Guide
Women's Premier League cricket: format, auction, rules
A guide to Women's Premier League cricket: the five franchises, the auction and retention system, the purse arithmetic and the January window.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Guide18 min read
On a November evening in Delhi, five franchises rebuilt their squads almost from scratch, and by the time the room emptied the competitive shape of the next several seasons of Women's Premier League cricket had been settled by bidding rather than by coaching. That is an unusual way to build a sport. Most competitions are shaped slowly, by academies and selection panels and a decade of unglamorous development work. This one gets reshaped in a day, against a published budget, with every rival watching the same board, and almost every feature of the league follows from that single constraint.
The direct answer, before the detail. Five city franchises play a double round-robin, twenty league fixtures in all, after which the side finishing top goes straight to the final and the teams placed second and third contest an eliminator for the other place. The competition is run by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, holds its own window in January and February under the women's Future Tours Programme, and builds its squads through an auction with a fixed per-franchise purse, capped retentions and, from the most recent mega auction onwards, right-to-match cards. Squads are drawn from a pool of Indian and overseas players, with a cap on how many of each a side may hold and a separate cap on how many may take the field.
- 5Franchises in the competition
- 20League fixtures before the playoffs
- 15Auction purse per franchise, in crore rupees
- 5Maximum retentions before a mega auction
Published structural features of the league and its most recent mega auction cycle. Not performance figures.
What the BCCI actually sold in 2023, and to whom
The league did not grow out of an existing domestic competition. It was created as a property and sold, which matters, because it means the owners arrived with balance sheets rather than with a history in the women's game.
Seventeen entities entered the closed-bid process for five teams. The winning bids came to a combined figure of a little over four and a half thousand crore rupees. Ahmedabad went to Adani Sportsline for the largest of the five bids, at 1,289 crore. Mumbai went to Indiawin Sports, the ownership vehicle behind the Mumbai Indians, at 912.99 crore. Bengaluru went to the Royal Challengers group at 901 crore, Delhi to the JSW and GMR partnership that holds Delhi Capitals at 810 crore, and Lucknow to Capri Global at 757 crore.
Three of the five, then, are extensions of existing men's franchises, sharing a name, a badge and in most cases a home ground. Two are not. That split is worth holding onto, because it produces two different theories of the same competition running side by side. A franchise attached to a men's club can share staff, medical provision, analysts, sponsorship inventory and a supporter base that already exists. A standalone owner has to build all of it, and has correspondingly less reason to treat the women's side as an appendix.
Broadcast rights were sold separately, on a five-year term, for 951 crore rupees. A rights deal of that size, agreed before a ball had been bowled, is the single fact that explains why player payments in this competition sit where they do. The league did not have to prove an audience before it could pay professionals. It was capitalised first and asked to justify the outlay afterwards, which is the reverse of how almost every women's competition before it was funded.
The wider argument about how the women's game reached the point where a property like this could be sold at all is set out in the piece on why the women's game grew when it did, and it is a genuinely different subject from the mechanics below.
The auction is the league's central mechanism, not its launch event
Broadcasters treat auction day as entertainment. Structurally it is the moment the competition decides how equal it wants to be.
Every franchise walks in with the same purse. Nothing about a wealthy owner permits a larger one. So a squad is not assembled by spending power, it is assembled by allocation: a side that pays heavily for one match-winner has visibly less to spend on the seven or eight squad places it still has to fill, and every rival can see the balance ticking down in real time.
This produces a set of behaviours that are specific to auctions and do not appear in leagues built on private negotiation. Sides bid on players they do not intend to buy, to drain a rival's purse. Sides sit out early lots knowing that a shrinking pool late in the evening will leave them buying good cricketers cheaply. A player's price is set less by her ability in the abstract than by how many teams still need exactly her role at the moment her name is called. The general mechanics of bidding inside a cap are covered in the article on how a cricket auction is actually run, and the women's competition inherited them wholesale.
One consequence is worth stating plainly. This is the only place in women's cricket where a player's market value is discovered in public rather than assigned in private by an employer with no competitor. That is a structural fact about the labour market and not a sentimental one.
