LONDON: On occasion, I am asked to compare the franchised cricket leagues — a subjective exercise, given there are no agreed criteria on which to base such analysis.
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It was interesting, therefore, to discover last week that The Cricketer magazine has published its own ranking of the leagues. It is not the first to do so — in August 2025, the BBC produced an assessment under the heading “Which franchise league is most entertaining?”
There is an understandable tendency for such rankings to focus on the biggest leagues. According to the World Cricketers Association, there are just short of 50 active short-form cricket leagues around the world. The Cricketer drew up its rules of engagement to include leagues that it judged to be “franchise-style,” excluding the T20 Blast in England and Wales which features the same county clubs that compete in other forms of domestic cricket. Only men’s leagues were included, whilst competitions that were not the biggest within a certain country or territory were excluded. This meant, for example, that the ILT20 was chosen as the UAE's primary league rather than the Abu Dhabi T10.
This pruning reduced the number of leagues under consideration to 10. Three criteria were set: the quality of cricket, entertainment value and viability.
