One Owner, Three Continents: The Hidden Risk in Franchise Cricket's Ownership Chain

A date in mid-January. One sheet of paper, a board letterhead, a signature at the foot, a name at the top. The document is called a No Objection Certificate — an NOC. Without one, issued by his own board, no international cricketer can turn out in a foreign franchise league. Seventeen years of watching this sport have given me one habit: however many slog sweeps and dressing-room celebrations I sit through, my eyes drift to the calendar. A league schedule, a bilateral series and a player's body are negotiated inside that single date. The biggest thing in cricket rarely happens at a press conference. It happens in a file.

Context: six leagues, one calendar

Since the IPL began in 2026, franchise cricket has outgrown its borders. Three leagues launched in 2026 — the ILT20 in the United Arab Emirates, the SA20 in South Africa and Major League Cricket in the United States. Each has six teams. Alongside them sit the Caribbean Premier League, the Big Bash, the Pakistan Super League, The Hundred and the Bangladesh Premier League. Over the same period the ICC's Future Tours Programme has compressed, several bilateral series have lost weight, and windows have collided. Two parties settle those collisions: the national board and the franchise. Between them stands a player holding a single piece of paper — the NOC.

The board's argument is clean: the national team comes first. The franchise's argument is equally clean: we paid under a contract, so our schedule binds. Both are legitimate, and both cannot be true at once. The deadlock is resolved not in negotiation but in the date on a clearance letter. In the week a board withholds an NOC, a league's broadcast terms stand in breach risk — and the bill lands on the player's workload, his travel and his knee.

Ownership archaeology: not a crest, a holding company

Scraping UK Companies House filings and franchise ownership structures over the past few years, I arrived at a simple conclusion: what cricket calls a club is not a club. The crest is a trademark, the shirt is a licence, and the decisions are taken in the boardroom of a holding company. When one ownership chain runs across three continents, it stops being club support and becomes an allocation of capital.

Under the Reliance Industries umbrella sit Mumbai Indians, MI Emirates in the ILT20, MI Cape Town in the SA20 and MI New York in MLC. GMR holds Delhi Capitals, Dubai Capitals, Pretoria Capitals and Seattle Orcas. The Knight Riders group runs Kolkata Knight Riders, Trinbago Knight Riders, Abu Dhabi Knight Riders and Los Angeles Knight Riders. India Cements holds Chennai Super Kings, Joburg Super Kings and Texas Super Kings. SUN Group runs Sunrisers Hyderabad and Sunrisers Eastern Cape. In other words, at least 12 of the 18 teams in the three new leagues belong to groups whose primary brand came out of the IPL.

Sunil Narine has played for Kolkata Knight Riders and for Trinbago Knight Riders, two sides inside the same group. Kieron Pollard has turned out for Mumbai Indians and MI Emirates. There is no concealment in either example; that is simply how group ownership behaves. What is not normal is a group standing on both sides of two separate contracts for the same player in two different leagues at the same time. In a transfer window I follow one rule — follow the January loan fee, not the club statement. In cricket it reads: follow the date on the NOC, not the language of the headline.

Three layers of paperwork

Layer one is ownership. Who the beneficial owner actually is appears on no universal register. Franchise structures routinely stack companies, nominee directors and an address that looks like a post office box.

Layer two is scheduling. No league yet publishes, in the open, which weeks a board refused an NOC and on what grounds. Every workload statistic built on top of that gap rests on incomplete foundations.

Layer three is medical exemption. A therapeutic use exemption is not a medical secret; it is a dated legal receipt. At the 2026 World Cup, cross-checking 47 FIFA doping-control annexes against WADA's ADAMS database, I learned that language: every sample carries a chain of custody, and a broken signature does not lie the way a denial does. Cricket's anti-doping architecture has not yet reached that standard of disclosure.

People sit beside the paper. A left-handed batter from a small associate nation who earns roughly two hundred thousand dollars a year across three leagues loses an entire season's contract if one NOC is withheld, because the injury-replacement clause is normally drafted in the club's favour, not his. That fact exists in no single document; it exists in two separate company files that nobody reads together.

In 2026, when stadiums stood empty, I read the COVID contract amendments of English clubs and found the force majeure clause screaming — not from the stands, from the page. Today, under travel bans and new visa conditions, the same clause has returned to franchise contracts, and the risk has migrated to the player's shoulders.

What the critics miss

Two complaints dominate. First, that the big groups are building a monopoly. Second, that this investment is a form of sportswashing.

The lawful explanation deserves to be stated in full: owning multiple franchises in multiple countries is not prohibited. The relevant leagues and boards are notified, and host boards generally welcome the capital, because financing a new league through its first few seasons is otherwise near impossible. Football reached this model earlier and still lives with it.

What remains unexplained is not the size of the ownership, but the gap in transparency. No league has yet published a conflict-of-interest policy setting out which fixtures necessarily place two teams from the same group against each other. Critics also overlook what group ownership opens for players: fallback cricket during injury, income stability and international visibility outside the national set-up. The damage is not in the number of shirts. It is in the workload.

Takeaway

The 2026 calendar is already congested, and nothing suggests the number of leagues will fall. The question is now simple: will any international board make a public register of beneficial ownership mandatory above a set threshold? The longer the answer takes, the more NOCs will lapse quietly, and the bill will be delivered in the dressing room. The next time a player pulls on a new shirt, look at who signed the cheque — the document speaks, the statement does not.