T20 franchise leagues around the world, and who gets the weeks

There is one pool of elite Twenty20 cricketers and fifty-two weeks in a year. Everything about the T20 franchise leagues around the world follows from that sentence. A league does not begin with a format or a logo or a set of city names. It begins with someone identifying a block of weeks in which the weather works, the local broadcaster has space, and enough good players are not already contracted somewhere else. Every other decision is downstream of the window.

That is why the circuit looks the way it does. Two competitions run in the same fortnight in January not because anybody planned a clash, but because January is the only month that suits both the South African summer and the Emirati one. The Indian Premier League gets a protected spring block not because it asked politely, but because nothing else can afford to be on at the same time. Leagues fail for calendar reasons far more often than for cricketing ones.

A generation ago a professional's year had an obvious shape. You played for your country when your country was playing and for your domestic side when it was not, and if you were good and from the right place you spent a winter as an overseas pro somewhere warm. That structure was inherited from an age of ships and it survived, more or less intact, into the age of aeroplanes. It is now gone. A leading short-format player moves between six or seven employers in a calendar year, most of them privately owned, several of them owned by the same holding company.

The IPL takes most of the attention and its recruitment machinery is covered separately in our piece on how the IPL auction works. What follows is the system around it: why the franchise model suits this format specifically, who owns the leagues, how each one recruits, and what the whole arrangement has done to the game underneath it.

Why the franchise model fits T20 and almost nothing else

Franchise cricket is often described as an import from American sport. That is half right. What the model actually did was find the one cricket format that could carry it.

Four properties make T20 unusually suited to a closed, city-based, privately owned league.

It is short enough to be a season rather than a campaign. A Twenty20 tournament of thirty-odd matches can be played in five or six weeks. That is short enough to fit into a gap in a crowded year, short enough for an overseas player to commit to without abandoning anything else, and short enough that a broadcaster can sell it as an event rather than a habit. A first-class competition cannot be compressed like that. The format is the schedule.

A match is one evening. Three hours plus an interval, finishing before a weekday audience goes to bed, in a single sitting, with an outcome. Broadcast economics reward that shape ruthlessly. The entire commercial case for franchise cricket rests on a product that behaves like a scheduled television programme rather than like a five-day event with an uncertain end.

A squad can be assembled rather than developed. This is the property people underrate. A football club that wants to be good in three years has to build an academy, a scouting network and a coaching structure, and even then it is buying into a market where the best players are locked into long contracts. A T20 franchise can walk into an auction or a draft and leave with a competitive squad in an afternoon. The unit of production is a small group of specialists on short contracts, not a developed institution. That makes a new team a plausible investment in a way that a new football club almost never is.

City identity is available and unclaimed. Cricket's traditional loyalties attach to countries, counties, states and provinces. Outside a handful of places, there was no strong pre-existing club allegiance for a new team to compete against. Franchise leagues walked into an empty room and put a name on the door.

Put those together and you get an entity that can be created quickly, staffed quickly, sold to a broadcaster quickly, and unwound quickly if it fails. The contrast with the promotion and relegation model that governs most of world sport is genuine and worth its own treatment, which is where our piece on closed leagues against open pyramids picks it up. The short version is that a franchise league guarantees its owners that they will still be in the competition next year, and that guarantee is what makes the investment financeable.

• 120Balls per side in a Twenty20 innings
• 100Balls per side in The Hundred
• 4Maximum overs one bowler may deliver in a T20 innings
• 10Consecutive balls one bowler may deliver in The Hundred

Playing-condition constants rather than reported figures. The Hundred is the only major competition on the circuit that is not Twenty20.

Who owns the T20 franchise leagues, and why it now matters more than the cricket

There are two ownership models on the circuit, and the difference between them explains most of what happens.

Model one: the board sells teams. A national governing body creates the competition, retains the league itself, and sells participation rights in individual teams to private owners. The board keeps control of the central broadcast deal, the playing conditions and the calendar slot. The owner buys a team, a share of the central pot, and the local commercial rights. This is how most leagues began, and it is a straightforward arrangement: the board raises money it could not raise from bilateral cricket, and the owner buys into a growth market with a fixed number of seats.

Model two: the owner buys teams in several countries. A group whose original asset is a team in one league buys teams in others. The same ownership now appears on the shirt of a side in India, a side in South Africa, a side in the UAE, a side in the Caribbean, a side in the United States and a side in England. This is the most consequential development in cricket since the format itself, and it is still routinely reported as a business story rather than a governance one.

