Same Owners, Four Continents: The Blueprint of Franchise Cricket's Money

In January, I was at Newlands in Cape Town for an SA20 match. I was not watching the scoreboard; I was watching the camera panning. When it settled on the owners' box, I recognised three faces — the same faces I had seen six months earlier at an ILT20 match in Dubai, and before that at an MLC ground in New York. Three countries, three legal systems, three separate boards — but one identical smile.

Back at my desk that night I opened a spreadsheet I have used since 2026. Four columns: date, counterparty, amount, jurisdiction. Following the paper trail, I laid the ownership filings of four leagues side by side — the IPL, ILT20, SA20, MLC. The mailbox was the first witness, and it never changed its story. The same registered address, the same holding-company name, the same signature pattern — only the league and the country had changed.

I stopped asking who won and started asking who invoiced. Because the biggest story in T20 cricket today is not about a six; it is about ownership. And the story as it is usually told — 'Indian billionaires are buying up world cricket' — is far duller, far more paper-bound, and for exactly that reason far more troubling.

January 2026 was the hinge of cricket's money economy. In the same month, two leagues launched: the UAE's ILT20 and South Africa's SA20. Six teams each. In both, a large share of ownership sat with the owners of Indian Premier League franchises. Not from some new office in London or Melbourne — straight from corporate boardrooms in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata.

In July of the same year came Major League Cricket, on American soil. Six teams, at least three of them with a clear Indian-franchise shadow behind the name. Before that, a team from the same group had already been playing in the Caribbean Premier League. By 2026 a quiet geography had formed: the same owner families running teams across multiple continents, while each team stood as a separate entity before its own national board.

Then came 2026. The England and Wales Cricket Board announced it would sell 49 per cent stakes in the eight Hundred franchises. The ECB said it expected the round to raise more than £500 million. In the list of buyers were the same familiar names — Indian franchise groups, American private equity, and Gulf and Australian investors. Eight teams, eight separate deals, but a single logic: a cheap doorway into English grounds.

Behind this picture, one more number matters. The International Cricket Council's India media rights for the 2026–27 cycle went to Disney Star, in a deal reported at roughly three billion US dollars. In other words, not just one league but a whole cycle's broadcast money was set in a few negotiations at a few tables. And at that moment the question sharpens: through what structure does this money move?

From years of watching matches, I can say this: the picture the spectator sees — the colour of the kit, the logo on the shirt, the wave in the stands — is not the picture of ownership. Ownership is visible on paper, and paper never wears a jersey. In this piece I want to draw that paper picture, not to find a villain but to find a structure.

Let us open the structure. A franchise is usually not a team; it is a company, with two or three more companies beneath it. At the top sits a holding entity, in the middle an investor group, at the bottom the operating company that signs players. For IPL sides, these layers sit under Indian company law. For ILT20, the same group uses a UAE free-zone structure, where ownership disclosure works differently. For MLC, often an American limited liability company, where members' names are not always public.

That is the first gap: one owner, three continents, three forms of disclosure. What I can find in a British register hides in another document in the Emirates and appears in a different declaration in America. None of it is false. Each jurisdiction simply asks its own small question, and nobody asks the whole question.

Now back to the mailbox. In 2026 I downloaded 1,400 pages of World Cup hospitality contracts and found that one post box in Zug, Switzerland — Postfach 1818 — appeared on fourteen contracts worth more than $86 million. In 2026, at the Qatar World Cup, four subcontractors listed the same mailbox. Four subcontractors, one mailbox, and a signature that kept changing hands. In cricket I do not look for a Zug mailbox, because cricket's structure is different; but I look on the same principle — where is one address doing far more work than its size deserves?

In cricket that role is often played by a registered office, a corporate-secretary firm, or an advisory company whose name recurs across the filings of several teams. Every clean explanation had a second address, and the second address had a landlord. In my experience those second addresses give the most away, because they usually do not try to hide — they are merely boring.

Then comes the player market, where the structure takes flesh. Sunil Narine's career raises a simple question. He plays in the IPL for Kolkata Knight Riders, in ILT20 for Abu Dhabi Knight Riders, and in the Caribbean Premier League for Trinbago Knight Riders. Three leagues, three countries, one brand family. The same is true of Andre Russell.