Retention rules, and the categories that constrain them
Before a mega auction, each franchise declares which players it is keeping. The current cycle allows five, and the five are not interchangeable.
A side may retain a maximum of three capped Indian players, a maximum of two overseas players and a maximum of two uncapped Indian players. Those ceilings interact: a franchise that wants to keep three capped Indians and two overseas cricketers has used its five slots and cannot protect an uncapped player at all. And a side choosing to fill all five slots must include at least one uncapped Indian among them.
That last clause is doing deliberate work. Left alone, every franchise would protect its most established names, and a young Indian player who had broken through would go back into the pool to be bid over. The rule forces each side to spend one of its scarcest protections on a player who has not yet played international cricket, which is a development subsidy written into an auction regulation.
The slab structure is the second constraint. Retentions are priced in descending order, so the first player a side keeps is charged at 3.5 crore, the second at 2.5, then 1.75, then 1, then 50 lakh. A franchise is free to agree a higher figure with a player than the slab provides, but the difference comes out of the auction purse on top of the slab. Protection is never free, and protecting your best player is the most expensive thing you can do before the auction has even started. The same design logic governs the retention system in the men's competition, where the slabs are larger but the incentive is identical.
The purse arithmetic, and why the number on screen is the real story
The published purse is 15 crore rupees per franchise. The number a side actually takes into the auction is almost never that.
Deductions run in a fixed schedule against the number of players retained. One retention costs 3.5 crore. Two costs 6 crore. Three costs 7.75, four costs 8.75, and the full five costs 9.25 crore, leaving 5.75 crore to build the remaining squad.
Read that schedule and the strategic tension appears immediately. The marginal cost of the fifth retention is only 50 lakh, which looks cheap. The marginal cost of the first is 3.5 crore, which is nearly a quarter of the purse for one cricketer. So the expensive decision is whether to retain at all, not how many to retain once you have started. A side that keeps one player has already surrendered a fifth of its buying power, and a side that keeps five has surrendered rather less than double that while protecting four extra cricketers.
Against this sits the second variable, which is squad size. A franchise must end the auction holding a squad in the mid-to-high teens, with a ceiling on how many of those may be overseas players. A side with 5.75 crore and eleven or twelve places to fill is shopping in a different market from a side with 11.5 crore and fourteen places. Neither position is obviously better. The first has certainty about its core and no ability to react to what happens in the room; the second has flexibility and no guarantee it will be able to use it.
Right to match, and what a recall card changes
The mega auction cycle introduced right-to-match cards to the women's competition for the first time. The card lets a franchise reclaim a player it previously held by matching the winning bid after the bidding has closed.
The allocation is inverse to retentions. A side that retains nobody carries five cards, four retentions leaves one card, and a side that retains the maximum five carries none at all. So the two protection mechanisms are two routes to the same total, and a franchise chooses between paying a known slab price now or an unknown market price later.
The trade is a genuine one. Retention fixes the cost in advance and removes all risk of losing the player. A right-to-match card costs nothing until it is used, but the price it eventually costs is set by a rival who has every incentive to push the bidding as high as it will safely go, knowing the card holder will have to match it. Cards are therefore valuable for players the market is likely to undervalue and dangerous for players everybody wants.
- Retention lists are filedEach franchise names up to five players it is keeping, inside the caps on capped Indians, overseas players and uncapped Indians, and files the list before the published deadline.
- Purse is reducedThe retention slab values, plus any excess agreed above a slab, are deducted from the 15 crore purse. The remaining figure is what the side can spend in the room.
- Right-to-match cards are allocatedCards are issued in inverse proportion to retentions, from five for a side that retained nobody down to none for a side that retained the full five.
- The auction runsRegistered players are called in sets. Bidding proceeds against the live purse balance, and a side whose purse is exhausted stops bidding regardless of who is still available.
- Cards are playedAfter the hammer falls on a former squad member, the previous franchise may match the winning bid and take the player back, spending a card and the full bid amount.
- Squad limits close the processA franchise must finish holding a squad within the permitted size range and inside the overseas ceiling, which constrains its bidding long before the last lot is called.
- Season is played in the windowThe completed squads enter the January and February window and play the double round-robin, the eliminator and the final.
