Australian cricket doesn't have a problem. But Cricket Australia is about to create one.
On Boxing Day, 94,199 walked through the turnstiles at the MCG. Cricket Australia’s response? Invite the IPL’s billionaires to buy a slice of the sporting summer.
By nine o’clock on Boxing Day, they were already streaming out of Flinders Street Station in their thousands. Kids with their faces smeared in zinc. Groups of friends in replica jerseys, cooler bags over their shoulders. Couples walking hand in hand along the banks of the Yarra, the river catching the early summer light. They turned left at the river, as Melburnians have done on the 26th of December for generations, and they walked towards the mighty Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG).
Some 94,199 fans eventually crammed themselves inside the vast concrete bowl for a day of frantic action between two flawed teams. It was the largest crowd ever assembled for a single day of Test cricket anywhere in the world — a record broken not at a World Cup final, but at an Ashes Test on a public holiday in the Australian summer. Nearly 35% of the people inside had never set foot in the ground before in their lives. They had come, on the most celebrated sporting day of the Australian calendar, to watch five-day cricket. (Although the game itself didn’t last two days.)
Across the country, two Big Bash League (BBL) matches were being played, in Sydney and in Perth. The total Boxing Day cricket attendance across all three venues was 162,408, but the Test match alone accounted for 94,199 of them.
Sit with that for a moment. While two T20 games were unfolding elsewhere, more than half of Australia’s entire national cricket attendance for the day was watching five-day cricket in Melbourne. Contrary to the global trend, Test cricket in Australia is not clinging on. It is not a format propped up by nostalgia and administrators who know no better. It is the thing Australians actually want. It is the main event. The meat in the sandwich, if you will.
Which makes what Cricket Australia is currently contemplating all the more baffling.
WHAT’S ON THE TABLE
Cricket Australia is seriously considering selling ownership stakes in BBL franchises to private investors, with IPL owners among the keenest buyers. A decision could come as early as mid-April. The Sydney Thunder and Melbourne Renegades are thought to be the franchises most likely to be sold outright. The Perth Scorchers, the BBL’s most successful club, may offer a 49% stake. Each franchise has been valued at around AUD 100 million.
The argument for doing this, put simply, is that the BBL is losing the financial arms race. Beth Mooney, Australia’s left-handed opening batter, is set to earn around $400,000 AUD in The Hundred — more than three times her WBBL salary. Tim David, the belligerent middle-order powerhouse, earned approximately $670,000 AUD from the same competition, more than his BBL contract and his Australian appearance fees combined. Overseas players are increasingly choosing the SA20 and ILT20 over Australia because the pay is better and the exposure to IPL franchise owners is greater. Private money, the case goes, is the only way to compete.
It all sounds pretty reasonable, yeah? It might even be right in a narrow, short-term, financial sense. But Australian cricket is not a narrow, short-term proposition, and the people making this argument seem to have forgotten what makes it distinct in the first place.
AUSTRALIA IS NOT INDIA. IT IS NOT SOUTH AFRICA
Here is something that gets lost in the global conversation about franchise cricket: Australia is genuinely different. Not better, necessarily, but different in a way that matters enormously to this debate.
In most cricket nations, the T20 league is the jewel in the crown. In India, obviously. The IPL has transformed the entire landscape of the sport. In South Africa, the SA20 is growing rapidly and is already proving its early doubters wrong. These are places where the T20 product has become, or is becoming, the primary driver of cricket’s popularity and revenue.
Australia is not one of those places. In Australia, Test cricket is still king. The Sheffield Shield still means something. The Boxing Day Test is not just a sporting event; it is a national ritual, woven into the fabric of the summer in a way that the BBL, for all its entertainment value, has never come close to replicating. Australians will happily queue around the block to watch their team in action. They will not do that for a BBL final.
This is not just sentiment. It is a commercial reality, too. The MCG’s record crowd on Boxing Day 2025 was not serendipitous; it was the expression of a deep, enduring cultural relationship between Australia and the Test game. Cricket Australia’s greatest asset is not the BBL. It is that relationship.
THE CAPTAIN SAID THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD
Pat Cummins, Australia’s Test captain, one of the best fast bowlers on the planet, and the captain of Sunrisers Hyderabad in the IPL, recently made an appearance on the Business of Sport podcast, where he laid bare the financial realities of cricket in 2026.
“Some of our guys are saying no to half-a-million pounds for 20 days’ work to go and play those two Test matches against Bangladesh,” he said. “It’s at a tension point. It has been for a while, but I think it’s only growing.”