The question is not moral; it is structural. When the same group is the counterparty to three contracts of the same player, how much real choice does that player have at the bargaining table? This is not an accusation — it is the natural result of a design. The franchise system protects the player with high wages, and in return takes exclusive control of his market. Both are true. But what the paper shows is that the agents representing players are often tied to the same group in multiple transactions.

I want to be clear here. I am not calling any specific contract unethical, because I have not seen the full paperwork. I am saying that related-party transactions of this kind are rigorously documented and disclosed in ordinary business, and in cricket they are not. A cricket economy that can sell £500 million of shares can at least record every team's true ownership in a central registry.

Now look at broadcasting, where the biggest numbers sit. A franchise league's main income comes from broadcast rights, sponsorship and ticketing. Broadcast rights are usually sold by the league company — and that league company is owned, at least partly, by the franchise owners themselves. So the same person sells the rights on one side and sits at the buying table on the other. This is lawful in several countries, under conditions. But it naturally raises a question about the neutrality of price-setting.

The question no single board can ask is this: is the money coming from the highest-bidding centre in the market, or circulating through related parties? The vast sum of the India media rights — reported at about three billion dollars for four years — shows how concentrated the market is. That concentration is not a hidden conspiracy; it is public. It is simply that nobody sees the whole picture at once.

Because each league sits under a different board, in a different country's law. The IPL is watched by the BCCI, SA20 by Cricket South Africa, ILT20 by the Emirates Cricket Board, the Hundred by the ECB, MLC by USA Cricket. Each regulates impeccably within its border. But ownership, player contracts and broadcast money do not respect borders, and nobody watches that.

Accountability is not lost — it is rerouted. I have written this before, about football, and in cricket the structure is simpler. Football at least has a national league and a European regulator. In cricket, the ICC is essentially a cooperative of member boards, and the member boards themselves run the leagues. That is, the very regulator who could see the whole picture is effectively controlled by the owners.

Here a boring possibility must be tested first, because the muckraker's instinct always pulls toward the clever explanation. The boring possibility is this: there is no deep plan. There is only self-interest, staff turnover, and the natural laziness of each body operating in its own jurisdiction. The simplest reason owners are entering multiple leagues is that it is profitable, and each board has invited them, because the boards have no money.

The evidence of that invitation is public. The ECB itself announced the share sale in 2026. The boards of South Africa and the UAE launched leagues by welcoming foreign investment. Nobody forced their way in. So the 'takeover' story sends its letter to the wrong address. The real story is that the boards, to cover their deficits, built a structure in which they later retained the least control.

Now the second boring possibility. It is said that this concentration is destroying the player market. The paper says otherwise. Franchise money is today the main source of income for almost every cricketer in the world, especially for players from South Africa, the West Indies, Afghanistan and New Zealand. Stars like Narine, Russell, Rashid Khan, Heinrich Klaasen or Jos Buttler earn from multiple leagues, several times their national contracts.

So the very structure that creates concentration is what keeps the floor of player wages high. This is the paradox of the structure, and it is exactly what gets lost in ordinary commentary. Those who criticise concentration often fail to recognise that rising player incomes are the other face of the same event.

But that does not make the structure harmless. Because the same concentration also controls the calendar. Today's international calendar is arranged so that franchise windows and bilateral series press on each other. And where that pressure stops is the player's body.

This is where the real meaning of 'load management' emerges. The phrase sounds scientific, almost medical. But on paper, rest decisions often fall in weeks when a bilateral series or a friendly is scheduled, while the player is present in a franchise window. The timing of rest is itself a commercial decision, merely wrapped in medical language.

I am not saying this against any particular player. I am saying the system is arranged so that commercial interest and physical limits sit at the same table, and nobody at that table has a name on paper. Load management is romanticised, but its most practical role is to reconcile the commercial demands of tours with the player's body.

So too with the young-player market. A franchise auction sometimes puts an enormous sum on a player with fewer than fifty top-flight appearances. On paper it is investment; in language it is courage. But the person making the decision does not carry the risk — the risk is carried by the player's shoulders and the board's reputation. A market that fixes a crore's price on the basis of one innings is not a market — it is gambling, merely done at a desk.