The sequence of squad-building steps in a mega auction cycle, in the order they occur.
The playing eleven, and the Associate slot that makes five overseas possible
Squad rules and match-day rules are different rules, and the second is where the competition diverges most visibly from the men's game.
A franchise may name up to four overseas players in its eleven, as in most Indian franchise cricket. On top of that, one player from an Associate nation may be named without being counted as an overseas player for that match. The arithmetic result is an eleven containing five cricketers who are not Indian. Name two Associate players and the concession applies to only one of them, with the second counted normally.
The reasoning behind the clause is straightforward and is about supply rather than generosity. The number of high-quality women's cricketers who are neither Indian nor from the five or six strongest Full Member nations is small, and those players have historically had almost no route into a well-paid league. Creating a slot that costs a franchise nothing to fill produces a demand for them that would not otherwise exist. It is a targeted intervention, and it sits in the same family of decisions as the uncapped-Indian retention requirement: a competition using its own scarcity rules to develop the pool it draws from.
The competition has also not adopted the Impact Player substitution that operates in the men's league. A side names eleven and plays with eleven. Whatever one thinks of the substitution rule in the men's competition, its absence here means the balance of a women's franchise eleven is a real constraint rather than something that can be resolved mid-match, and all-rounders are priced accordingly on auction day.
Reviews are a third small divergence. The competition allows a set number of unsuccessful reviews per innings and, unusually, extends the review to wide and no-ball calls, which the standard international protocol does not. That is a competition-level choice written into its own playing conditions rather than a change to the international review system.
Five teams, twenty matches, and the format that follows from both
A five-team double round-robin gives every side eight league matches. Twenty fixtures in total, then an eliminator between the second and third-placed teams, then a final in which the league leader is already waiting.
That playoff shape is a substantial reward for topping the table. A side finishing first has one match to lose and a rest period before it. A side finishing second has to win two matches in quick succession against opposition that has just had to do the same. Over an eight-match league phase, the difference between first and second is often a single result, and the format converts that single result into a materially different route to the trophy.
The eight-match league phase also creates a scheduling problem that a longer league does not have. There is no room for a slow start. A side that loses its first three has to win effectively all of the rest, and combinations of overseas availability, injury and travel that a fourteen-match league would absorb become decisive here. The condensed shape is a real competitive feature, not an administrative detail, and it is the same problem faced by every short franchise competition described in the survey of how the global franchise circuit fits together.
Why the window moved, and what a protected slot is worth
Under the women's Future Tours Programme for the 2025 to 2029 cycle, the competition holds a dedicated window in January and February, having previously sat later in the Indian season. Two other leagues received protected windows in the same allocation, one in the English summer and one in the Australian spring.
A protected window is the most valuable thing a franchise league can be given, and it is worth understanding why. Without one, a league competes for players against bilateral international cricket, against other leagues, and against domestic competitions in the players' home countries. Every overseas signing then carries a risk that the player's board will recall her, and the franchise has bought a squad place it cannot rely on. With one, national boards are expected to schedule around the window, and a franchise buying an Australian or English cricketer is buying availability rather than a probability.
The consequence for the auction is direct. A player who might miss half the season is worth less than one who will play all of it, and buyers price that risk in. Anything that reduces the risk raises the ceiling on what the best overseas players can command, which is the mechanism by which calendar decisions turn into wages.
What the money actually reaches, and what it does not
The salaries at the top of this competition are the highest in the women's game. That is the headline and it is true. The structure underneath it is more complicated, and the article on how pay in the women's game is actually structured covers the national contract layer in detail, so the point here is narrower.
An auction inside a cap produces a steep distribution by design. A handful of players take a large share of the 15 crore, and the remaining squad members are bought at or near their base prices. A short season compounds it: a competition that lasts a matter of weeks cannot be a whole year's income for a player at the bottom of a squad list, however well the league is funded. The competition is a very large payment to a small number of cricketers and a useful supplementary payment to the rest.
What it changes for everybody, though, is the existence of an alternative employer. A player whose only possible income was a national contract now has a second buyer, and every squad member has a public price attached to her name that a board cannot easily argue with in a contract negotiation. That effect reaches well beyond the players who are bought.
