Women's Franchise Cricket: WPL, SA20 Women and How It Transformed the Game
The inaugural Women's Premier League in 2023, SA20 Women, and how franchise cricket has revolutionised professionalism and salaries in women's cricket.
The 2020s marked a watershed decade for women's cricket: the emergence of high-value franchise leagues transformed the sport's economics, visibility and talent pipeline in ways that decades of bilateral series had not managed. The Women's Premier League (WPL), launched by the BCCI in March 2023, and the SA20 Women competition in South Africa combined to create a new professional ecosystem that gave top women cricketers multi-year financial security for the first time.
The Women's Premier League: March 2023
The inaugural WPL season was held in March 2023 across Mumbai and Navi Mumbai. Five franchises — Mumbai Indians, Delhi Capitals, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Gujarat Giants and UP Warriorz — were sold to IPL franchise owners for a combined franchise fee of approximately ₹4,669 crore (around $570 million USD), signalling the BCCI's serious financial commitment to women's cricket. The player auction produced record prices: Australian all-rounder Nat Sciver-Brunt became the most expensive women's cricketer at auction at that time, sold to Mumbai Indians for ₹3.2 crore. The inaugural champion was Mumbai Indians (defeated Delhi Capitals in the final). The WPL was played at full-sized international venues in front of crowds that regularly exceeded 30,000.
SA20 Women and South African Franchise Cricket
South Africa's SA20 Men's league, launched in January 2023, was accompanied by a Women's Super League competition run under the same franchise umbrella, with all six SA20 franchises maintaining affiliated women's teams. The SA20 Women's Super League provided South African women cricketers — including Tasmyn Brits, Laura Wolvaardt and Shabnim Ismail — with competitive T20 cricket of genuine quality linked to the commercial infrastructure of the men's franchise system. Players like Brits, known for her aggressive wicketkeeping-batting combination, could develop T20 skills in a competitive franchise environment that had not previously existed for South African women.
How Franchise Cricket Transformed the Women's Game
Before the franchise era, most women's cricketers — even internationals — earned modest national contracts supplemented by part-time work or teaching. Franchise cricket changed this in four interconnected ways: financial security through multi-year contracts worth 20-50 times previous averages; access to elite coaching, conditioning and sports science resources built for IPL-level operations; global cross-pollination, with English, Australian, Indian, West Indian and South African players training and competing alongside each other regularly; and visibility through broadcast deals that put women's franchise cricket in front of hundreds of millions of viewers. The WBBL (Australia) pioneered many of these elements from 2015, and the WPL and SA20 Women accelerated the trend globally.
Frequently asked questions
Did the WPL actually increase earnings for the average women's cricketer, or did the money concentrate at the top?
The WPL's economic impact on women's cricket has been genuinely transformational at the top tier but more uneven further down the player pyramid — though even indirect effects have raised the floor for professional women's cricket globally. At the top: the auction system created a transparent market that valued star women cricketers in ways their national board contracts never had. When Smriti Mandhana sold for ₹3.4 crore and Nat Sciver-Brunt for ₹3.2 crore, those figures publicised the commercial value of women's cricket superstars in a way that made it harder for national boards to underpay similar talent. Australia's Cricket Australia and England's ECB responded to WPL economics by increasing central contract values for their top women's players, citing competitive market pressure. The middle tier: players selected in the WPL auction but not as marquee names still earned ₹20-50 lakh for a single month's cricket — equivalent to several years' domestic women's cricket income in most countries. The base price at WPL auctions (₹20 lakh) represented a meaningful income floor for players from nations where women's cricket had previously been semi-professional at best. The bottom: players outside the top 87 contracted across five franchises see limited direct benefit. Women's club and second-tier domestic cricket in most countries remains poorly funded, and franchise league spots are limited to internationals with T20 track records. Developmental players in associate nations or second-tier domestic setups have not yet seen significant trickle-down from WPL economics. Long-term optimism: the WPL's broadcast deal with Viacom18, guaranteed eyeballs, and BCCI backing mean the competition's value is likely to grow over successive seasons, expanding rosters and progressively including more players. Historical precedent from the men's IPL (which transformed Indian domestic cricket salaries over 5-7 years) suggests the WPL's full economic impact on women's cricket globally is still building.