In my long observation, another pattern keeps returning — the cricket economy overpays for one visible skill and undervalues the invisible foundation. At auction, prices rise for strike rate, for sixes, for pulling crowds. But what decides matches — discipline, bowling consistency, the fine detail of fielding — is often flat or falling in value. It is the same market error in which a visible skill is overpriced while the basic foundation is left in the dark.

Now the Hundred's structure deserves a closer look, because it is the most recently documented example. In the ECB model, 51 per cent of a franchise stays with the host club that owns the ground, and 49 per cent goes to an investor. In principle this structure is meant to protect the game's interest — because the majority share stays inside the game. But 49 per cent is a share that, commercially, is not quite a veto, yet is enough to control the narrative.

And 49 per cent has a subtle advantage. Whoever buys 49 per cent does not have to carry the long-term liability of the game; he only watches the flow of money. Whoever keeps 51 per cent carries the liability but cannot bring in the money. It looks like a balanced partnership, but over time it becomes an imbalance, where one decides and another enjoys the result.

I do not trust a paper trail that ends exactly where it should. If the ECB's 49 per cent trail stops at the level of a holding company, then I do not know where the money actually comes from, whose risk it carries, or where future profit will go. Without a central beneficial-ownership registry in cricket, this trail will always stop at a door.

The contract looked ordinary until I sorted the metadata by time zone. The filing time was different, the signature time was different, and the decision time was different — three different clocks in one transaction. This is not proof of a crime. It is merely proof that the transaction was not made in one room, but moved through several.

And that is where the football experience applies. In 2026 I read the Companies House filings of Wigan Athletic, where a £6.4 million 'management fee' had been paid to a Hong Kong entity in 2026–20; weeks later the club entered administration, a twelve-point deduction followed, and seventy-five jobs were at risk. £6.4 million did not vanish. It was rerouted through people who did not exist.

I raise this example because cricket has not yet seen a scandal of exactly this scale — at least not publicly. But the structural ingredients are identical: the same intermediaries, different leagues, and a regulatory reality in which nobody sees the whole money path. The story was not the missing money. It was the system that made missing money normal.

So what do the critics miss? They usually make two mistakes. First, they assume the problem is new, and that the problem is Indian. The paper says the problem is old — English county cricket, Caribbean leagues, outside money has entered everywhere — and that it is not only Indian but equally American private equity and Gulf capital. Pointing a finger only at Indians leaves two-thirds of the structure out of sight.

Second, they assume concentration means the game will be ruined. The paper says the opposite. Concentrated capital is, right now, holding cricket's international structure together — covering the boards' deficits, paying players' wages, and launching leagues in countries where a professional cricket economy did not exist before. That benefit cannot be denied, and those who deny it usually argue not with reasons but with nostalgia.

But the biggest thing they miss is the boards' own role. I am not accusing any board of corruption. I am merely stating a plain fact of paper: every franchise sale was decided by a board, and that board lacked money. So the accountability problem was not imposed from outside; it became part of the design from within.

Here my profession gives me a warning. The muckraker's instinct always wants to find a conspiracy, because conspiracy stories are simple, heroes and villains match up, and readers grasp them quickly. But the paper trail often arrives at a monotonous truth — incompetence, turnover, and everyone following the rules inside their own border. If I write an accusation without a name, I am not investigating; I am only selling atmosphere.

So the real question is not of a villain but of a design. If the same owner runs several teams in several countries, is that harmful to the game? Probably not always. But if it happens, we should at least have the right to know — who owns, who benefits, and who decides. Because what cannot be measured cannot be protected; and what is hidden cannot be measured.

So what should we watch next? Three things are on my radar. First, if in the 2026–27 cycle any board or league launches a central beneficial-ownership registry — that would be the biggest reform, because it is not a new rule, only the disclosure of an existing truth. Second, in the next share sale or auction, how often the same group's name recurs, and whether that recurrence is rising or falling. Third, who sets the calendar — because whoever sets the calendar actually makes the game's biggest decision.

I began this piece with an owners' box in Cape Town. I end with a question. When across four continents there is one owner, one player, one brand, and someone asks 'whose league is this?' — the answer is not a name, but an empty box. That empty box is cricket's biggest story today, and nobody is invoicing for it.