Pakistan Super League format: eight teams, two pools

Open the standings for the current Pakistan Super League and you find something no other major T20 competition puts there: two pools, inside a single league whose teams do not all play each other the same number of times. Most franchise leagues run a flat round robin and let the table sort itself out. This one has a group stage bolted onto a league, and that piece of architecture is the first clue to what the competition has been trying to solve.

The Pakistan Super League format now works like this. Eight franchises, divided into two pools of four. Each side plays the three teams in its own pool twice and each of the four teams in the other pool once, which is ten league matches per side and forty in total. The top four across the whole table, not the top two from each pool, go into a four-match playoff arranged on the page system: a Qualifier, two Eliminators and a Final. Forty-four matches in all.

Two things happened at once to produce that shape. The competition expanded from six teams to eight, and in the same year it replaced the draft it had used since it began with an open auction. Almost everything distinctive about the league today is a consequence of one of those two decisions, or of the financial arrangement underneath both.

• 8Franchises in the competition
• 2Pools the league stage is split into
• 10League matches each side plays
• 44Matches in the competition including playoffs

Published structural counts for the eight-team edition rather than performance data. The league-stage total follows arithmetically from eight teams playing ten matches each.

Two pools inside one league, and what that actually buys

A pool structure inside a franchise league is rare enough to need explaining, because on the face of it the pools do very little. The four playoff places are decided on the overall table, not pool by pool. A side can finish top of its pool and miss the playoffs while three teams from the other pool go through. So what are the pools for?

They are a scheduling device rather than a competitive one. With eight teams and a fixture list of ten matches per side, the competition has to decide which fixtures recur and which do not. A flat draw would leave that decision to be argued about every year. Assigning teams to pools settles it in advance and gives every side a fixed set of three opponents it meets twice, which makes the fixture list predictable, keeps the derbies intact and gives the broadcaster a repeating rhythm.

The cost is the same cost every unbalanced schedule carries. Ten matches is a short season, and two sides finishing on the same points have been tested by different opponents. A team drawn into a pool with the three strongest sides plays six of its ten matches against them. A team in the softer pool plays six against weaker opposition and four against the strong ones. The table does not correct for that and the playoff cut does not care.

Worth noting is what the structure deliberately avoids. The obvious alternative is to send the top two from each pool into the playoffs, which is how a World Cup group stage works. The competition does not do that, and the reason is that it would let a mediocre side qualify from a weak pool ahead of a better side in the strong one. Taking the top four overall keeps the pools as a fixture-generating tool while leaving qualification on merit across the whole field. It is a sensible compromise and it is the sort of thing a competition only reaches for once it has grown past the size where a full round robin fits in the calendar.

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• Matches against the three teams in the same pool6
• Matches against the four teams in the other pool4

The published fixture allocation for the eight-team structure. Every side meets the three teams in its own pool twice and each of the four teams in the other pool once.

Show the numbers

Worked example: how one side's ten league matches are allocated

Item	Value
Matches against the three teams in the same pool	6
Matches against the four teams in the other pool	4

The playoff: one Qualifier, two Eliminators, one Final

Four sides go through and the bracket that follows is the page system, the same principle the Indian competition uses and a different arrangement from the finals series run in Australia.

The Qualifier is the side that finished first against the side that finished second. Winning it sends a team straight into the Final with several days off. Losing it costs nothing but a delay.

Eliminator 1 is third against fourth and it is single elimination. One of those two sides ends its season that evening.

Eliminator 2 takes the loser of the Qualifier and the winner of Eliminator 1. The winner of that match takes the second place in the Final.

The Final is the Qualifier winner against the Eliminator 2 winner.

The design gives the top two sides two chances and the sides in third and fourth exactly one, which sets the real prize of the league stage. Second place is not one rung above third; it is a different category of outcome. A side in third going into the last round of fixtures is playing to move up one place and double the number of defeats it can absorb, which is why the closing week of the league stage in this competition is frequently more consequential than the opening rounds of the playoff.

There is a subtler effect on the fourth-placed side, which most brackets share and few people notice. Fourth place is worth having, but the route from fourth to the trophy runs through three consecutive knockout matches against progressively better opposition, with no rest and no margin. The competition has therefore built a structure in which qualifying is easy relative to the size of the field, and in which qualifying badly is close to worthless.

