Bangladesh Premier League Guide: BPL Format and Teams

Every franchise league has a founding promise. Permanent city teams, loyal supporters, a competition that becomes part of the sporting calendar the way a football club becomes part of a neighbourhood. Most leagues fall short of it. This one has fallen short in a particular and instructive way: the cities have stayed, and almost nothing else has.

The Bangladesh Premier League is the country's franchise T20 competition, launched in 2012 and played, with one long interruption, most years since. It is watched by enormous domestic audiences, it pays local players more per week than any other cricket available to them, and it has never managed to keep the same set of owners in place for more than a few cycles.

What the league is

Seven or so city-branded teams, a short tournament of a few weeks, played almost entirely at three grounds. It is run by a governing council appointed by the national board, not by an independent company, which means the board is simultaneously the regulator, the landlord and the ultimate owner of the competition. The structure of the board is the necessary context for most of what follows.

Squads are assembled through a player draft rather than an auction. Local players are graded into categories with fixed fee bands, and teams pick in rotation. A limited number of overseas players can be signed directly outside the draft, which is where the money and the negotiation actually happen.

The first two seasons, and the case that stopped it

The inaugural season in 2012 was a commercial success beyond what anyone had forecast. Dhaka's franchise won it, won again the following year, and the league looked established.

Then came the corruption case. An investigation into the 2013 edition led to disciplinary proceedings under the anti-corruption code, and a tribunal found offences proven against players and team officials connected with that season. The former national captain Mohammad Ashraful admitted involvement and received a lengthy ban, later reduced on appeal. Sanctions were also imposed on a team official and on an overseas player. The competition did not take place at all the following year, and it returned only after the board restructured the ownership arrangements.

That episode is worth stating without decoration, because it is often either exaggerated into a general indictment or waved away. What is documented is this: offences were charged under the code, a tribunal heard them, findings were made, and bans followed. The league's governance was rebuilt afterwards, and no comparable case has been proven against it since.

The franchises, and why they keep changing

The city names recur. Comilla, Rangpur, Khulna, Barishal, Chattogram, Sylhet and Dhaka have all fielded teams across multiple seasons. The entities behind those names have not.

Franchise agreements have often been issued for short terms rather than the decade-long licences that underpin the Indian Premier League. An owner buys in for a season or two, brands the team, and may or may not be there next time. When the owner changes, the name usually changes with it, and the previous team's history goes with the previous owner. Dhaka's franchise alone has carried a long series of different identities. Rajshahi has appeared and disappeared. Comilla, the most consistently successful of the group and the one with the strongest claim to a continuous identity, has still gone through ownership changes.

For one edition around the start of the 2020s the board dispensed with private owners entirely and ran every team itself as a one-off tournament marking a national centenary. That it was possible to do this at all tells you how lightly the franchise identities were held.

The effect on supporters is predictable. It is hard to build a following for a team that may not exist, under that name, with those colours, the following January. The crowds come for the cricket and for the players, which is not the same thing as coming for the club.

The format

A double round-robin among the participating teams in most editions, followed by a playoff bracket of the kind used across most franchise leagues:

Stage	Who plays	What is at stake
Group stage	All teams, home and away in most seasons	Top four qualify
Qualifier 1	1st v 2nd	Winner goes straight to the final
Eliminator	3rd v 4th	Loser is out
Qualifier 2	Loser of Qualifier 1 v winner of Eliminator	Winner takes the second final place
Final	The two survivors	Title

The number of teams has fluctuated between six and eight across editions, and the group format has been adjusted accordingly. "Home and away" is partly notional: most matches are played at Mirpur regardless of which teams are involved, with a block of fixtures moved to Chattogram and, in some seasons, Sylhet. The character of those three grounds is set out in the grounds guide, and it matters more here than in most leagues, because a competition played largely on one surface produces a narrow tactical range.

Mirpur in particular rewards spin and cutters, punishes attempts to hit through the line, and produces totals that would be considered below par almost anywhere else. Sides built for it are built around slower balls and left-arm orthodox, for reasons the spin tradition guide explains.

The draft, and what it does to squads

Local players are placed into graded categories with fee bands attached, and teams select in rotation across a series of rounds. Some editions have allowed a small number of retentions before the draft opens; others have not. Overseas players sign directly, subject to a cap on how many can appear in any single eleven, and that allowance has moved between editions.

