floor for the game to play. So, anyone who is starting off will have a good time because they are going to feel like, ‘Wow, what a shot, I am a machine’,” Sabri said. 

“But then there is also a very good skill ceiling … It’s a very interesting mixture in a way most racket sports are.”