1. 1League stage closesForty matches across two pools produce a single table, and the four highest-placed sides qualify regardless of which pool they came from. Fifth place and below are finished.
2. 2Qualifier, first against secondThe winner takes a place in the Final immediately and gets the longest rest of any side in the playoff. The loser drops into the second Eliminator with its season still alive.
3. 3Eliminator 1, third against fourthA single match with no second chance attached to it, which is the entire penalty for finishing outside the top two. The loser is eliminated.
4. 4Eliminator 2, Qualifier loser against Eliminator 1 winnerThe side that lost the Qualifier defends its second life here. The winner claims the remaining place in the Final, having played one match more than its opponent will have.
5. 5The FinalThe Qualifier winner against the Eliminator 2 winner, with one side rested and the other having come through two knockout matches in the preceding days.

The published playoff structure for the current edition. It follows the page system, in which the two highest-placed qualifiers are given a second chance and the other two are not.

From a draft to an auction, ten years late

For its first ten seasons the competition distributed players through a draft. Every available player was slotted into a category, the categories carried fixed prices, and franchises picked in turn from the ranked lists. A franchise could not outbid a rival. It could only pick before one, or fail to.

From the 2026 edition that system was replaced by an open auction, held in February of that year, in which franchises bid against each other with a capped purse.

The difference is not a matter of ceremony. A draft prices a player by category and lets the pick order decide who gets him. An auction lets the market decide both the price and the destination, which means a franchise that values a particular player more than everybody else can have him, and will pay for the privilege. The mechanics of an open T20 auction, the way the room's behaviour changes as the money drains and why the last hour looks nothing like the first, are worked through in the piece on what actually happens in a cricket auction.

Two reasons are usually given for the change and both hold up. The first is transparency: a draft in which the board sets category prices invites arguments about whether a player has been graded correctly, and an auction moves that judgement to the bidders. The second is squad building: a draft, by design, spreads the best players evenly, which is fine for competitive balance and frustrating for a franchise that has identified a specific combination it wants and cannot assemble.

The timing tells you the third reason. The switch arrived in the same year the competition expanded, and adding two franchises to a draft is awkward, because two new sides with no history have to be inserted into a pick order built around retention. An auction handles new entrants far more gracefully: they arrive with a full purse and bid.

There is a cost the competition has accepted along with the benefit. Auctions concentrate talent towards the franchises that judge the market best and towards the ones willing to spend their purse early, and a league whose sides are not equally resourced will see that concentration show up in the table within a couple of seasons. The draft was a levelling instrument. Removing it is a bet that a wider talent pool will absorb the difference.

Retention, and the four slots that shape the auction before it starts

Each established franchise was allowed to retain up to four players before the auction, one from each of the Platinum, Diamond, Gold and Silver categories. The categories are a ranking of players by standing and price, running from a small Platinum tier at the top through Diamond and Gold to Silver, with an Emerging tier for uncapped and young players underneath. Each band's base price sits at roughly half the one above it.

Restricting retention to one per band is a more elegant rule than it looks. A franchise cannot keep its four best players, because they will not be spread across four different categories. It has to keep one elite player, one from the tier below, and so on down, which forces the best players in the competition back into the auction room in numbers. Compare that with a system that allows four unrestricted retentions, where a strong squad simply keeps its core and the auction becomes a market in everybody else's spare parts.

The two incoming franchises had nothing to retain from, so they were permitted to sign a matching number of players to bring them level with the established sides before bidding began. That is the standard remedy for an expansion side and it addresses a genuine unfairness, though it does not fully solve it: a new franchise has no existing relationships, no established recruitment staff and no returning players who already know the environment.

The purse itself carries an unusual feature. Each side had a cap on what it could spend at auction, and that cap could be extended by a defined amount for the specific purpose of directly signing one foreign player who had not appeared in a previous edition of the competition. That is a targeted subsidy for novelty, written into the financial rules: the competition is paying its franchises to bring in overseas players the league has not seen before, rather than recycling the same circuit. It also quietly acknowledges the availability problem the competition now has, which the calendar section below returns to.

What open bidding did to the way a squad is assembled

Swapping a draft for an auction changes the job of a franchise's recruitment staff completely, and the change is worth spelling out because it explains why some sides looked well built after the first auction and others did not.

Under a draft the work is ranking. A franchise decides the order in which it wants players, waits for its turn, and takes the highest name still on the board. Price is fixed, so a mistake costs a player rather than money, and the worst outcome is that a rival takes somebody first. Preparation is essentially a list.

Under an auction the work is budgeting under uncertainty. A capped purse has to cover a whole squad, players come up in an order the franchise does not control, and every rupee spent on one signing is unavailable for the rest of the room. The failure modes are new. Spend heavily early and a side ends the day with three excellent players and a thin supporting cast that has to be filled from whoever is left. Hold back and a side can find that the players it wanted have gone while it was being disciplined, leaving it with money and nothing worth buying.

