{"id":224059,"date":"2025-10-25T04:59:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T04:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/224059\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T04:59:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T04:59:08","slug":"in-an-affluent-and-crowded-t20-market-how-is-the-bbl-supposed-to-compete-big-bash-league","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/224059\/","title":{"rendered":"In an affluent and crowded T20 market how is the BBL supposed to compete? | Big Bash League"},"content":{"rendered":"

The BBL may have been born near the start of Twenty20<\/a> era, but ahead of its 15th season growing pains have set in. Cricket Australia wants to tap private funding to help Australia\u2019s men\u2019s and women\u2019s competitions keep pace in franchise cricket\u2019s crowded landscape. But as the BBL rubs up against well-heeled upstarts in the sport\u2019s increasingly unstable calendar, its true worth can be difficult to assess.<\/p>\n

Few are better placed to do so than Venky Harinarayan, the Indian-born, Silicon Valley investor, who is a leading name in San Francisco\u2019s venture capital scene. In the sport he loves, he established his home town\u2019s franchise the Unicorns in 2023 with co-owner Anand Rajaraman, and made headlines when he signed Pat Cummins in a pioneering four-year deal that gave Major League Cricket<\/a> [MLC] legitimacy.<\/p>\n

Harinarayan believes the biggest challenge for the BBL in realising its potential comes from the leagues in South Africa and the UAE, competitions which run within its traditional December-January school holiday window \u2013 a \u201cvery prime piece\u201d of the calendar. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take people thinking a little strategically,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has to happen, but I don\u2019t know that you can go in and ask someone to move their window, it\u2019s not an easy process.\u201d<\/p>\n

The BBL was one of the first movers in cricket\u2019s short format after the IPL\u2019s establishment in 2008. Although Indian internationals have always been barred from competing, the early seasons of the Australian league attracted premier T20 talent and cricket luminaries including Chris Gayle, Kieron Pollard and Muttiah Muralitharan. Top T20 players today such as Rashid Khan, Jos Buttler, Phil Salt and Harry Brook have had BBL stints, but haven\u2019t stayed.<\/p>\n

Chris Gayle playing for the Melbourne Renegades in 2016. Photograph: Graham Denholm\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

A recent push to attract more big international names has delivered the likes of Pakistan\u2019s Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi and Mohammad Rizwan, and England\u2019s Sam Curran, but the emergence of franchise cricket in South Africa and UAE has challenged the BBL teams\u2019 ability to sign overseas talent and keep them for the entire season.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe number of internationals [in BBL] is not anywhere close to the UAE league or even the South African league,\u201d Harinarayan says. \u201cThe good thing with that is you build a lot of great local talent, and the not so good thing with that is the interest for the BBL itself, it tends to be more Australian, and it\u2019s not as followed in the rest of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

While South Africa\u2019s league is boosted by elite homegrown players, Australia\u2019s Test stars are unavailable in the BBL due to the overlap of the Test scheduling. The likes of Cummins, Steve Smith and Travis Head are finding space in their diaries to compete for franchises overseas, giving a leg up to these emerging competitions over the BBL.<\/p>\n

Graphic showing IPL teams as global franchises<\/a><\/p>\n

While the Hundred auction raised \u00a3520m, the money came largely from a core group of established cricket investors, including four IPL owners. Harinarayan believes making the BBL a compelling proposition for people like the Delhi Capitals or Mumbai Indians ownership groups \u2013 which both have entities in UAE and South African leagues \u2013 or those behind six other IPL franchises with stakes in other top competitions, will help Cricket Australia find common ground on the calendar.<\/p>\n

The Capitals and Indians also have offshoots in both MLC and the Hundred, the seasons of which abut each other in July. Harinarayan has seen IPL owners work well with other investors to develop the MLC. \u201cEverybody realises that it\u2019s in everybody\u2019s best interest to grow it here, it\u2019s not about sharing the pie yet as much as it is about growing the pie, and that tends to align people fairly quickly,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat we did with the Hundred was we just found out it doesn\u2019t make sense for both of us [MLC and the Hundred] to be also in the same window competing for the same players, it\u2019s much easier if we carve out our own windows.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The sale process in the UK has also been instructive for Cricket Australia, which is currently negotiating with state bodies over exactly what a privatisation would look like, and how much of the capital injection will be seen by local officials who currently run the BBL franchises and administer pathways and grassroots.<\/p>\n

Harinarayan has a close relationship with Cricket Victoria, which has helped build the Unicorns, and he travelled to Melbourne for the first time for last year\u2019s Boxing Day Test. He says it is too early to discuss his level of interest in a BBL franchise, but that it would be a very different investment as an established property compared to the startup nature of MLC. \u201cThe fact that we have such a great relationship with Cricket Victoria [means] if they go down this path, will we take a look? Absolutely. Will we do it? I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t know what they want, what they\u2019re asking for, what everybody is trying to set up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Access to broadcast, gate and sponsorship revenue will underpin valuations, and Australian cricket may also have to say goodbye to the existing BBL properties. Harinarayan agreed with comments from Kolkata Knight Riders chief executive Venky Mysore, who told the Sydney Morning Herald last month<\/a> investors must be able to rename and rebrand teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs you keep bringing down what you are willing to give, obviously what you get paid also keeps going down commensurately. If you take a look at the Kolkata Knight Riders or the Mumbai Indians, as an example, these guys are now not IPL franchises, they\u2019re global franchises,\u201d Harinarayan says. \u201cIf you [the BBL] fit that bill, then would they be interested? Yes. If not, they will think twice, or they will not pay as much as you want, so that\u2019s finally where the rubber hits the road.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The BBL may have been born near the start of Twenty20 era, but ahead of its 15th season…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-224059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}