When Kevin Pietersen suggested that The Hundred could evolve into the UK’s answer to the IPL, he probably did not anticipate the response that followed. Lalit Modi, the man who built the IPL from scratch, returned fire on X with a quote-tweet that was less a disagreement and more a systematic dismantling — six numbered reasons why the comparison, in his words, would not hold “in this lifetime.”
Modi’s six-point case against the comparison
The exchange began when Pietersen, responding to fan commentary about Modi’s earlier prediction that The Hundred would collapse, pushed back with confidence. “The Hundred won’t die in 3yrs, it’ll be a T20 comp within 3yrs (sic),” Pietersen wrote on X. He went further in a follow-up reply to a user, adding: “It’ll just be the UK’s version of the IPL. Format will change to T20.”
The Hundred won't die in 3yrs, it'll be a T20 comp within 3yrs.
— Kevin Pietersen🦏 (@KP24) April 18, 2026
Modi’s reply was immediate and expansive. “Not in this lifetime will ANY T20 tournament will be like the @IPL my friend. Better not to hype it up as such as you don’t have,” he wrote on X, before laying out his argument point by point:
Not in this lifetime will ANY T20 tournament will be like the @IPL my friend. Better not to hype it up as such as you don’t have
1. Cricket as a premier sports in uk. It’s football followed by rugby followed by racing followed by tennis followed by darts 🤣🤣😭
2. Nor the die… https://t.co/ACzUoiWvkj— Lalit Kumar Modi (@LalitKModi) April 18, 2026
“1. Cricket as a premier sports in uk. It’s football followed by rugby followed by racing followed by tennis followed by darts 🤣🤣😭 2. Nor the die hard fan base. 3. Nor the population to support it. 4. Nor the advertisers to back it. 5. Nor the Indian players. They will NEVER BE ALLOWED 6. The 18 counties will find it hard to come to an agreement. If they do an IPL format WHICH IS HOME AND AWAY. You don’t have the number of days to play it or crowds to support it.”
The structural argument was pointed: without Indian players, without a cricket-first sports culture, and without the advertiser base that underwrites the IPL’s economics, any T20 ambition in the UK hits a ceiling well before it approaches Indian franchise cricket’s scale. Modi did not leave the ceiling undefined either. “So better to see the reality and see it more like a South African T 20 league at best. That to if it’s the only short format in uk then the teams will break even or make a marginal profit. Keep in mind @ECB_cricket bread and butter will continue to be the bilateral games and you all should hope that is the case as short format requires all the above ingredients to get people to pay even pay a fraction of the 35 pounds per month for the football package,” he continued in the same post on X. On the question of subscriber numbers, he added: “How many subscribers does one think they are for sky cricket? Simple find that number and multiply what people will pay for it. Currently for 1 month. You will be lucky if that number is even a million. I am happy to corrected.”
Where the prediction began
Modi’s X rebuttal did not emerge in isolation. The foundation was laid on the Stick to Cricket podcast with Michael Vaughan, where he had made the original claim that drew Pietersen’s response. “It’ll die in three years. Completely die. It’ll be finished. It won’t be there. I guarantee it. In three to four years, it won’t exist. It’ll pump so much money in it that there will be no future. I’ll give you the simple reasoning: it’s in the month of August. Great window, that’s all you have. There’s no promotion or marketing behind it. Sky has no reason to promote it. There is no money coming into the game. At the end of the day, the people who bought the teams are expecting a return. The return comes from media rights and nothing else,” Modi said on the podcast.
The commercial mismatch Modi keeps returning to
The revenue model sits at the heart of Modi’s scepticism. The UK’s sports economy runs on subscription income, not advertising — and that distinction, he argued on the podcast, is precisely where The Hundred’s commercial logic breaks down. “Would you buy a Sky package just for The Hundred, for one month? The UK is not an advertisement-driven market. The UK market is the best in the world for subscription revenue. That is Sky Television’s model. Its model is subscriber-based,” he said, arguing that without a durable subscriber base, no league can build long-term commercial foundations.
The competition for that subscriber attention is fierce and growing. “Football is taking over the English market. If people have disposable income… and they have constraints on buying a Sky box, what are they buying? Packages. The first sell is football. Formula One and tennis are growing very fast…The young kids dictate what we’re going to watch… You can’t milk something that is not milkable, guys. I mean, you can’t go and milk a cow when you can’t milk the bloody thing. It’s running out of juice,” Modi said. Cricket’s window within that ecosystem is already narrow, and The Hundred does not expand it. “People fight for the cricket package, but only when the Ashes are on or when India comes to play. That’s spread over four or five months. You have a short window of one month to put The Hundred. You’re buying a cricket package, which is already diminishing,” he added.
The Hundred’s IPL links and what they do — and don’t — change
The irony is not lost on observers that The Hundred’s own ownership structure is increasingly intertwined with the IPL. Four of the competition’s eight franchises carry investment links to IPL owners — Manchester Super Giants, MI London, Southern Brave, and Sunrisers Leeds all feature in the upcoming edition. The tournament’s inaugural auction earlier this year produced its own headline moments, with James Coles becoming the most expensive signing after London Spirit secured him for GBP 390,000 (approx. US$ 526.5K), while Jordon Cox, the previous season’s MVP, joined Welsh Fire for GBP 300,000 (approx. US$ 405K).
That commercial activity suggests a competition with genuine investor appetite. But Modi’s argument is not that The Hundred lacks money — it is that the market it operates in cannot generate the returns that would justify IPL-scale ambitions. The subscription economics, the sport’s position in the cultural hierarchy, and the absence of Indian players are not problems that franchise investment alone can solve. Whether The Hundred’s evolution proves him right or wrong, the terms of that debate have now been set very publicly — and very precisely.