The retention rule sharpens both problems. Because a franchise may keep only one player from each of the four priced bands, it enters the auction with a squad that is deliberately unbalanced, missing its second and third best players in the tiers it protected at the top. Its bidding has to repair a known hole rather than simply improve the side, and everybody else in the room can see which hole it is. A franchise that retained an elite batter and let a second elite batter go is going to bid for batting, and its rivals will price accordingly.

There is one further wrinkle that the extension to the purse creates. Because the cap could be lifted specifically to sign a foreign player who had never appeared in the competition, a franchise had a reason to identify an unfamiliar overseas name well before the auction and secure him outside the room. That is a genuine advantage available only to sides with real scouting capacity, and it is the sort of edge that separates franchises far more reliably than anything that happens during the bidding itself.

The Emerging tier, and a selection rule rather than a squad rule

Alongside the four priced bands sits an Emerging category for uncapped and young players, and the rules published for the auction attached a requirement to it: each side had to carry uncapped under-23 players in its squad, and to field at least one of them.

The distinction between a squad requirement and a selection requirement matters more than it sounds. A rule that says a squad must contain young players is easy to satisfy and easy to ignore, because a player can sit out every match. A rule that says one must be in the eleven changes what the competition is for. It guarantees that in every match of every season, a certain number of young domestic cricketers are on the field against international-standard opposition, and it does so without asking a coach to be generous under pressure.

That is the strongest developmental instrument any franchise league has, and relatively few use it in this form. The economic logic of a T20 side, where every place in the eleven has to be justified against the alternative, otherwise pushes uncapped players out of the side in exactly the matches that would develop them fastest. The related question of how a squad values players who can do two jobs, which is where young cricketers most often break in, is examined in the piece on what an all-rounder is really worth.

First edition, 20165

After the first expansion, 20186

Current structure, from 20268

The number of teams contesting the competition at its founding, after the first expansion, and in the current eight-team structure. Counts only, with no claim about the quality or competitiveness of any edition.

Show the numbers

Franchises in the competition, by edition

Item	Franchises
First edition, 2016	5
After the first expansion, 2018	6
Current structure, from 2026	8

Who owns a franchise, and why the fee is annual rather than a price

The competition is run as a single entity by the Pakistan Cricket Board, with each franchise held and controlled by private investors. That much it shares with the other big leagues. What it does not share is how the investors pay.

In most franchise competitions an owner buys a team, once, for a large sum, and then draws a share of the league's central revenue for the length of the licence. In this one the franchises pay the board a fee every year. The two arrangements look similar on a spreadsheet and behave very differently. A one-off purchase converts the team into an asset whose value the owner can grow and eventually sell. A recurring fee makes the team a cost centre that has to be paid for again every season regardless of how the season went.

That difference is the root of most of the friction the competition has had with its own franchises. The owners have argued for years that the model transferred too much of the league's income to the board and left them exposed, and the dispute reached the point of collective legal action. The settlement that followed moved the split of media rights revenue heavily towards the franchises, leaving the board with a small percentage of that particular stream while retaining a larger share of central licensing. Where broadcast money sits in the structure of any modern league, and why it usually decides the argument, is set out in the piece on how broadcasting rights are sold and shared.

The expansion introduced a further mechanism worth understanding, because it is a straightforward piece of risk transfer. The two new franchises were given a guaranteed minimum from the central pool for their first several editions. If a new side's actual share fell below that floor, the board undertook to make up the difference or to discount the shortfall against the following year's franchise fee. That is the board underwriting the commercial risk of expansion rather than asking two new investors to carry it, and it is the sort of provision that makes an expansion auction attract serious bidders instead of cautious ones.

What an expansion franchise inherits, and what it does not

The two teams added for the eight-team structure, Hyderabad Kingsmen and Rawalpindiz, arrived into a competition that had been running for a decade with a settled set of rivals, and the terms they arrived on are a good test of how seriously a league takes expansion.

On the sporting side they were treated well. Both entered the auction with a full purse and no retained players, and both were permitted to sign an equivalent number of players in advance to match the four the established sides had held back. That levels the starting position in a way that many leagues have failed to do for new entrants, and the results in the first season suggested the levelling was real rather than nominal, since one of the two reached the Final at the first attempt.

On the commercial side they were given the guaranteed central pool floor described above, which is the more valuable concession. An expansion franchise's hardest year is its first: it is paying a fee, building a staff, buying a squad and selling sponsorship to a market that has never heard of it. A guaranteed minimum share for the opening editions turns an unknown revenue into a floor, which is what allows an investor to model the thing at all.

What no rule can hand a new franchise is the accumulated stock a decade-old side has. An established club has a support base, a recognised set of colours, a scouting network, relationships with agents and foreign players, and a body of institutional knowledge about which grounds behave how. A new one has a name, a purse and a coaching staff hired in a hurry. That gap closes over seasons rather than months and it does not show up in any of the published rules.

