The WBBL is being left behind in the Big Bash privatisation battle

Australia has become synonymous with excellence in women’s cricket over the last decade. They professionalised before any other country, and have dominated the international stage ever since. Their T20 World Cup win at Lord’s earlier this year was their seventh title, and their path to victory was pushed by a fusion of veteran greats and young talents – all of whom have been forged in the WBBL training ground.

The WBBL was the first women’s T20 franchise league, and when it launched in 2014 it changed women’s cricket forever. The first season of the Kia Super League took place in England 18 months later – the ECB’s first foray into a professional women’s domestic competition. As the impact of the WBBL showed through the superiority of Australia’s national side, and the ECB moved towards developing a women’s T20 franchise league in the late 2010s, calls grew for a women’s IPL in India. The WPL was launched in 2023, and all of it can all be traced back to the WBBL firing the starting gun.

However, as Cricket Australia seeks to secure their future with a one-off injection of potentially up to one billion Australian dollars, the WBBL is fighting for its future.

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The WBBL’s struggle stems from Cricket Australia’s plan to sell off its Big Bash franchises. Having seen the ECB sell off its shares in The Hundred last year, generating £945 million for English cricket, CA immediately sought to follow suit. They’ve engaged the Raine Group, who facilitated the sale of The Hundred franchises, to do a similar deal with the Big Bash.

Like The Hundred sale, however, CA’s plan has caused deep cracks within Australian Cricket. Some states are for private investment, while others are not. Some are for private investment in principle, but against CA’s self-determination model, which will see states given the choice over whether to sell up, and how much of their own shares to keep.

There’s also been opposition from the players, with the Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA) currently in talks with CA to agree a new Memorandum of Understanding. While private investment will likely see salaries boom for Big Bash players, the ACA and CA are currently at loggerheads over how much of the initial cash generated from the sale will go to players.

It’s messy, and mixed up in all of it is the status of the WBBL.

The key difference between the sale of The Hundred franchises and the sale of the BBL teams is over the alignment of the men’s and women’s competitions. The Hundred’s double-header model means that the teams and the competitions are more visually aligned, a key selling point for the franchises. While BBL and WBBL teams share names and kits, the competitions are played in separate windows, and at largely different venues. In short, while The Hundred has always been marketed as a single competition, the Big Bash has two distinctly separate identities.

That’s led to debate over what investors will actually be buying. Speaking on the Keepin it Cricket podcast, former Australia captain Alyssa Healy questioned whether the competitions should be split in the sale process. “The WBBL is the premier competition in the world,” she said. “Don’t lob it in with the Big Bash, that’s not fair.”

It’s understood that Cricket Australia initially considered selling the BBL and WBBL teams as separate franchises, but quickly dismissed the idea. While the BBL generates revenue, the WBBL operates at a loss, and the competition’s growth has stalled over the last few years in comparison to other women’s franchise leagues. However, when the WPL franchises were sold by the BCCI in 2023, they were bought for a combined £465 million, or around 880 million Australian dollars.

“We’ve pushed Cricket Australia to explore what it would be like if you had separate owners for the men’s and women’s teams of the same club, and what opportunities that could potentially unlock,” Holly Ferling, director of women’s cricket at the ACA, told Wisden Women’s Cricket Weekly podcast. “... If you look at Angel City FC, or some of the WNBA teams, and some of the opportunities that that’s unlocked, where you’ve got some super passionate investors that want to see women’s cricket and women’s sport grow, to me that’s the opportunity this is if we get the right partners involved.

“If we get the MoU done first, that’s the piece that could absolutely change the game for women’s cricket, and women’s sport, here in Australia. We’ve done such an amazing job for such a long time, but we’re starting to see some of these other sports like NRLW [Women’s rugby league], and AFLW [Women’s Australian Football] really start to leap ahead and do some amazing things. We want some really forward thinking when it comes to women’s cricket, because women’s cricket is crying out for it in this country.”

The debate over selling teams separately taps into how women’s sport is viewed as a whole, and how to strike a balance between standing on an equal platform with men’s sports, while retaining a distinct identity. Women’s sports has to, and in many cases does, have its own commercial value when given the right conditions. But aligning men’s and women’s competitions often significantly benefits that commercial value, even if it clashes with the vision for women’s sports having their own inherent value.

For Cricket Australia and the WBBL’s position at the point of sale, that will come as a partnership with the BBL.

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With team licenses set to be sold as one, how privatisation could help to grow the women’s game in Australia is the next question. As with the sale of The Hundred, getting the right investors, who see the WBBL as a growth opportunity rather than an added responsibility, will be key. Making sure there are protections in place for WBBL sides is one of the seven objectives that must be satisfied in order for players to pass any Memorandum of Understanding.

