Cricket Australia Structure Explained: How the Game Runs

Australian cricket looks simple from the outside. One national team, six states, a Test summer and a Big Bash. The structure underneath is more layered than that, and understanding it explains a lot about why Australian teams have historically been hard to beat, and why the arguments about the game here tend to be arguments about money and calendar space rather than about talent.

Cricket Australia at the top

Cricket Australia is the national governing body. It was the Australian Cricket Board until 2003, and before that the Australian Board of Control, which tells you something about how the organisation used to see its job. It is based in Melbourne, and it is Australia's Full Member representative at the International Cricket Council.

CA's remit covers the national men's and women's teams, the international schedule played in Australia, the Big Bash League and the WBBL, the domestic first-class and one-day competitions, national selection, high performance, the community game and the commercial arrangements that pay for all of it. Broadcast rights are the dominant revenue source by a very wide margin, which is worth keeping in mind whenever a scheduling decision seems inexplicable.

For most of its history the board was made up of delegates sent by the state associations, each of them representing their state's interests. Governance reforms early in the 2010s replaced that arrangement with a smaller board of directors selected for their skills rather than their postcode. The change was contested at the time and it fundamentally altered the relationship between the centre and the states, moving Australian cricket from a federation of member associations towards something closer to a single national organisation with state delivery partners.

The six state associations

The states are the load-bearing walls. Each is a separate organisation with its own board, staff, venues, competitions and history.

Association	State	Shield side	Home base
Cricket New South Wales	New South Wales	New South Wales	Sydney Cricket Ground
Cricket Victoria	Victoria	Victoria	Melbourne Cricket Ground and Junction Oval
Queensland Cricket	Queensland	Queensland	The Gabba
South Australian Cricket Association	South Australia	South Australia	Adelaide Oval
Western Australian Cricket Association	Western Australia	Western Australia	WACA Ground and Perth Stadium
Cricket Tasmania	Tasmania	Tasmania	Bellerive Oval

Alongside them sit Cricket ACT and Northern Territory Cricket, which are members of the national structure and run their own community and representative programs without fielding a Sheffield Shield side. The ACT does field a team in the women's national one-day competition, and Canberra's Manuka Oval hosts international cricket, so the territories are not as peripheral as the Shield table suggests.

Each state association runs its premier club competition, its junior representative pathway, its second XI program, its academy, and its Shield and one-day sides. They also operate the major grounds in their capital cities, which is covered in more detail in our guide to Australian cricket grounds.

The competitions

There are five domestic competitions that matter, and they sit in a reasonably clear hierarchy.

The Sheffield Shield is the first-class competition, contested by the six states over four-day matches. It has run since 1892-93 and is the oldest and most important of the lot. New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia were the founding sides. Queensland joined in 1926-27, Western Australia in 1947-48 and Tasmania in 1977-78. New South Wales have won it more often than anybody else, by a distance. The season culminates in a final hosted by the team that finishes top of the table, and the host holds the significant advantage that a draw is enough for them. It is covered in depth in our Sheffield Shield guide.

The domestic one-day cup is the fifty-over competition for the same six states. It has carried a long series of sponsor names over the decades, which is why nobody can ever remember what it is currently called. Its status has fluctuated, and it has been squeezed hard by the expansion of Twenty20 cricket.

The Big Bash League is the men's city-based Twenty20 competition, contested by eight privately branded clubs rather than by the states.

The Women's Big Bash League uses the same eight clubs and runs in its own window earlier in the summer. It is a separate competition, explained in our WBBL guide.

The Women's National Cricket League is the fifty-over competition for the states, plus the ACT. It has run since the 1990s and remains the format where a young player's technique is properly examined.

Below those sit second XI cricket, which the states use to bridge the enormous gap between club and first-class standard, and the national under-age championships that feed the whole thing.

Grade cricket

Grade cricket, called premier cricket in most states, is the club competition in each capital city, and it is the foundation of the entire structure. Sydney's grade competition and Victorian Premier Cricket are the two largest and oldest, with equivalents in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart.

The format is unusual and it is the reason Australian players arrive at first-class level better prepared than most. First grade in Sydney or Melbourne is largely two-day cricket, played across consecutive Saturdays, with one-day matches interspersed. That means a first-grade batter has to bat for a long time against a genuine attack on a genuine pitch, then come back a week later and do it again. It teaches the thing that Twenty20 cannot teach, which is how to occupy the crease.

The standard is high. Grade sides regularly contain contracted state players who are not in the Shield XI that week, former internationals, and a good number of overseas professionals filling in an English winter. A young player making runs consistently in first grade is playing against people who have played first-class cricket. That is not the case in most countries.

