WHO WOULDN’T want a sporting debut like Sajeevan Sajana’s? Playing for Mumbai Indians against Delhi Capitals in the first match of this year’s Women’s Premier League (WPL), a Twenty20 (T20) cricket tournament in India, she strode out to bat with her team needing five runs to win—and with just one delivery remaining in the game. With a smooth swing of the bat, she clouted her first ball in the WPL over the boundary rope for six. Mumbai, the defending champions, were up and running in the most dramatic fashion.
Ms Sajana’s strike was the sort of moment that the WPL was created for. Within minutes it had been clipped and posted on the league’s social-media accounts. It has since been watched more than 700,000 times on X (formerly Twitter) alone. The WPL, launched last year and run by India’s national cricket board, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), is an attempt to replicate the success of the men’s Indian Premier League (IPL). The IPL, launched by the BCCI in 2008, has brought previously unfathomed sums of money into cricket.
The WPL could have a similar effect on the women’s game, if to a rather less opulent degree. The BCCI has sold five franchises to Indian businessmen for a total of $570m. Three of these, based in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, went to owners of IPL teams, ensuring a level of operational continuity and know-how. The BCCI earned another $116m from the sale of five years’ domestic and digital broadcasting rights for the month-long competition. Owners have ten years to pay their purchase fee, during which time they receive a gradually diminishing share of the broadcasting pot, because, in theory, commercial and game-day revenues should increase.
Crucially, plenty of this cash is ending up in the players’ pockets. Take Natalie Sciver-Brunt, for example. A star of the England team, she is believed to earn a base salary of up to £100,000 ($127,000) a year from the England Cricket Board. She won’t soon be competing at the top of the earnings league with Iga Swiatek, a tennis star who in 2023 won $9.9m. But thanks to the WPL’s commercial heft, she can earn far more from a few weeks of T20 in India than from a year plugging away at international cricket. She was bought by Mumbai at auction for £320,000.
High salaries have ensured that almost all of the world’s best female cricketers make themselves available for the WPL. The foreign players raise the league’s profile and lift standards without completely stifling local talent. Thirteen players this year, for example, come from Australia, long the dominant force in women’s cricket. Last year eight of the top ten run-scorers and eight of the top ten wicket-takers were foreign. Since two-thirds of players in the WPL squads are Indian, the BCCI is in effect paying the world’s best international players good wages to play alongside and tutor India’s most talented cricketers. That the majority of the players in the IPL are Indian goes some way to explaining why India’s men’s national team has won a greater proportion of its T20 games than any other leading side.
Still the benefits are likely to be spread around, even if unevenly. In the IPL, throwing together the world’s best cricketers—enabling them to train collectively and come up with new tactics—raised the quality of cricket internationally. The league has cultivated improvements in the athleticism of fielding, the inventiveness of batting and the creativity of bowling. These have spread to other, longer forms of cricket.
The same is likely in the women’s game. Despite her pyrotechnic debut, Ms Sajana is not the future: at 29 she probably won’t enjoy a long international career. But Shafali Verma, Richa Ghosh and Pooja Vastrakar, the young stars of India’s national side, are sure to benefit from years of tutelage from the best foreign players. By building a world-leading tournament—again—the BCCI has challenged its rivals to find a way to keep up.