Australia’s best cricketers may quit the home summer to play in the lucrative South African Twenty20 tournament in January 2028 unless they can be paid internationally competitive salaries of about $1 million each to take part in the Big Bash League.
A group of senior players including captain Pat Cummins will seriously consider asking Cricket Australia for no-objection certificates to play in the SA20 in 2028 if they cannot be assured of what they see as fair market value for their services, according to two sources with knowledge of confidential discussions.
This masthead can also reveal that Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc were approached to play in the Hundred competition this year for pre-auction signing fees of about $800,000 each. Doing so would have stopped them from playing in the Top End Test series against Bangladesh in August.
While the offers were again rejected, with Mitch Marsh, Tim David and Adam Zampa the most high-profile Australians to sign for the tournament this year, Cummins alluded to these market pressures in an interview aired earlier during the current Indian Premier League tournament.
Those offers, and the money currently being earned by the best players in the SA20, have priced the best Australian players at nearly $1 million each for a major franchise tournament outside India, a long way above the fees they have so far been able to attract in the BBL.
As a countermeasure to free up more cash for Australian BBL players, CA is seriously contemplating ripping up the overseas player draft, which has doled out more than $20 million to “platinum” and “gold” tier imports since 2022. Overseas players would then be signed directly.
CA declined to comment on the prospective South Africa offers, but CA’s head of cricket James Allsopp has made it clear which players are in demand.
“The two priorities, in my mind, are making sure multi-format players that drive a lot of commercial value, and also performance value for the team, are well looked after, and we can compete with those market forces, and then also our specialist white-ball players,” Allsopp said last week.
“They’re in pretty high demand.
“There’s a world now, where they can jump on the franchise circuit and make a really good living away from Australian cricket, or even away from our BBL, and that’s not going to be in the best interests of Australian cricket.”
This summer’s BBL will be severely affected by a concurrent Australian Test tour of India that runs from January to March, meaning the likes of Cummins, Starc, Travis Head and Alex Carey were always going to be unavailable following the home Tests against New Zealand.
But 2027-28 is supposed to be a season when the BBL is the centrepiece of the summer, given lower profile international tours by Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
While CA is currently ironing out the calendar for that summer, the intention is to play three Tests against Pakistan from mid-December to early January in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, before two Sri Lanka Tests are played later in February following the BBL.
That schedule would theoretically free up Cummins and company to play in the BBL, but the going rate for players overseas currently outstrips anything Australia have offered. Cummins, in particular, has not played in the BBL since 2019, though he remains loosely linked to the Sydney Thunder.
“Obviously a big Ashes series – all the main guys want to play that series,” Cummins had said on the Business of Sport podcast. “For example, during the Hundred this season we’ve got two Test matches against Bangladesh. All our guys that will play in that Test match have opted out of going to the Hundred auction, but that’s not going to be the case forever.
“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. I think it is a tension point. At the moment, our guys are so keen to play for Australia that they’re happy to forgo that, but I don’t think we can accept that that is going to be the case forever.”
Top End series clashing with overseas leagues was a tension point last year also, as numerous Australian players including Zampa and David were unable to take up offers in the Hundred because of white-ball games against South Africa.
CA’s recent offers of multi-year, multimillion dollar central contract extensions to Cummins and Head have turned heads across the system, with some Australian players unhappy about the dispersion of money down the contract list. Meanwhile, numerous Australian BBL players have been unhappy for some time about the money going to little-known overseas players via the draft.
It has all added up to a febrile atmosphere in the aftermath of Australian cricket’s failure to reach consensus on plans to sell stakes in all eight BBL clubs in time to have the new investors in place for 2027-28.
Former CA chief executive Malcolm Speed has pointed to the money going to overseas players ahead of better Australian players as one area of the BBL that needed to be rejigged sooner rather than later.
“There’s a premium for international players in the BBL – they get about $100,000 more than the top Australian players,” Speed told SEN on Wednesday. “Get rid of that. The Australians deserve to be paid as much as everyone else.”
CA and Cricket Victoria are set to meet on Thursday for further discussions of the state association’s eagerness to move ahead with selling off the Melbourne Renegades to private investors.
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Daniel Brettig is The Age’s chief cricket writer and the author of several books on cricket.Connect via X.From our partners
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