Consider what a multi-league owner actually holds. It has a coaching and analytics operation whose fixed costs are spread across six competitions instead of one. It has a scouting network that sees a player in one league and can offer him another. It has a brand that a supporter in Johannesburg, Dubai and Dallas recognises, which is worth far more to a sponsor than a single-market team. It has the ability to keep a promising young player employed for most of the year by rotating him between sister clubs, which is a form of development pathway that no national board designed and none controls.

And it has something no board has: a portfolio view of the calendar. A board wants its own six weeks protected. A multi-league owner wants a sequence of six-week blocks that do not collide, in an order that lets the same core group of players move through them. Those are different objectives, and only one of them is being pursued by an organisation that operates in every relevant market at once.

This is where the analogy with other sports breaks down. In a closed North American league, the owners and the competition share an interest, because the owners collectively are the league. In cricket, a franchise owner's interests span multiple competitions that are in direct conflict with one another for players and weeks. There is no equivalent anywhere else in professional sport, and there is no rulebook governing it.

The consequences are not all bad, and pretending otherwise is lazy. Multi-league ownership brought capital into South African and Emirati cricket at a moment when neither board could have raised it domestically. It has professionalised players from countries whose boards cannot afford to. It has built the only genuinely global scouting apparatus the sport has ever had. It has also concentrated a large share of the world's franchise cricket in the hands of a small number of groups, none of which answers to a national board, an international federation or a players' association.

How each major league claims its slot

What follows is the shape of each competition rather than a list of trivia: where it sits in the year, how it gets players, and what limits it.

The Indian Premier League

The IPL occupies a protected block in the northern spring and functions as the market-clearing price for everything else. It recruits through an auction, which is the only major recruitment mechanism on the circuit that lets a team spend a very large share of its budget on a single player if it decides to. Its overseas quota is small relative to the size of the tournament, which means most of the playing opportunity goes to Indian cricketers.

Its constraint is that it is a domestic competition. Indian men's players do not appear in overseas leagues, which is a rule with a global effect: the single deepest pool of T20 talent in the world is unavailable to everybody else. Every other league on this list is competing for the residual. That one restriction shapes the salary structure, the recruitment strategy and the identity of every other competition on the circuit, and it is the least discussed structural fact in the sport.

The Big Bash League, Australia

Australia's competition relaunched at the start of the 2010s as a city-based league with eight teams, two each in Sydney and Melbourne, running through the Australian summer. It was built as a free-to-air family product rather than a premium one, and that decision shaped everything: matches in the school holidays, early evening starts, accessibility over exclusivity. For a period it drew crowds among the largest at any domestic sporting event in the country.

It recruits through a draft rather than an auction, and its slot is the problem. The Big Bash sits in a southern-summer window that now contains other competitions bidding for the same overseas players, and it overlaps with Australia's own Test season, which removes its best local players at exactly the point the tournament most wants them. A league that once had first pick of the world's available professionals now has to work for them.

The Hundred, England and Wales

The Hundred is the only competition here that is not Twenty20. Each side faces 100 balls delivered in blocks of five, a bowler may deliver five or ten consecutively, and the ends change every ten balls. There are eight city-based teams, and the men's and women's competitions are staged as one tournament with double-headers at the same grounds.

It was created to reach an audience county cricket does not reach, with the format made deliberately distinct so it could be explained to a newcomer without reference to anything else. It has been the most contested innovation in English cricket in a generation. Supporters point to full grounds, a new audience and the transformation of the women's professional game. Opponents argue it was imposed on a county structure that was not properly consulted, and that a second short format fragments an already crowded summer.

More recently the ECB sold equity stakes in the eight teams, bringing in outside investment including from ownership groups already holding IPL franchises. That changed what the competition is. It began as a broadcast product owned by a governing body. It is now, at least in part, a set of privately held clubs whose owners have interests elsewhere in the calendar.

The Pakistan Super League

The PSL launched in the middle of the 2010s in circumstances no other league has faced. International cricket had effectively stopped in Pakistan after the attack on the Sri Lanka team bus in Lahore, and the country's players had gone the best part of a decade without a home crowd. The league was therefore staged in the United Arab Emirates, played entirely abroad, and brought home in stages: first a final, then a set of matches, then the whole tournament.