The system was designed to control costs and stop the wealthiest owners buying every international, and on its own terms it works. The side effect is that squads are torn up and rebuilt almost every year. A team that reaches a final has very little chance of keeping the group that took it there, which compounds the identity problem created by the ownership churn.

For a young local player the draft is, on balance, a good thing. It guarantees that every side carries a quota of domestic cricketers rather than a handful of names surrounded by imports, and it puts inexperienced players into competitive elevens rather than leaving them on the fringes.

How it compares with the IPL and PSL

	BPL	IPL	PSL
Franchise tenure	Often short-term, frequent ownership turnover	Long-term licences, stable ownership	Long-term licences, largely stable
Squad building	Player draft with fee bands	Auction with a purse	Player draft with fee categories
Home venues	Most matches at one ground	Genuine home grounds across the country	Home grounds, with periods played abroad
Overseas depth	Variable, constrained by the calendar	The deepest in the sport	Strong, with a clear identity
Player payment record	Repeated documented disputes	Regulated and generally reliable	Generally reliable
Domestic audience	Very large	Enormous	Very large

The comparison flatters nobody, but the honest reading is that the league's weakness is not the standard of cricket. It is the absence of the two things that make a franchise competition an institution: continuity of ownership and a real home ground.

The Big Bash is a useful third reference point, because it solved the identity problem differently again, with league-owned clubs tied to specific stadiums and a stable brand set from the beginning.

Payments, and what is on record

Disputes over unpaid fees have recurred throughout the competition's history. Players, coaching staff and support staff have publicly pursued outstanding money from franchises, and the board has at times intervened, withheld guarantees or removed owners. This is documented and repeated rather than isolated, and it is the single most damaging thing about the league's reputation among overseas professionals.

The board's mechanism for handling it is the bank guarantee lodged by each franchise, which can be drawn on to settle outstanding player payments. That the mechanism exists is an admission that the problem is expected.

Where it sits in the calendar

The league occupies a window in the northern winter, typically in the weeks either side of the turn of the year. That window is now crowded. Several other T20 leagues run at or near the same time, and the deepest pools of available overseas talent are contracted elsewhere. The result is a competition that gets a genuine but uneven share of the international market: some outstanding signings, a good many journeymen, and a fair number of late replacements.

For local players, the calendar problem runs the other way. The tournament sits between the first-class season and the Dhaka club league, and a busy international with a national contract may play across all three in a compressed period.

What it has given the national side

The clearest benefit is exposure. A twenty-two-year-old from a divisional side who has never left the country finds himself in a dressing room with two or three experienced international cricketers and has to bowl at them in the nets and then in a match. That is an education no domestic competition here can otherwise provide.

The competition has also been a reliable route to overseas contracts. Shakib Al Hasan built the longest and most productive IPL career of any player from this country; our figures, computed from ball-by-ball data, credit him with 793 runs from 52 IPL innings at an average of 19.82 and a strike rate of 124.49, alongside 47 wickets in 50 matches at an economy rate of 7.18. Most of that came at Kolkata Knight Riders, where he was a genuine first-choice all-rounder rather than an occasional pick. Mustafizur Rahman has moved between several IPL franchises over the years on the strength of a cutter that was developed on exactly the sort of slow surface the league is played on.

Whether the tournament has produced better T20 cricketers overall is harder to argue. A competition played mostly on low, gripping pitches teaches a set of skills that travel poorly to flatter conditions, and the national T20 record away from home reflects that. The wider version of this argument, applied to Test cricket, is the subject of the guide to home advantage.

Following it

Matches are broadcast domestically and streamed abroad through arrangements that change from edition to edition. Full scorecards are published and archived. Squad lists are best checked at the draft rather than assumed from the previous year, because turnover in both playing groups and team names is high.

Career records for the local players who have made a name in the competition are in the player index, the longer national story is in the history of cricket here, and the rest of the domestic game is collected on the cricket in Bangladesh hub.

Sources and method

Built from the competition's published playing conditions and governing council regulations, the published tribunal decision and sanctions in the 2013 corruption case, the board's franchise and draft documentation, and the full scorecard archive of the tournament. Franchise ownership, squad composition, prize money and broadcast arrangements change between editions and are described in general terms here rather than fixed to a season. The Indian Premier League figures quoted for individual players are computed by us from ball-by-ball data and are our own.