Throwing open the Hundred to foreign investment was intended to attract more elite players, boost attendances and position it as the baby brother of the gargantuan IPL. English cricket has succeeded in bringing in a lot of overseas cash: sales of stakes in the eight franchises raised more than £450 million. But it has also imported problematic foreign politics.
Prior to the revamped player auction, a BBC journalist, Tom Grundy, ran a story based on messages from a senior ECB official to an agent that confirmed only non-IPL-owned teams would consider signing Pakistani players. No Pakistani cricketers have been selected to play in the IPL since a Pakistani terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, attacked Mumbai in 2008. This unofficial policy has been extended to Indian-owned franchises in competitions in South Africa, the US and the UAE.
The lock-out has had serious consequences for Pakistani players. The IPL offers by far the largest contracts in the sport, while the intermingling of the world’s best players for ten weeks every year acts as a crucible for innovation in the Twenty20 format.
Prior to the privatisation of The Hundred franchises, there was no issue with the selection of Pakistani players. Six were chosen in 2023, four in 2024 and two in 2025. The ECB was forced to issue a pre-auction statement confirming that all eight teams were committed to buying players ‘based solely on cricketing performance, availability, and the needs of each team’.
The issue appeared to have been resolved when Sunrisers Leeds, who are owned by the Sun Media Group in India, bought Pakistani spin-bowler Abrar Ahmed for £190,000. This was by no means a pity purchase; his price-tag was the tenth largest at the auction. The BBC subsequently ran a piece titled ‘Abrar signing allays Hundred India-Pakistan concern’.
But on closer inspection, the evidence that the shadow ban has been lifted is flimsy. When the ECB released The Hundred’s longlist of available players after consulting with the franchises, only 14 of the 63 Pakistanis who had declared their interest made the cut. A law firm, Leigh Day, has noted that this rate of attrition was greater for Pakistanis than for cricketers from other countries. Among those jettisoned at this stage was Sahibzada Farhan, who made more runs than anyone else at the T20 World Cup earlier this year. And at the auction itself, not only did three of the four IPL-owned teams not buy a Pakistani player; they did not even make a single bid.
There is also a major difference between the Sun Media Group and the other three Indian-owners of Hundred franchises: its distance from the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Its owners, the Maran family, also founded Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, a regional political party in Tamil Nadu. DMK has regularly allied with Congress, the BJP’s main rival in federal politics.
Compare that with the other three Indian owners. Mukesh Ambani, whose Reliance conglomerate owns 49 per cent of MI London, has regularly praised Modi. The new operator of Manchester Super Giants, Sanjiv Goenka, has lauded the Prime Minister’s ‘selfless devotion combined with awesome intellect and fantastic vision’. Goenka’s firm, RSPG, has also benefited from the Modi government’s willingness to bend the rules in its favour when awarding operating licences for major coal mines. The GMR group, which has a minority stake in Southern Brave, has donated large sums to an electoral trust that has subsequently financed the BJP.
No-one at the governing body wants an ugly distraction
The relationship between the BJP government and the Board of Control for Cricket in India is famously iron-clad. For years, the BCCI was run by the startlingly young Jay Shah, whose father, Amit, remains India’s home minister and Modi’s closest ally. And Modi has long co-opted India’s countrywide devotion to cricket as a political vehicle. During a visit to India in 2023, Modi drove the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, around the edge of the pitch in Ahmedabad in a chariot in prior to a Test match between the two teams. For as long as the Indian government remains considers Pakistan an enemy, so too will Indian cricket.
It is likely that we have heard the last about the shadow ban, at least for this season. The ECB has issued its statement and the franchises have duly filled their rosters. No-one at the governing body wants an ugly distraction from the cricket ahead of a major relaunch of the competition. It would also be extremely difficult to prove that Pakistani players are the victims of discrimination. Although it is illegal to make employment decisions on the basis of nationality or ethnicity under the terms of the UK’s Equality Act, it would be simple to put forward sporting reasons to justify the franchises’ decisions. Instead, India’s domination of cricket means the great lock-out of Pakistani players from the sport’s most lucrative competitions will continue.
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