It is the clearest example of a franchise league doing something for a country's cricket that its board could not do alone. It brought international players back to Pakistani grounds, rebuilt the security and logistical apparatus needed to host, and gave a generation of Pakistani cricketers regular exposure to overseas professionals at home. The quality of fast bowling it has produced and exported is not a coincidence.

Its constraint is the window. The PSL sits close enough to the IPL that it competes for the tail of the same overseas market, and it recruits through a draft with salary bands rather than an open auction.

The Caribbean Premier League

The CPL was the first league outside India to build a distinct identity rather than copying the IPL. It is played in the Caribbean summer, and it moves between grounds across the islands in a way no other franchise competition attempts, which is a logistical burden it accepts deliberately because the alternative is concentrating the tournament in one or two territories and losing the rest.

Its significance goes beyond entertainment. West Indies cricket has spent decades losing its best players to better-paid employers elsewhere, and the CPL keeps money and matches inside the region. It has added a women's competition and a linked event staged in the United States, and its ownership groups have been among the most active in buying into other leagues.

Its constraint is a mid-year window shared with English county cricket and, increasingly, with American cricket, which limits the pool of English and Australian professionals available to it.

SA20, South Africa

South Africa had tried twice before and failed twice: once when a planned tournament collapsed before a ball was bowled, once with a board-run competition that found neither an audience nor a sustainable broadcast deal. SA20 worked, and the reason is not complicated. The six teams are owned by the owners of IPL franchises, which brought capital, an existing commercial operation and a route into a guaranteed broadcast market.

That model has consequences in both directions. It gave South African cricket a financially viable domestic property at a point when the board badly needed one. It also means a significant share of the country's top-level cricket is owned by companies whose primary asset is in another country, and it puts the competition squarely inside a January window that Australia and the UAE are also occupying.

The ILT20, United Arab Emirates

The UAE hosted other people's cricket for decades: as a neutral venue for Pakistan, as the relocated home of a full IPL season during the pandemic, as the site of World Cups. The International League T20 was the point at which it began hosting its own, in January, with six teams, several again linked to IPL ownership.

Its distinguishing feature is squad composition. The ILT20 permits a much higher proportion of overseas players in the eleven than any other league, with only a small quota of UAE-qualified cricketers required. That makes it the most internationally staffed competition on the circuit, which is precisely why it could be competitive immediately and precisely why it is criticised for offering limited development value to local players. Its constraint is the shallowness of the domestic base beneath it.

Major League Cricket, United States

MLC began in the middle of the 2020s with six teams, a purpose-redeveloped stadium in Texas and investors drawn from technology and from IPL ownership. Its commercial case is the South Asian diaspora in North America, one of the wealthiest cricket-watching populations in the world and one that had never had a domestic competition worth the name.

Its cricketing case is longer term. The United States has hosted matches at a men's T20 World Cup, and the sport's return to the Olympic programme has given American cricket a target and a reason for public investment. Its constraint is infrastructure: a shortage of grounds that meet international standards, in a country where stadium construction is expensive and cricket is competing for land and attention with sports that already own both. Whether MLC builds a genuine playing base or remains an import-driven summer event will take a decade to answer.

The second tier, and the ones that did not survive

Below the headline competitions sits a larger group than most people realise. Bangladesh has run its premier league since the early 2010s. Sri Lanka has the Lanka Premier League. There have been tournaments in Canada, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Namibia and Kenya, some annual, some sporadic. The UAE also stages a ten-over competition in Abu Dhabi, one of several attempts to compress the format further.

Alongside them are the older domestic tournaments that are not franchise leagues but compete for the same players and the same weeks: England's county T20 competition, New Zealand's Super Smash, the domestic T20 cups in India and Pakistan.

Not everything survives. Several leagues have launched loudly and folded within a season or two when the broadcast money did not appear. The circuit looks permanent from outside. Individual competitions are fragile, and the ones that endure almost always have either a captive domestic broadcast market or an ownership group with an existing IPL asset.

The player's year, and the rise of the freelance professional

Now look at the same system from the other side. A player does not experience the circuit as a set of leagues. He experiences it as a budget of weeks that has to be allocated before anyone else allocates it for him.

The allocation runs roughly in this order. International commitments come first if the player has a central contract, because the contract requires it and because refusing has consequences beyond one series. Then the league he is retained by, since retention usually predates the auction or draft. Then whatever the auction or draft produces. Then partial-tournament deals for the gaps. Then, if anything is left, rest.

