The Women Shaping the Business of Cricket

The ICC Women's T20 World Cup has just wrapped up — the most successful edition in the tournament's history, and the latest marker of how far the women's game has come on the field. The progress off the field deserves the same spotlight. Behind cricket's fastest-growing era — franchise leagues multiplying, media rights breaking records, the game reaching further than it ever has — a great many of the decisions are being made by women. Far more than most people in the sport realise.

The cricexec Women's Power 50 is the first attempt to collectively name and celebrate them.

It is a cohort of the fifty most influential women in the business and governance of cricket — the owners, executives, administrators, broadcasters and commercial leaders shaping the game off the pitch. Some are among the most recognisable figures in the sport. Nita Ambani, who tops the inaugural list, sits at the centre of cricket's most valuable commercial ecosystem. Clare Connor has spent two decades moving the game forward, from the field to the highest tables of its governance. Preity Zinta and Juhi Chawla helped invent franchise ownership as we now know it.

But what struck us most in building this list was not the famous names. It was how many of the fifty are not widely known at all — and, in some cases, not even known to one another.

This is the nature of a global industry that remains, for all its international scale, deeply local. A general manager at a club in Sydney, operations leads at franchise leagues in South Africa and the Caribbean, a commercial chief in London — each highly influential in her own market, few of them visible across the others. The women running cricket's commercial and institutional machinery are spread across boards, leagues, clubs and broadcast booths on every continent, and much of their work happens out of the wider game's view.

Bringing them into one frame reveals something a single market never could: the sheer depth of women's leadership now embedded across the sport.

The rise of women into senior roles across the business and governance of cricket is recent — and it has accelerated markedly in just the last several years. Some of the women who were there near the beginning are still here, still building. Some of the earliest and most visible progress came in the commentary box — in England more than two decades ago, and in India when the IPL opened its commentary team to women in 2015 — and several of those same voices appear on this list today, their influence now extending well beyond the microphone.

That progression is the point, and it is worth celebrating. Real progress has been made, much of it hard-won, and the women on this list are the proof of it. Visibility is normalisation. Where barriers still stand in the way of women rising in cricket — and they do — some are simply the absence of examples: the quiet assumption that these are not roles women occupy, because they have not often been seen occupying them. The most direct answer is to show that they do, in numbers, at the highest levels, across the whole of the game.

This is not a declaration that the work is finished. It plainly is not. Until May of this year, the ICC Board — arguably the most powerful room in cricket — had gone two years with no women in it, the independent seat left empty since Indra Nooyi's departure in 2024. Ros Rivaz now holds it, and she is still the only one — and it is not the only room where the count remains too low.

Still: this list is a celebration of how far the game has come — and a way to make the trajectory visible, so that women's presence at the top of the sport comes to feel like what it should be: entirely unremarkable.