Babar Azam’s first season in the Big Bash League came to an end on Thursday (January 22), a day out from Sydney Sixers’ do-or-die playoffs game against the Hobart Hurricanes.
The former Pakistan skipper’s returns for the season read 202 runs in 11 matches, averaging 22 with a strike rate of 103.1. Of the 350 times a player has scored 200-plus runs in a BBL campaign, this is the lowest strike rate.
To many, it is no surprise that Babar was among the slower scorers in the tournament. But often, he has done so while maintaining a solid average. This BBL season, neither the volume nor speed of runs made any real impact. He did score two half-centuries, but failed to cross 15 on eight occasions, and his other significant score of 47 was marred by another incident (more on that later).
Despite all this, his stint was an unqualified success.
Or at least, one must assume given the intent of the signing.
'Babar is guaranteed to put bums on seats'
The BBL has fallen by the wayside to an extent, in terms of its popularity outside Australia. The pre-emininent non-IPL T20 league in the early 2010s, it has since struggled to maintain that status in an increasingly crowded December-January window.
Ahead of this season, ESPN’s Danyal Rasool noted how the league’s Pakistani influx formed part of an attempt to raise its profile in the country. Babar was not the only one signed; Shaheen Afridi, Mohammad Rizwan and Shadab Khan also found takers, among others like Haris Rauf and Hasan Ali. When Shaheen was ruled out midway through the tournament, Brisbane Heat replaced him with a compatriot in the form of Zaman Khan.
When Babar’s signing was announced on June 13, 2025, Cricket Australia’s announcement dedicated four full paragraphs to his off-field draw:
“Babar is guaranteed to put bums on seats at the SCG and around the country for away games, such is his popularity among Australia's Pakistani diaspora.
“The batter boasts close to six million Instagram followers. His new Sixers teammate, Steve Smith, is the most popular current Australian cricketer with nearly four million. The pair could this summer form a mouth-watering opening combination.
“Babar's incredible reach was illustrated by a teaser video posted last night by the Sixers, who have since gained around 35,000 new followers.
“Pakistan fans, alerted to their national board publishing Babar's availability for the BBL on Tuesday, had put two and two together and flooded the Sixers' social media with comments of excitement at the global superstar's signing.”
The only mention of Babar’s cricket was a throwaway line referring to him as “one of T20 cricket's leading top-order batters,” before saying that formed only one aspect of his appeal. The Sydney Sixers statement was more on-field-focused in that regard.
That said, senior player Jordan Silk was unusually focused on Babar’s off-field impact, saying to SEN: “I'm expecting it's going to drag another 5- to 10,000 possible fans through the gates, and that's going to be awesome.
“We've played some big Sydney derbies and sort of played in front of 40,000 there, and it's electric so I expect it to be somewhat along those lines.
“(I’m) really looking forward to getting back to the SCG and seeing what sort of crowd that we can pull in now that we've got a pretty big draw card.”
Curiously, CA’s statement on the signing of another marquee overseas player in R Ashwin for the Sydney Thunder struck a different tone. Much of the focus, naturally, was on his achievements as an international cricketer, and clarification on the processes involved to bring him in.
Ashwin has 5.3 million Instagram followers, 11 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) and over 2 million subscribers across YouTube channels catering to Tamil and Hindi-speaking audiences. Seemingly, this did not warrant even a mention, the same way that Babar’s following did, when it could arguably have been more of a consideration for Ashwin.
How the Sydney Sixers went all-in on Babar
The Sixers, naturally, attempted to make the most of Babar’s popularity. They unveiled a dedicated stand of the Sydney Cricket Ground called 'Babaristan' nearly a month out from the season. The final league stage game for their women’s team was part of the club’s Community Round, at which fans could compete for a meet-and-greet with Babar when he arrived later in December.
The first Babaristan stand sold out eight days prior to the Sixers’ first home match against the Adelaide Strikers. 20,110 showed up for the game, the highest for the Sixers’ first home game of the season across the past four years – and not by a small margin.
In the 2022/23 season, with some Covid-19 hangover still around, the Sixers got 117,788 fans through the SCG turnstiles across six matches. That number was almost equalled in four games this season.
The average number of spectators per game was just over 19,500 that season. There was a spike the following year to almost 26,500. But from 2023/24 to 2024/25, average attendance rose by barely 0.5 per cent. This was despite the Sixers being defending champions, and going on to register a 6-2 win-loss record that year.
After Babar’s arrival, the rise was 9.3 per cent.
The Strikers game was the only one this year where SCG attendance was below 25,000. League matches against the Melbourne Stars and Hobart Hurricanes drew 25,589 and 30,090 fans respectively – the latter particularly impressive given the threat of rain.
In the last three years, only one game outside of playoff matches and games against local rivals Sydney Thunder had breached 25,000 spectators; a fixture against Perth Scorchers last January, which was Steve Smith’s first game for the club in a year, and in which he scored a stunning century.
Through all this, the expectant fans did not get to see much of Babar. In his first two outings at Sydney, he was dismissed after facing 10 and seven balls. The third was washed out after he had faced 14.
And in the fourth, he played 39 – but it was the ones he didn’t face that blew up.
In a now-viral incident, Steve Smith turned down an easy single to Babar in order to keep strike for the following over. That promptly yielded 32 runs, a BBL record. Babar played on the following over, and on his way off the field, slammed his bat into the boundary cushions.
Code Sports reported that after the incident, Babar felt “disrespected” and commentator Mark Waugh said he “refused to come out and shake hands. He was gone for the night.”
Sixers captain Moises Henriques brushed off the incident later on, admitting Babar was “quite upset”, but it was nothing more than a cultural misunderstanding, and that he and Smith had “kissed and made up”.
The incident earned the league solid mileage online. An Instagram clip of his reaction to being dismissed garnered 15.5 million views, and an X post of the same had 1.9 million, both streets ahead of the BBL’s normal levels of reach on social media. Mark Waugh saying he would drop Babar for the Sixers’s crunch game on Friday got nearly half a million views on X.
When the announcement came on Thursday that Babar would miss the rest of the season for national duty, it was accompanied by a statement from Sixers general manager Rachael Haynes.
She said Babar had made an outstanding contribution, followed by, “The level of fan engagement generated by Babar's passionate supporters has been exceptional, highlighted by the Babaristan stand at the SCG, which has been a memorable feature of our home matches this season.”
More than anything (or anyone) else, Babar was the BBL’s marketing tool for this year. One might say this was obvious, since he is not necessarily among the most effective T20 batters currently on the circuit. In fact, there were almost certainly others in Pakistan who might have been better choices as a T20 opener.
It remains to be seen how this squares with the potential privatisation of the league, which, if it happens will almost surely involve IPL and Indian investment – Pakistan’s players have been persona non grata as far as they are concerned.
In effect, it didn’t matter whether Babar did well with the bat or not, whether he helped the Sixers win games or not. That would only be a bonus. He put bums on seats; in that, the objective of his signing was complete, and he served the purpose of the BBL. It was never driven by the cricket.
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