1. 1Step 1, the central contract claims first refusalIf the player holds a national contract, board commitments are booked before anything else. This is what the board is paying for, and it is why the fee is often lower than a league would pay for the same weeks.
2. 2Step 2, retentions lock inFranchises retain a core of players before the auction or draft. A retained player knows one block of his year months before the rest of the market moves.
3. 3Step 3, the auction or draft fills the middleWhatever weeks remain go to the highest bidder or the earliest pick, depending on the league's mechanism. Availability caveats are declared here, and a player who cannot commit to a whole tournament is worth less in the room.
4. 4Step 4, the NOC is requestedThe home board is asked to approve each overseas engagement. It may approve in full, approve part of a tournament, or refuse. Nothing is contractually safe until this arrives.
5. 5Step 5, the gaps are sold as partial dealsTwo or three spare weeks are filled by replacement contracts, mid-tournament arrivals and early departures. This is now a professional category in its own right, not an accident.
6. 6Step 6, whatever is left is rest and rehabilitationFast bowlers in particular reach this step with nothing in the budget, which is why workload management has become a contractual negotiation as much as a medical one.

The order matters more than the destinations. Each step removes weeks from the budget before the next step gets to choose.

The freelance professional is the natural product of this system. A growing group of players hold no international contract at all and build the entire year from league work. Some retired from international cricket to do it. Some were never selected. For a specialist finisher, a wrist-spinner or a death-overs bowler from a smaller nation, it is a viable career and frequently a better paid one than international cricket outside the largest boards.

The effect on national contracts is direct. Boards have responded by splitting contracts by format, so a player may hold a red-ball contract, a white-ball contract or a full one, priced according to how many days the board expects to use. Some have gone further and offered deliberately partial contracts, accepting that a player will take league work in agreed windows, on the theory that half a player under agreement is better than a whole player under none. Others have held the line and lost people.

The uncomfortable arithmetic is that a central contract is not competing with a league contract on money alone. It is competing on certainty. A league engagement pays a known sum for a known block. International selection pays only if you are picked, and being dropped costs a player far more than it used to, because the weeks he might have sold are already gone.

38%15%12%15%19%

• International duty and camps20
• Primary league retention8
• Second league engagement6
• Partial deals and replacement stints8
• Rest, travel and rehabilitation10

Invented illustration, not a real player's schedule and not a claim about any individual. The point is only the arithmetic: 52 is the whole budget, and the first claim on it is made before the player negotiates anything.

Show the numbers

A constructed 52-week year for a leading white-ball professional

Item	Value
International duty and camps	20
Primary league retention	8
Second league engagement	6
Partial deals and replacement stints	8
Rest, travel and rehabilitation	10

Read that figure as a constraint rather than a schedule. Whatever the true distribution for any given player, the total is fixed. Every week a new competition wants is a week taken from one of those blocks, and the block it is usually taken from is the last one.

The clash problem, and the certificate that runs it

Two leagues wanting the same fortnight is not an occasional scheduling accident. It is the normal condition of the circuit, and there is no authority that resolves it.

What exists instead is the no objection certificate. A contracted player who wants to appear in an overseas league needs written permission from his home board. Leagues will not register a player who cannot produce one, which makes the NOC the main instrument of control anybody has over where cricketers go. It can be refused outright, granted for part of a tournament, or made conditional on availability for a specific series.

Boards use it very differently, and the pattern is predictable from their market size. A board with a large domestic broadcast market can afford to refuse, because it pays its players enough that refusal does not push them out of the system. A board with a small one cannot, because refusal invites a player to give up his central contract entirely and go freelance, at which point the board loses him for everything rather than for six weeks.

1. 1Both leagues make an offer for overlapping datesThe player cannot accept both. He can accept part of each if the two tournaments will register a partial contract, which most now will.
2. 2The player's agent checks the international scheduleAny series inside the window is a hard obstacle if the player holds a central contract, and a soft one if he does not.
3. 3An NOC is requested from the home boardThe board decides in its own interest. A large-market board can refuse without losing the player. A small-market board risks losing him permanently and usually grants it.
4. 4The board attaches conditionsCommon outcomes are a partial NOC covering the first half of a tournament only, or approval conditional on returning for a named series.
5. 5The leagues negotiate a split or one of them loses outA franchise that signed the player for a full season may accept a partial deal and sign a replacement for the remainder, or may release him and use the slot elsewhere.
6. 6The player absorbs the residual riskIf the international series is cancelled or he is not selected, the weeks he protected are simply lost. There is no compensation mechanism for this anywhere in the sport.