Read that again. Australia’s own players — the ones who fill the MCG on Boxing Day — are already being offered extraordinary franchise money and choosing Test cricket instead. They are, for now, making a heart-over-head decision. But Cummins is not celebrating this. He is warning about it. The tension is growing, he says. The pull is getting stronger. And his own franchise’s owners, the Sunrisers group, have already bought into The Hundred, with Sunrisers Leeds. The same networks that employ Cummins, 32, in the IPL are now embedded in English cricket and eyeing Australian cricket, too. The circle is closing and closing fast.
Bringing IPL ownership into the BBL will not resolve that tension. It will intensify it. Once the investors who own the world’s most powerful T20 league also have a stake in Australia’s domestic T20 competition, the commercial logic that shapes those competitions starts to pull in one direction. And that direction is not the Sheffield Shield. And in turn, it’s not the Australian Test team, either.
WHAT HAPPENED IN ENGLAND — AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY TELLS US
The Hundred sold ownership stakes in all eight franchises in 2025, raising around £500 million. IPL franchise owners now control teams in Manchester, Leeds, London and Southampton. The Oval Invincibles — a name English cricket fans had barely had time to learn — became MI London thanks to a 49% acquisition by the spectacularly wealthy Ambani family. The Northern Superchargers became Sunrisers Leeds, while Manchester Originals are now the Manchester Super Giants, much to the chagrin of some and the amusement of many. Cricket Australia CEO Todd Greenberg has suggested this kind of awkward rebranding will not happen to the BBL because its franchises are more established. He may be right.
But the rebranding is almost a distraction from the more important point. England’s experience shows that once private money is in, the investor’s agenda follows — and the investor’s agenda is not the same as that of the ECB (or Cricket Australia). The counties that sold stakes in Hundred franchises received a share of the proceeds. What they did not receive was any guarantee that the new owners would prioritise county cricket, the red-ball game, or the development pathway that produces England Test players. That conversation is still ongoing. It will not be resolved quickly or easily. It may not be resolved at all.
Australia should look at England and ask not just whether The Hundred model has made that competition better, but what it has done to English cricket as a whole. The answer is complicated, and anyone claiming it has been unequivocally good is being intellectually dishonest.
NOBODY IS ASKING THE SHEFFIELD SHIELD QUESTION
The Sheffield Shield is not glamorous. It does not generate headlines. It does not even attract County-level crowds. But take it away — or hollow it out, or leave it financially stranded while private money floods into the T20 game — and Australian Test cricket starts to look dramatically different.
The state associations currently resisting full BBL privatisation — Cricket New South Wales and Queensland Cricket among them — are not doing so out of pure altruism. They have their own financial interests to protect. But those interests and the long-term health of Australian cricket happen to be aligned. The states fund the Sheffield Shield. They fund the pathway. They are the ones who identified Pat Cummins, Nathan Lyon and Marnus Labuschagne before they were household names. A BBL controlled by private investors has no obligation to continue funding that system.
IPL franchise owners are, for the most part, good at running T20 cricket operations. They are not in the business of funding red-ball cricket development in countries they do not govern. Why would they be? Their job is to build a valuable franchise, attract the best players, and generate returns. If that happens to coincide with Sheffield Shield cricket thriving, wonderful. But it will not be their priority. It will not even be on their radar.
CRICKET AUSTRALIA DOES NOT NEED TO DO THIS
Here is the thing that gets overlooked in all of this: Cricket Australia is not a financial pauper. It is the custodian of the most commercially successful Test cricket product in the world. The Boxing Day Test generated record crowds and record broadcast audiences. The Ashes series drew 35% first-time visitors to the MCG. Australian cricket has the platform, the audience and the cultural authority to resolve its BBL problems without surrendering governance to outside investors.
A higher salary cap, funded by Cricket Australia’s own revenues. A revised broadcasting deal that directs more money into the tournament. A smarter scheduling arrangement that reduces the overlap between the BBL and the Test summer, which the Boston Consulting Group report has already recommended. These are not fantasy solutions. They are the kinds of structural fixes that a board with confidence in its product could pursue without handing the keys to investors whose interests may not align with the game Cricket Australia is supposed to be protecting.
The BBL needs to be better. No question. The salary gap with rival leagues is real and it needs to close. But “the BBL needs more money” and “the BBL needs IPL owners” are not the same argument. Cricket Australia is in danger of treating them as if they are.
Ninety-four thousand people broke a world record on Boxing Day just by showing up to watch a Test match. They walked out of Flinders Street Station and along the Yarra in their thousands, as they have done for generations, and they filled the MCG. That is not a problem that needs fixing. It is an asset worth protecting.
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