Beyond the capitals, every state runs country and regional competitions, and a number of Australian internationals came through those rather than through the metropolitan grade system.

The pathway from club to Test

The route is well worn and reasonably predictable.

1. Junior club cricket, usually starting with a modified entry-level program run through schools and clubs, then age-group competitions on progressively larger grounds with progressively harder balls.
2. Representative age-group cricket, where a player is picked for a regional or state under-age side and appears at the national under-age championships. This is the first point at which national selectors and state academies see a player systematically.
3. Premier or grade cricket, moving through the lower grades into first grade. This is the sorting mechanism that does most of the work, and it is unforgiving.
4. State second XI cricket, where a contracted rookie is exposed to four-day cricket against other state academies and fringe players.
5. The Sheffield Shield, on a state contract. This is where a career actually begins.
6. Australia A and the high performance program, run through the National Cricket Centre in Brisbane, which handles specialist coaching, rehabilitation and touring squads for players on the edge of selection.
7. The Australian team, selected by the national selection panel, with the top group of players on annual Cricket Australia contracts supplemented by state contracts.

The step that fails most often is the fourth to fifth. There are six Shield sides and roughly a dozen batting positions in the country worth having. A player can dominate grade cricket for five seasons and never get a look, purely because the state's top six is settled and healthy.

Where the Big Bash sits

The BBL sits alongside this structure rather than inside it. It began in 2011-12, replacing an earlier state-based Twenty20 competition, and it swapped the six state teams for eight city-based clubs with their own brands and their own supporter bases. The Perth Scorchers have been the most successful, with five titles across the fourteen seasons in our dataset, ahead of the Sydney Sixers on three. The Melbourne Stars are the only club yet to win it in that period. Our BBL figures cover the men's competition from 2011-12 to 2024-25, 618 matches in total.

The clubs are not owned by the states, but the relationships are close, and the geography is not accidental. Perth draws from Western Australian cricket, Brisbane Heat from Queensland, Adelaide Strikers from South Australia, Hobart Hurricanes from Tasmania, and the two Sydney and two Melbourne clubs split the two largest player pools in the country between them.

The tension is structural and it has never been fully resolved. The BBL runs through the Australian summer at the same time as the Shield, which means the Shield loses many of its best players for a large chunk of the season. Shield cricket is where Test players are made; the BBL is where a substantial share of the revenue is made. Every scheduling compromise in Australian cricket is some version of that trade-off, and the same tension exists internationally wherever a domestic first-class competition shares a calendar with a franchise league such as the IPL.

Money and the players

Australian players are covered by a collective agreement negotiated between Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers' Association, the players' union. The distinguishing feature of the Australian model has long been revenue sharing: players receive an agreed percentage of the game's revenue rather than a fixed wage bill set by the board.

That principle produced the most serious industrial dispute in the sport's recent history in 2017, when the previous agreement expired and a large number of contracted players were briefly unemployed. It was resolved with revenue sharing intact, and it was extended to cover women's cricket, which was the single most consequential outcome of the whole affair.

The practical result today is a tiered system. A top-line international is on a Cricket Australia contract, a state contract and a BBL or WBBL deal, plus whatever overseas franchise cricket the schedule permits. A Shield-only player is on a state contract that is a real professional salary but not a large one. A first-grade player is paid match fees by their club and works for a living.

The base of the pyramid

Underneath everything is community cricket: several hundred thousand participants across junior entry programs, school competitions, club cricket at every grade, indoor cricket, and social formats designed to get people who will never play a two-day match onto a field. Cricket Australia and the states run these jointly, and participation numbers are the metric the whole organisation is judged on internally, more than any result on the field.

This is the part of the structure most people never think about and the part that determines everything twenty years out. A generation that plays the game in the backyard and at the local club produces Test cricketers. A generation that only watches it does not.

What the structure gets right and wrong

What it gets right is depth. Six Shield states, a demanding club competition, a second XI layer and a genuine high performance program means Australia rarely has to pick a player who has not been thoroughly examined. The players who reach the Test side have generally already faced the specific problem they are about to face, in front of a small crowd on a Tuesday. That shows up in results, and it is a large part of why the Ashes record and the broader Australian team records look the way they do.

What it gets wrong, or at least struggles with, is calendar. The domestic first-class competition is fragmented by the T20 season, the one-day cup has been reduced to an afterthought in some summers, and the international schedule has grown to the point where the best players are rarely available to their states at all. None of these are Australian problems specifically. They are just more visible here because the pathway was built when the calendar had space in it.

If you want to see the outputs of the system rather than the plumbing, our player records cover most of the modern professionals it has produced, and the Playing XI tool lets you build sides from them.