There is no governing body in this process. Every step is a bilateral negotiation, which is why outcomes differ so widely between players of similar standing.

There is one more unresolved piece. When a franchise signs a player developed at another board's expense, the board receives nothing. Transfer-style payments and revenue-sharing directed to a player's home union have both been proposed and neither has been adopted at scale. It is the single largest open question in the economics of the sport, and it falls hardest on exactly the boards least able to absorb it.

What it has done to Test cricket, honestly

The effects are uneven and the honest answer depends on which country you are asking about.

For boards with the largest domestic markets, franchise cricket is additive. India, England and Australia can pay their leading players enough centrally that turning down a league contract is a rational choice, and all three restrict overseas participation in some form. India's men's players do not appear in foreign leagues at all, which has shaped the entire global market.

For boards with small domestic markets, it is a competitor. West Indies has lived with this longest and most painfully: for two decades its selectors have picked from a pool that is partly unavailable, and the region's players have generally made the entirely reasonable choice to take guaranteed money over intermittent selection. South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh face versions of the same problem. Sending an under-strength Test side on tour because a league window clashes with it stopped being a scandal and became a scheduling assumption.

The pressure falls on the middle of the Test calendar rather than on the top of it. The Ashes and India's biggest series are protected absolutely, because they generate enough revenue to defend their own weeks. Everything else is negotiable, and two-Test series have become the default for most pairings, which weakens the thing that makes Test cricket distinctive: a contest long enough for a series to turn. The World Test Championship was designed partly to give those matches a reason to exist, and it has helped, without changing the underlying scarcity of weeks.

Now the other side, which deserves stating properly rather than as a concession.

Franchise cricket has professionalised players from countries whose boards could never have afforded to, and it has given Afghan, Irish, Nepali, Namibian and American cricketers a route into the top level that no national pathway offered them. It has raised the technical standard of the short game everywhere, and several of those techniques have travelled back into the longer formats. It has funded women's professionalism at a speed no governing body was going to fund it unprompted. It keeps hundreds of cricketers in the sport who would otherwise have left it for a job that pays reliably.

The circuit is not simply a drain on the international game. It is a parallel economy that the international game now depends on and does not control, and those are two different criticisms that get collapsed into one.

The economics: it is all broadcast money

Strip away the branding and a T20 league is a mechanism for converting six weeks of scheduled inventory into a broadcast contract. Ticketing, sponsorship and merchandise matter at the margins. The central media deal is the basis of the whole structure, and every other revenue line is sized relative to it.

That has a specific consequence: a league's viability is set by the size of the market its broadcaster can sell into, not by the quality of its cricket. This is why a competition with a modest playing standard in a large market is a stronger business than an excellent competition in a small one, and it is why the most reliable predictor of a new league's survival is whether it has a captive domestic broadcast audience or an owner who can bundle it into an existing rights package.

What happens when a league's rights value falls is worth spelling out, because it is the most common way these competitions die. The central pot shrinks. The salary cap has to come down, or the league has to run a deficit. Lower salaries mean the better overseas players go elsewhere, which lowers the quality of the product, which lowers the next rights valuation. Owners who bought in expecting growth stop funding losses. One or two teams go back to the board, the board cannot find replacement owners at the old price, and the competition either shrinks, restructures under new ownership or quietly does not take place next year.

That spiral runs fast, usually inside three seasons, because nothing in a franchise league is a fixed asset. There is no stadium to sell, no academy to run down, no supporter base with decades of habit behind it. The players are on short contracts and leave immediately. This is the mirror image of the property that made the model attractive in the first place: a competition that can be assembled in a year can be disassembled in one.

The comparison with a hard-capped closed league in another sport is instructive here. The revenue-share mechanism behind the NFL salary cap ties every club's ceiling to collective league income, which means the clubs rise and fall together and no team can be individually outspent into irrelevance. Cricket has caps at league level and nothing at circuit level, and the leagues themselves compete with one another. There is no shared pot and no floor.

The women's leagues moved faster, and for a reason

The expansion of the women's franchise circuit has been more rapid than the men's, from a much lower base, and the mechanism is worth understanding rather than simply noting.