As part of that, the Big Bash could look significantly different in years to come. One major change floated as part of the process, is moving the WBBL and BBL into the same window, at least partially, to play the men’s and women’s competitions as double-headers. Initially, double-headers were part of the Big Bash calendar, but in an effort to give the WBBL its own platform, that format was phased out from the 2018-19 season.

However, for outside investors, cutting costs by running one competition window instead of two would likely be an attractive offer. Even without private investment, many think combining the windows again would be a key growth opportunity for the WBBL.

“I love the idea of the women’s competition being played before the men, or visa versa,” says Terry Svenson, CEO of Queensland Cricket. “It absolutely gives a whole of club feel. And as I talk to many of our players, it actually feels like you’re playing a grand final every game of the competition. So I’m a strong advocate of making sure the teams are playing before each other, whether that’s men before the women or women before the men, but I think it needs to be played on the same game.

“For broadcasters, it would allow them to reduce costs, and for the state associations and Cricket Australia it would allow a reduction of costs as well. That doesn’t necessarily have to go into savings, it could go into reinvesting in growing the game. It’s important to think differently, and we’ve got to invest and have bigger ambitions to make our women’s game, particularly the WBBL, bigger here in Australia.”

Svenson’s position is complicated, as Queensland have been outspoken opponents of Cricket Australia’s privatisation plan – although not inherently opposed to private investment at some stage.

“It’s not always about money,” he says. “But we do think there are other changes and tweaks and material changes we can make, and then if we go ahead and sell in a couple of years time, we’re extracting the most value for the competitions that we’re able to do.

“We think there are some things that can be done in the short term that we’ve been advocating for. Let’s think differently about the opportunity. It might be for the WBBL that we only play it on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. You can’t play it on a Tuesday night during school, when you’re not actually going to have fans out there.”

Scheduling has been a bone of contention among Australia women’s players for some time, but has been a prominent source of frustration ahead of the start of this year’s international season. Senior players such as Beth Mooney and Elysse Perry have voiced their concern that there is no women’s international cricket scheduled during the height of the Australian summer, in school holidays in December and January. Australia Women will play just nine matches of international cricket on home soil during the season. The WBBL will also be completed at the beginning of December, outside the prime-time window.

“The importance of scheduling is going to be so important moving forward, particularly for the women’s game,” says Ferling. “This is probably in and amongst all of the discussions around this venture [Big Bash sale], women’s cricket has, in my eyes, been lost a little bit. There’s such an opportunity here to do something amazing with the women’s game, but we haven’t had it discussed, and the schedule is a massive part of that.”

Establishing a single Big Bash window for the men’s and women’s team isn’t straightforward. The men’s window in peak summer clashes with the current window for the WPL, but there is scope for at least a partial crossover.

The other big win for the WBBL will likely be a significant increase to the salary cap. For this year’s competition, Cricket Australia scrapped the overseas draft in favour of direct signings, and got rid of the requirement for a minimum number of overseas players in a squad. The move was done with the intention to unlock higher salaries for the most highly demanded Australian players.

While CA will, at least in the short term, retain control over the salary cap after privatisation, a key aspect of the sale is to make the Big Bash competitive with the salaries on offer in other franchise leagues. Last year, Sophie Devine was in the highest paid Platinum bracket of WBBL players, and earned AUS$110,000 (around £58,00) for the season. In this year’s Hundred, the first season after the sale of the franchises, she was bought for £210,000 at auction.

“Our (the ACA’s) proposal has our players being paid – we’re not even just looking at domestically, but across different codes as well… making sure that they’re paid competitively,” says Ferling. “And more than anything, that our Australia women are being paid what their value is, and what they deserve.

“For so many of them, with the salary caps currently in place, they are doing the team thing and often taking under what a lot of internationals are, and yet they [Australia Women] are the best team in the world.”

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After a battling six months, Cricket Australia has forged ahead with its vision for privatisation. The next year will see the Melbourne Renegades become the first franchise sold, with others set to follow. However, there is currently no coherent plan for where that will leave WBBL teams, and what the future of the competition will look like. The danger is that the WBBL will become an addition to the BBL rather than retaining status in its own right.

Nevertheless, despite its image as a trailblazer in women’s cricket, and having arguably the highest quality domestic system in the world, the commercial growth of domestic competitions in Australia has stagnated.

“We’ve had moments,” says Ferling. “That’s what we’ve had in women’s cricket. We’ve had the T20 World Cup at the MCG, and then unfortunately had Covid hit, but then we never have the momentum, or the thing that kicks us on.”

Australia Women is Australia’s greatest female sporting success story, as one of the most dominant teams in any sport in history. But, in order to keep their hold over the international game, privatisation has to rejuvenate the WBBL, rather than keep it as an afterthought.

“This is something brand new that Australian cricket hasn’t done before,” says Ferling. “So how do we make sure we get it right the first time? And take our time to be able to get this right? Not only for the female players to have those protections in place, but also for the male players and the sport as a whole. This should make the sport go to the next level in this country… If we do it right.”

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