Pakistan's Regional Cricket Reforms Explained

Between 2019 and 2026 Pakistan changed the shape of its first-class competition three times. It went from a mixed field of regional and departmental sides, to six provincial teams and nothing else, back to a wide field of regions and departments, and then to a ten-team competition with a second division underneath it.

Each change was announced as the reform that would finally raise the standard. Each was accompanied by an argument that the previous system had been ruining Pakistani cricket. Both claims are worth examining rather than repeating, because the underlying problem has been the same throughout and none of the three structures has solved it.

This page explains what the regional reforms actually were, who decided them, what happened to the cricketers caught in the changes, and what the domestic season looks like at the time of writing.

The system that existed before 2019

Pakistan's first-class cricket had two kinds of team for most of its history, and they were not really in the same business.

Regional and city sides — Karachi, Lahore, Sialkot, Peshawar, Faisalabad, Multan and others — represented places and drew on local club cricket. They were where a boy from a city's club competition would be seen.

Departmental sides — Pakistan International Airlines, National Bank, Habib Bank, United Bank, Sui Northern Gas Pipelines and similar — represented employers. They did not represent a catchment at all. They were payrolls, and their function was to give a cricketer a job. A player on a departmental contract had a salary, a pension track and something to do after his career. The full history of that arrangement is set out in the guide to departmental cricket in Pakistan.

Both types competed in the same Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, which had been running since 1953-54, when it was created to help select the side for Pakistan's first tour of England. Over the decades the competition ran with as many as sixteen or eighteen teams across one or two divisions.

The two persistent complaints were straightforward. First, that with that many teams the standard of a typical match was low, so runs and wickets in it meant little. Second, that departmental sides distorted selection, because a good young cricketer's route was to be hired rather than to be picked for his city.

What the 2019 reform did

The restructuring implemented for the 2019-20 season was the most drastic change in the history of Pakistan's domestic game. It abolished both categories at once.

In their place came six teams, drawn on provincial lines:

Team	Territory
Sindh	Sindh province outside the Karachi city structure's old boundaries
Central Punjab	The Lahore-centred half of Punjab
Southern Punjab	Multan, Bahawalpur and the south
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa	Peshawar and the north-west
Balochistan	Quetta and the south-west
Northern	Islamabad, Rawalpindi and the northern districts

These six played the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, the fifty-over Pakistan Cup and the National T20 Cup, with matching second XI, under-19, under-16 and under-13 competitions beneath them. The stated logic was concentration: fewer teams meant the best players in one dressing room, higher-quality matches, and figures that a selector could trust. Age-group cricket was televised for the first time.

The first season ran from September to December 2019. Central Punjab won it, beating Northern by an innings and 16 runs in the final; Zafar Gohar was player of the tournament.

Who decided it

The reform is usually attributed to Imran Khan, and that is broadly fair. He had argued for a provincial, department-free domestic structure for decades, and as Prime Minister he was the board's patron with the power to appoint its chairman. Ehsan Mani chaired the PCB through the restructuring and it was formalised in a new constitution in 2019, which set up a tiered arrangement in which provincial associations took responsibility for grassroots cricket while the board supervised.

How the board is constituted and who actually holds which power is covered in the guide to PCB structure.

The cost nobody in favour of it disputed

Cutting from sixteen or eighteen first-class teams to six removed several hundred professional cricket contracts and, with the departments gone, the employment attached to them.

The board offered contracts to a defined number of players across the six sides and a further tier below. That was a far smaller number than the system had previously supported. Players in their late twenties and early thirties who had been employed by a bank or an airline for years, playing decent first-class cricket without ever being close to a Test cap, lost both the cricket and the job in the same announcement.

Defenders of the reform argued this was the point: that the old system was paying hundreds of people to play cricket of a standard that helped nobody, and that the money was better spent on fewer, better-paid professionals. Opponents argued that a country of Pakistan's size and income cannot treat a sporting job as a luxury, and that removing the safety net would deter families from letting a talented boy try. Neither argument is silly, and the disagreement was never really about cricket quality.

The reversal

In January 2023 the PCB reversed the policy, restoring both departmental and regional cricket and describing the previous four seasons as a mistake.

The formal justification was employment and participation. The political context was that the board's leadership had changed with the government, which is a recurring feature of Pakistani cricket administration rather than an aberration: Zaka Ashraf chaired a management committee from mid-2023 into early 2024, and Mohsin Naqvi became chairman in February 2024.

What the reversal produced immediately was a very large competition again. By the 2024-25 season the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy was back up to eighteen teams, which meant the standard-of-play complaint returned exactly as it had been in 2018.

The current structure

For 2025-26 the board took a third approach, which is arguably the most conventional and is the first of the three to be built on promotion rather than on abolition.