The Women's Big Bash was the first women's franchise competition of real scale, and its effect was not primarily on Australian cricket. It was on everybody else's, because it offered a professional contract to overseas players from countries where full-time professionalism did not exist. A player could not make a living from her national board, but she could make one from a domestic season plus a WBBL contract. That single arrangement kept a generation of international cricketers in the sport.

The Hundred did something structurally similar in England by staging the women's competition alongside the men's, at the same grounds, on the same broadcast, which addressed the exposure problem that had defeated every previous attempt to build an audience. India's Women's Premier League then did for salaries in the women's game roughly what the IPL did in the men's, and the CPL and SA20 have added women's competitions of their own.

Growth was faster here for a plain reason: there was no incumbent structure to displace. The men's game had a century of county, state and provincial cricket occupying the calendar and the loyalty. The women's game had far less of either, so a new competition did not have to argue with anything. It could simply occupy the space. The fuller account of how the professional women's game was built is in our piece on the growth of women's cricket.

The vulnerability is the same one that affects the men's leagues, only sharper. These competitions are funded by broadcast deals that are still being established, and several are carried commercially by being bundled with a men's tournament. A women's league that depends on that bundle is a line item in someone else's negotiation.

Who actually controls the calendar

The honest answer is that nobody does, and that the question is usually asked as though somebody should.

The International Cricket Council administers a Future Tours Programme, which is a schedule of bilateral commitments agreed between boards, plus its own global events. It is not a calendar in the sense of an authority allocating weeks. It is a record of what boards have agreed among themselves, and it does not cover franchise leagues at all, because those are domestic competitions run by member boards or by private companies under their sanction.

So the calendar is set by four groups pulling in different directions. Boards want their own leagues protected and their own home internationals played in the best weeks. The ICC wants clear windows for global events. Multi-league owners want a sequence of blocks that suits a shared group of players. Broadcasters want cricket in the slots their audience watches, which is what pushed several tournaments into the same months in the first place.

A properly negotiated global calendar with fixed windows for international cricket and fixed windows for leagues is discussed at every governance meeting and never quite agreed, because agreeing it means at least one powerful board surrendering weeks it currently owns. Nobody has the authority to compel that and nobody has an incentive to volunteer.

What has emerged instead is a set of informal norms. Nothing significant is scheduled against the IPL. Certain marquee bilateral series are treated as untouchable. Global events get a nominal window that is respected imperfectly. These norms hold because breaking them is commercially stupid, not because any rule prevents it, which means they will hold exactly as long as the commercial logic behind them does.

How to tell whether a new T20 franchise league will survive

New competitions are announced constantly, with a launch event, a set of team names and a list of players who have signed non-binding agreements. Most of the announcements tell you nothing. Five questions do.

Which weeks does it actually have, and who else wants them? A league with a genuinely uncontested window has a structural advantage that no amount of investment can substitute for. A league squeezing into a fortnight already occupied by two established tournaments is bidding for the players nobody else wanted, and it will look like it.

Is there a domestic broadcast market, or is it selling to a diaspora? Both can work. Selling into a large home market is the stronger position, because the buyer needs the content. Selling to a diaspora audience in another country means competing for the same viewers as the leagues they already watch.

Who owns the teams, and what else do they own? An owner with an existing franchise elsewhere brings a commercial machine, a scouting operation and, most importantly, a reason to keep funding losses through the early seasons. An owner with no other cricket asset is making a standalone bet and will behave like it when the first bad year arrives.

Can it get NOCs? A league that has not established working relationships with the boards whose players it needs will announce signings that do not materialise. Watch the first squad list against the first team sheet.

Is there a playing base underneath it? A competition staffed almost entirely by imports can be good television immediately and still have no route to becoming a domestic sport. That is a legitimate business model, but it is a different one, and leagues that confuse the two tend to make promises about development they have no structure to keep.

Answer those five and you will be right about most new leagues more often than the press releases are. Answer none of them and you are guessing from the quality of the launch video.

The wider point is the one the calendar keeps making. Every new competition is a claim on a fixed number of weeks belonging to a finite group of players, and the sport has no mechanism for deciding whose claim is better. Until it has one, the leagues that survive will be the ones that took their weeks early and held them, which is a description of how the circuit was built and a fair prediction of how it will keep changing. More on the format and the competitions that use it is collected in the cricket archive.