The expansion question, and the case on both sides
A sixth team has been discussed publicly and has not been confirmed. The arguments are worth setting out, because they are not obvious.
Expansion adds fixtures, and fixtures are the product being sold to a broadcaster. A six-team double round-robin gives thirty league matches instead of twenty, which is half as much inventory again and a longer season to sell. It also creates roughly twenty more professional playing contracts, which for a domestic system trying to widen its base is the single most useful thing the league can do.
Against that, a new franchise has to be stocked, and it can only be stocked from the existing pool. Five squads of fifteen to eighteen already absorb a large share of the Indian players ready for cricket at this level, and the overseas allocation is limited by the same rules that apply to everybody. A sixth side assembled from what is left would be visibly weaker, and a competition with one obviously outmatched team is a worse product than a competition with five closely matched ones. The honest position is that expansion is a question about the depth of the Indian domestic system rather than about the league's finances, and depth takes years to build.
How this compares with the other women's franchise leagues
Three competitions define the women's franchise year, and they solve the same problem differently.
The Australian league is the oldest of the three and grew inside an existing structure, sharing its identity and its calendar with the men's competition described in the guide to the Big Bash format. Longevity gave it depth of squad and a settled domestic player base, and it now competes for overseas players against two leagues with more money.
The English competition was designed from the start with both fixtures inside a single tournament identity, sharing branding, venues and production, and moved to an auction model for its women's teams with an enlarged salary pool. Its format rules are covered separately in the piece on how The Hundred is played.
The Indian competition is the shortest and the richest. Five teams, a protected window, a fixed purse, a public auction, and a broadcast deal signed before the first ball. It is not the most mature of the three, and on player development it has furthest to go, but it sets the price the other two now bid against.
Which roles a five-team auction prices highest
Any auction reveals what a competition is short of, because scarcity is exactly what bidding measures. Watch a women's franchise auction with that in mind and three shortages show up every time.
The first is the seam-bowling all-rounder who bats in the top six. A twenty-over side has to find four bowlers from outside its two or three specialists in almost every match, and a player who bowls a genuine set of overs and also holds a batting position solves two selection problems with one squad place. In a competition where the eleven is fixed for the whole match, that flexibility is worth more than it would be in a league with a substitution rule.
The second is the wrist spinner. Twenty-over cricket rewards a bowler who takes wickets in the middle overs rather than one who merely contains, and the leg spinner and the left-arm wrist spinner are the two types that most reliably do it. The supply of them is thin in every country, which is why their prices tend to run past what their overall records would suggest.
The third is the wicketkeeper who bats at the top of the order. A specialist keeper who bats at seven occupies a place that a side would rather give to a bowler, so the keeper who opens or bats at three is effectively giving her franchise a free squad slot. The reasoning is the same one that governs how a batting order is constructed, applied under a cap that makes every place expensive.
What is systematically underpriced is the finisher who has not yet had the chance to finish anything. Death-overs batting is judged on a small number of high-pressure innings, and a young player without those innings on her record has nothing for a bidder to price. Franchises that have done well out of the auction have usually done it by buying that profile cheaply and then giving it the overs it needed.
What the league sends back to the India side
A domestic competition is judged in the end by what it does for the national team, and this one has three transmission routes.
The first is exposure to a standard of bowling that domestic cricket in most countries cannot produce. An Indian batter in this competition faces the best fast bowlers and the best spinners from four or five other nations across a handful of weeks. Nothing in a national domestic season replicates that concentration, and the adjustment a player makes to it is the adjustment she will need at international level.
The second is dressing-room method. A young player sits alongside senior professionals from Australia, England, South Africa and the West Indies and observes how they prepare, how they recover, how they use an analyst and what they do on the days they are not playing. That knowledge transfers far faster by observation than by instruction, and it reaches players who would otherwise have to wait for a national call-up to encounter it.
The third is pressure at a scale the domestic game cannot manufacture. A full stadium and a live national broadcast produce a specific kind of nervousness, and a player who has already experienced it half a dozen times arrives at her international debut having solved a problem her predecessors had to solve on the day.
