Women's Premier League Guide: Teams, Auction, Format

For a decade and a half, the answer to why India had no franchise league for women was some version of "the market is not ready". Then the board sold five franchise slots in a single afternoon for a sum in the thousands of crores, before a ball had been bowled, before anyone knew whether the television audience existed, and the question stopped being asked.

The Women's Premier League launched in 2023. It is short, it is compressed into a few weeks, and it has already done more to change the economics of women's cricket in the country than the previous twenty years of domestic restructuring combined.

What came before

The board took over the administration of women's cricket in 2006, when the separate Women's Cricket Association of India was merged into it. That gave the national side central funding and the domestic structure a proper home, and the governance arrangements are covered in the guide to BCCI structure.

What it did not immediately give was a professional pathway. The domestic women's calendar ran on inter-state lines, with limited-overs and T20 competitions and an age-group structure beneath, but the number of players earning a living from cricket was small.

The T20 Challenge

From 2018 the board ran a short exhibition event alongside the men's playoffs, called the Women's T20 Challenge. It began with a single match, grew to three teams playing a handful of games, and served mainly as a proof of concept. It was never a league. Nobody involved pretended otherwise.

Meanwhile the competitive gap was widening in a very visible direction. Australia's Women's Big Bash League had been running since 2015-16, paying professional salaries and building a domestic audience, and England had launched a women's competition alongside the men's. Australian players were arriving at international tournaments having played a full professional season. Indian players were not. The details of the Australian model are set out in the guide to the Women's Big Bash League, and the men's competition it sits beside is covered under the Big Bash League.

The five franchises

Franchise rights were sold at auction ahead of the first season. Five slots were offered and five were bought, by a mixture of existing IPL owners and new entrants. The Ahmedabad slot drew the highest bid.

Franchise	Home city	Ownership background
Mumbai Indians	Mumbai	Same ownership group as the IPL franchise
Delhi Capitals	Delhi	Shares ownership with the IPL franchise
Royal Challengers Bengaluru	Bengaluru	Shares ownership with the IPL franchise
Gujarat Giants	Ahmedabad	Adani group, the highest bidder for a slot
UP Warriorz	Lucknow	Capri Global, a new entrant to Indian cricket

Three of the five carry names and identities directly borrowed from the men's competition, which was deliberate. A new league with no history borrows equity where it can find it, and the supporter bases attached to Mumbai Indians, Delhi Capitals and Royal Challengers Bengaluru transferred more readily than a set of invented names would have.

The two independent identities, in Ahmedabad and Lucknow, were placed in cities that had recently acquired men's franchises of their own, in Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants, which spread the league's geographic footprint beyond the four traditional metros.

The auction and squad rules

The player auction follows the same basic mechanism as the men's competition: a set purse per franchise, a base price per player, open bidding, and a squad that must be assembled within both a spending limit and a headcount. The mechanics of that format, including how bidding rounds and unsold players are handled, are explained in how the IPL auction works.

Two rules matter more here than in the men's league.

The overseas allocation

A WPL squad may contain a limited number of overseas players, and the playing eleven may field up to five of them, of whom one must come from an Associate nation rather than a Test-playing country. That last provision is unusual and quite deliberate: it guarantees a place in every match-day squad for a player from a developing cricket nation, which no men's league requires.

Squad size

WPL squads are small, in the mid to high teens rather than the mid twenties of the men's league. With a five-team competition and a short season, a smaller squad keeps a higher proportion of contracted players actually playing, which was one of the criticisms of the exhibition format that preceded it.

The first auction produced salary figures that were, by the standards of the domestic women's game anywhere in the world, transformative. Several Indian players earned more in one contract than they had in their careers to that point. Uncapped domestic players who had never been near a national squad were bought for sums that changed their circumstances outright. That, more than anything on the field, is what the league did in its first week.

The format

Five teams. Each plays the other four twice, home and away, for twenty league matches. The side that finishes top of the table goes straight to the final. The teams finishing second and third play an Eliminator, and the winner of that meets the table-toppers.

It is a cleaner structure than the men's competition uses, and the reward for topping the table is greater: one match, not two, and no second chance for the sides below. With only five teams and eight matches each, a single bad week is close to fatal.

The first season was played entirely in Mumbai, across two grounds, because a travelling schedule for a brand-new league is an unnecessary risk. Home-and-away hosting followed as the league established itself.