Expansion also changes the competition around the new sides. Adding two teams dilutes the domestic player pool across eight squads instead of six, which raises the value of every competent local cricketer and puts real pressure on the tier of players who were previously on the edge of a squad. That is the mechanism by which league expansion develops a country's depth, and it is slow, indirect, and almost impossible to demonstrate in a single season.

A competition that spent years without a home

The league was founded in 2015 and its first edition, in early 2016, was played entirely in the United Arab Emirates. Not as a commercial venture into a new market, which is how other competitions have used overseas fixtures, but because international cricket was not being played in Pakistan for security reasons and a domestic franchise league staffed by foreign professionals could not be staged there.

The competition came home in stages over the seasons that followed, beginning with a small number of showpiece matches and expanding until the whole tournament was hosted domestically. The current edition was played inside Pakistan, concentrated at Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore and National Bank Stadium in Karachi.

That history sits underneath several features of the format that would otherwise look odd. A competition that has spent years persuading foreign players to travel has a structural incentive to make overseas participation easy, which is part of why the purse extension for a first-time foreign signing exists. A competition whose venue availability has been uncertain has a reason to prefer a compact schedule at a small number of grounds over a full home-and-away structure spread across every host city. And a competition rebuilding its domestic footprint has an obvious interest in the under-23 selection rule, because the pipeline it is feeding is the one that was most damaged while international cricket stayed away.

It also explains why expansion mattered so much beyond the arithmetic. Adding two franchises is a statement that the competition can support more teams, more venues and more investors, in a country that a decade earlier could not host a single international fixture. The wider survey of how each major competition claims its place in the calendar, and what each one is structurally good and bad at, is set out in the guide to the global franchise circuit.

The March window, and the collision it walked into

For most of its life the competition occupied a window in February and early March, ahead of the Indian league. That slot had an obvious virtue: overseas players who would later be unavailable were free, and the competition had the attention of the T20 audience largely to itself for several weeks.

The 2026 edition ran from late March into early May, which overlaps the Indian season almost entirely.

The consequences are structural rather than sentimental. Every overseas player with a contract in the larger competition is unavailable, and the pool of foreign talent the auction was bidding for is therefore smaller and different from the pool a February tournament would have drawn on. Broadcast attention across the region is split. And the competition's own scheduling flexibility is reduced, because a window shared with a larger event cannot easily be stretched.

There are reasons a competition might accept that, including the domestic and international fixture demands that bracket the old February slot and the practical difficulty of staging a tournament in Pakistan across certain months. A competition does not usually move into a clash by choice. It moves because the alternatives were worse, and the honest way to read a fixture list of this kind is as evidence of a constrained calendar rather than as a strategic decision.

The effect on the format is felt in squad construction. When the strongest foreign players are elsewhere, the value of a domestic core rises sharply, the Emerging tier becomes more than a developmental gesture, and the auction rewards franchises that judged the local market well rather than the ones that budgeted for a marquee overseas signing. A competition's window and its squad rules are the same subject viewed from two ends.

How to judge a Pakistan Super League season

Five things make the competition legible from the outside, and none of them are the scores.

Check the pools before the table. A side sitting fourth may have played six of its ten matches against the three strongest teams in the competition, and a side sitting second may have had the easier pool. The playoff cut ignores that, so you should not.

Watch the last week of the league stage rather than the first week of the playoff. The competitive gap between second and third is the largest single step in the structure, and the matches that decide it are ordinary league fixtures that nobody bills as knockouts.

Look at how each franchise used the retention slots. One player per band forces a choice about which tier of the squad to protect, and a side that kept a Platinum player and let a Diamond player go has made a statement about where it thinks matches are won.

Count the uncapped players in the eleven, not the squad. The selection requirement guarantees a floor. A franchise that consistently plays more young domestic cricketers than the floor demands is doing something the format only asks for in part.

Read the fee model behind the results. A franchise paying the board again every season is under a different kind of pressure from one that bought its licence outright, and it will make squad and marketing decisions accordingly, particularly in a year when its own share of the central pool looks uncertain.

Track availability rather than reputation. In a window that overlaps a larger competition, a foreign signing who is present for the whole season is worth more than a better one who is present for four matches, and the auction rewards franchises that understood that in February.

Judge a season on those and the competition stops looking like a smaller version of somebody else's league and starts looking like what it is: an eight-team tournament that has just changed its selection mechanism, its size and its place in the calendar within a single year, and which is still finding out what those three changes do to each other. The rest of the sport is covered across the cricket section, and the other long-form explainers are collected in the blog.