There is a cost against those three, and it should be stated. A short, high-profile twenty-over competition pulls attention and preparation time away from the longer domestic formats, and the skills the national side needs in fifty-over cricket and in the occasional Test are not the skills the league rewards. A board that lets the league become the whole domestic calendar will find the bill arriving a few years later, in exactly the formats the league does not cover.
Venues, crowds and why the tournament stays small
A twenty-two-match tournament played inside a few weeks is a logistics problem before it is a sporting one, and the early seasons were staged across a very small number of grounds, beginning with two venues in Mumbai.
Concentrating the fixtures has real advantages. Teams do not travel, so preparation time is preserved and injury risk from repeated flights disappears. Production costs fall, because one outside broadcast setup covers many matches. And a small number of grounds staging fixtures on consecutive days builds a habit in the local audience that a scattered tournament cannot.
The disadvantage is that a franchise named after a city that never plays there is not really a city franchise. Home advantage does not exist, home support cannot form, and the commercial value of a local identity stays theoretical. The competition has begun to spread its fixtures more widely as it has settled, and the direction of travel matters more than the current arrangement: a league that intends to sell city identities has to eventually let the cities host.
What to watch, if you want to judge whether it is working
Four things tell you more than the results do.
The auction floor, not the ceiling. The record price is a headline. The interesting figure is what the fortieth player bought goes for, because that number tells you whether the demand runs deep or stops after the internationals.
The uncapped Indians who play. Every squad contains uncapped players. The question is how many of them get into the eleven, and whether they get into it in positions that matter rather than as a fielding substitute. A league that develops players has uncapped cricketers bowling in the last two overs.
The Associate slot. Whether franchises actually use the extra place, and who they use it on, is a direct measure of how much scouting work the competition is doing outside the obvious markets.
The margin of the league table. A five-team league that produces a settled hierarchy inside two seasons has a problem the auction was supposed to prevent. A cap and an auction are meant to pull sides towards each other, and if they are not doing so the constraint is somewhere else, most likely in the depth of the player pool rather than in the money.
Keep an eye on the retention lists more than the auction itself. By the time the bidding starts, most of the interesting decisions have already been filed. More on the competitions, formats and rules that surround it is collected on the cricket section, and the rest of the explainers sit on the blog.
Common questions
How many teams are in the Women's Premier League?
Five, based in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Lucknow, sold by the BCCI in a closed-bid process in 2023 that drew seventeen bidders. Three of the five are owned by groups that already held Indian Premier League franchises, and two came from outside that group. Expansion to a sixth side has been discussed publicly but has not been confirmed.
How does the WPL auction work?
Franchises bid against each other for players out of a fixed purse, so every rupee spent on one cricketer is a rupee unavailable for the rest of the squad. Before the auction each side declares its retentions, and the value of those retentions is deducted from the purse it takes into the room. A mega auction returns almost every player to the pool, while a smaller auction between mega cycles tops up squads around a larger retained core.
How many players can a WPL team retain?
Up to five, with category limits: no more than three capped Indians, no more than two overseas players and no more than two uncapped Indians. A side retaining the full five must include at least one uncapped Indian among them. Each retention slot carries a published price, and a franchise that pays a player more than the slab value has the excess taken off its auction purse as well.
Can WPL teams play five overseas players?
Yes, in a specific case. Four overseas players may be named in the eleven in the ordinary way, and one player from an Associate nation may also be named without being counted against that allowance, which produces an eleven with five non-Indian cricketers in it. If two Associate players are named, only one of them escapes the count.
When is the WPL played and how long is the season?
The competition holds a dedicated window in January and February under the women's Future Tours Programme for the 2025 to 2029 cycle, having previously been staged later in the Indian season. The tournament itself is short: a double round-robin among five sides produces twenty league fixtures, followed by an eliminator and a final.
What is the difference between the WPL and the men's IPL?
Scale, mainly. The men's competition has ten teams and a season several times longer, while the women's has five teams and a tournament that runs for a matter of weeks. The rules also diverge in two visible places: the WPL permits the extra Associate-nation slot in the eleven, and it has not adopted the Impact Player substitution used in the men's league.
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