• The Quaid-e-Azam Trophy was cut from eighteen teams to ten, played as a single round-robin with a final — 46 four-day matches across five venues.
• The Hanif Mohammad Trophy sits beneath it as a second tier and functions as a qualifying competition.
• Six teams were retained on the previous season's finishing positions: Abbottabad, Bahawalpur, Islamabad, Lahore Whites, Peshawar and Sialkot.
• Four earned their places through the Hanif Mohammad Trophy: Faisalabad, FATA, Karachi Blues and Multan.

That last point is the substantive change. Under both earlier systems a team's presence in the top competition was an administrative fact. It is now, at least in principle, a sporting one. Karachi Blues — historically the most successful side in the competition's history — qualified through the second tier rather than being handed a place.

The competition's full format history and honours are set out in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy guide, with the limited-overs equivalents in the Pakistan Cup guide and the National T20 Cup guide.

How a season fits together

The structural argument is easier to follow if you know what the calendar it has to fit into looks like.

A Pakistani domestic season has to accommodate a first-class competition of four-day matches, a fifty-over tournament, a national Twenty20 tournament, a full set of age-group competitions, a women's programme, and a franchise league window for the Pakistan Super League, all around a national team schedule that has grown considerably since international cricket returned to the country.

The 2025-26 Quaid-e-Azam Trophy alone is 46 four-day matches spread across five venues. Add the second-tier Hanif Mohammad Trophy beneath it and the limited-overs competitions alongside it, and the season is close to full before a single age-group fixture is scheduled. This is why the number of teams keeps being cut: adding matches is not available as an option, so the only lever an administrator can pull to raise the average quality of a fixture is to remove the weaker sides.

It also explains the recurring criticism that Pakistan's first-class cricket is played too quickly and at the wrong times of year, on pitches prepared under time pressure at a small number of grounds. A ten-team competition concentrated on five venues means a great deal of cricket on a limited number of squares, which affects how the surfaces behave by the back end of a season. That is a curation problem rather than a structural one, and no version of the reforms has addressed it directly.

What the three attempts have in common

Read together, the 2019 reform, the 2023 reversal and the 2025-26 restructure share three features.

They were all imposed from the top. None emerged from the regions. Each followed a change in who controlled the board, and each was presented as correcting its predecessor rather than adjusting it. A domestic structure that changes with the government cannot accumulate the institutional memory that a competition needs.

They all targeted the number of teams. Sixteen was too many, then six was too few, then eighteen was too many again, now ten. The number of teams is the easiest thing for an administrator to change and among the least important variables in whether a first-class competition develops Test cricketers. Pitch preparation, the length of the season, the quality of the balls used, the standard of umpiring and whether internationals play any of it all matter more.

They left the employment question unresolved. Departments are back, which means the underlying arrangement — a professional cricketer's livelihood depending on a corporate payroll rather than on cricket revenue — is back too. A properly funded domestic professional game would make the question moot. Pakistan's board revenue is dominated by international fixtures and by the Pakistan Super League, and neither of those pays for a wide first-class base.

What has actually improved

It would be wrong to present the whole period as churn.

Age-group cricket was genuinely professionalised during the six-team era, with under-19, under-16 and under-13 competitions structured and, in part, televised. That infrastructure survived the reversal and is described in the guide to the under-19 pathway in Pakistan.

Women's domestic cricket has expanded on a regional model in the same period and is now a paid structure rather than a nominal one, as set out in the guide to women's domestic cricket in Pakistan.

And the provincial associations created in 2019 did not disappear when the first-class teams did. Sindh, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan associations retain grassroots responsibilities under the constitutional arrangement, which is a change from the pre-2019 position where the board dealt directly with city bodies.

Common misunderstandings

"The reforms abolished Karachi and Lahore cricket." They abolished those sides in first-class competition for four seasons. The city associations and their club cricket continued throughout, which is why the informal game feeding them — described in the guide to street cricket culture in Pakistan — was unaffected.

"Six teams was an Australian model." It resembled Australia's six-state structure superficially. The difference is that Australian states have run their own cricket for well over a century with their own revenue; Pakistan's six provincial teams were created by administrative instruction in one off-season.

"The reversal proves the reform failed." It proves the reform lost political support. Four seasons is too short to judge whether concentrating first-class cricket produces better Test batters, and the reversal removed the possibility of finding out.

The longer arc of the national side these systems feed is covered in the history of Pakistan cricket, and the rest of the domestic and international game sits on the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Sources and method

This page rests on PCB constitutional and competition documentation, published Quaid-e-Azam Trophy and Hanif Mohammad Trophy team lists and formats for the seasons named, PCB announcements of the 2019 restructuring and of the January 2023 reversal, and the board's published record of chairmen and their terms. Team and match counts are given as published for the stated seasons and will change as the board revises the structure again. Where the effect of a reform on player numbers or standard is contested, both positions are described rather than adjudicated. Nothing here is computed by this site.