Feature	WPL	Men's IPL
Teams	Five	Ten
League matches per side	Eight	Fourteen
Total matches in a season	Twenty-two including playoffs	Well over seventy
Playoff structure	Top side direct to final, plus one Eliminator	Two qualifiers and an eliminator
Overseas players in the XI	Five, including one from an Associate nation	Four
Season length	A few weeks	About two months

The men's competition has now played more than a thousand matches across its seasons, and our own ball-by-ball dataset covers the lot. The women's league, by comparison, is measured in dozens. Any comparison of records between the two is meaningless for at least another decade.

Why it was created

Three arguments converged.

The first was competitive. India had reached finals of global tournaments without winning one, and the diagnosis offered repeatedly by players and coaches was depth: a national side capable of beating anyone on a given day, sitting on a domestic structure that produced too few match-ready professionals.

The second was commercial. The board had watched the women's game draw large audiences at international events and concluded that the demand existed. A World Cup final at a full ground is evidence that people will watch women's cricket. Whether they would watch a domestic league was the untested part, and the franchise auction transferred that risk to the buyers.

The third was structural. Australia had demonstrated over several seasons that a professional women's franchise league produces a stronger national team, and the results were not subtle. Copying a model that visibly works is not a difficult decision to defend.

What it changed

The most measurable change is money. A pool of contracted professional positions now exists that did not exist before, and it sits on top of the board's central contracts rather than replacing them. A player who is not in the national squad can still be a professional cricketer.

The second change is visibility. Domestic players who had been anonymous outside their state circuits became recognisable within a single season. That has a knock-on effect on sponsorship, on the willingness of families to let daughters pursue the sport seriously, and on participation numbers at age-group level.

The third is the coaching and support environment. A franchise assembles the same apparatus for a women's squad as for a men's one: strength and conditioning, analysts, physiotherapy, video. Players who had trained largely on their own between state matches spent weeks inside a full professional set-up.

The fourth is exposure to overseas players. An Indian teenager sharing a dressing room with the best players from Australia, England, South Africa and the West Indies learns things that cannot be taught in a camp. This is the same mechanism that made the men's Indian Premier League a development tool as well as a tournament, and it works identically here.

India's under-19 women winning a global title in the same window as the league's launch was not caused by the WPL, since those players were developed long before it existed. But the pipeline they are entering is a materially different one from the one their predecessors entered.

The honour board so far

Mumbai took the inaugural title in 2023. Royal Challengers Bengaluru won the following edition, which was that franchise's first senior trophy in any competition, men's or women's, and the reaction in Bengaluru said a good deal about how quickly supporters had adopted the women's side as their own.

The honour board is short by design. A league that has played a handful of seasons does not yet have dynasties, and treating early results as evidence of anything structural would be premature.

The open questions

Four of them, none with an obvious answer.

Expansion

Five teams is a small league. Adding franchises requires enough players to fill the squads without diluting the standard, which is a genuine constraint rather than an excuse. The pool is growing, but it grows at the speed of the domestic structure beneath it.

Season length

A few weeks of cricket is not a professional season. The gap between the WPL and the rest of the calendar is where the argument about a longer domestic women's programme now sits.

Multi-day cricket

The women's domestic structure is built almost entirely on limited-overs formats. Test cricket for women is played rarely, and the pathway to it barely exists. A franchise T20 league does nothing to address this, and nobody claims it does.

Depth beyond the top eleven

With five squads, the number of professional contracts is still small relative to the number of registered players. The league raises the ceiling considerably. Raising the floor is a separate job, and it belongs to the state associations.

For the domestic structure the league sits on top of, see the Ranji Trophy guide, which covers the men's first-class competition and the calendar pressures that shape every Indian season. The grounds the league is played at are described in India's iconic cricket stadiums, career records are in the player index, and the rest of the Indian game is on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

This guide draws on the BCCI's published tournament regulations and playing conditions for the Women's Premier League, board announcements covering the franchise sale and auction rules, and the documented history of the Women's Cricket Association of India merger and the Women's T20 Challenge that preceded the league. Comparative figures for the men's competition, including season match totals, are computed from our own ball-by-ball IPL dataset. Franchise valuations and salary figures are described qualitatively because the published numbers vary by source and by cycle. This site is independent and is not affiliated with the BCCI or with any franchise.