Intro
Pakistani players signed up for the Nepal Premier League, including T20 captain Sahibzada Farhan, were told on the eve of the tournament that their clearance was on hold — some of them already in Kathmandu, some already cleared. People involved with the leagues put the figure the PCB wants at around $25,000 per player. Nothing has been confirmed in writing and the PCB has not commented publicly.
The reaction has largely been to call it a shakedown. The case for the board is stronger than that. Boards spend years and real money turning teenagers into players leagues want to pay, and then get handed a form to sign. The IPL has paid home boards a cut of overseas player fees for more than a decade. The difference is structural: the IPL pays a percentage, known before the auction. The reported PCB fee is flat and, by franchise accounts in both North America and Nepal, arrived after squads were set.
In the vlog below, cricexec founder and publisher Zee Zaidi makes the case that boards should be paid — and explains why the West Indies tried this in 2016 and failed.
Transcript
The Pakistan Cricket Board reportedly wants $25,000 for every player it lets play in a foreign league. A lot of people are calling that a shakedown. I think it’s one of the most rational things a cricket board has done in years. The real question is whether anyone can make it the rule.
Here’s why it’s back in the news. The Nepal Premier League has just started, and according to multiple reports, the Pakistani players signed up for it, including Pakistan’s T20 captain, Sahibzada Farhan, were told on the eve of the tournament that their clearance to play were on hold, even players who’d already been cleared. Several were actually already in Kathmandu. People involved with the leagues say the PCB wants around $25,000 per player. That hasn’t been confirmed in writing, and the PCB hasn’t commented publicly.
I’m Zee Zaidi, founder and publisher of cricexec, the leading publication covering the business of cricket worldwide. We’re read daily by the people who run the sport, boards, franchises, sponsors, players, and more.
Now, this isn’t new. I first heard about this fee, the PCB’s NOC fee, during the 2025 Major League Cricket season from an insider. In July this year, that same story went public. A year later, the same allegation. MLC franchises said the PCB was charging $25,000 a player for an NOC, and PCB chairman Mohsin Naqvi reportedly told one franchise the fee was the board’s right and a source of revenue. And the market responded. This season, Haris Rauf was the only Pakistani player in the MLC.
So let’s take the board’s side for a minute, because I think it has a better case than most people think. A board spends years and a lot of money turning a talented teenager into a player a league wants to pay. Academies, coaches, domestic cricket, age group tours. Then a private league signs that player, and the board gets a form to sign. That’s it. If you develop players good enough to be paid that much, you obviously want to be paid too. And this desire isn’t unique in cricket. The whole soccer or football establishment is built on payments made to the organizations that develop players. In soccer, it’s built around academies and teams, but in cricket, it actually is the national systems.
And actually, this isn’t a Pakistani invention. The IPL has been paying home boards for more than a decade. A cut of every overseas player’s fees, reportedly around 10%, and for a few years it was 20, goes to the home boards. So the richest league in the world already accepts this principle. In a sense, the PCB is just asking every other league to do what the IPL already does.
But there’s a reason the IPL arrangement works, and this one is causing chaos. The IPL’s payment is a percentage. It rises and falls with the player’s value, and everyone knows the terms before the auction. The PCB’s fee, as reported, is flat. Same amount for a headliner as for a squad player. And in both North America and Nepal, franchises say the demand arrived late, after squads were already set. At that point, a fee starts to look like leverage. For a league the size of MLC, that’s irritating. For a much smaller league like Nepal’s, a flat fee can be a far bigger share of what a player actually costs.
And the people who lose most aren’t the leagues, they’re obviously the players. When MLC owners decided Pakistani players weren’t worth the extra cost, it was the players who missed out on contracts.
So how can this become a standard? History says not if one board tries it alone. In 2016, the West Indies board announced a 20% release fee for its players in any overseas league. Cricket Australia and Cricket South Africa publicly refused to pay it. Only a handful of boards ever signed up, and it never became the rule. That’s the weakness. A league can always shop elsewhere. There are plenty of overseas players who don’t come with a fee attached, which means if release fees are gonna become standard, they’ll need to look a lot more like the IPL model, a percentage, agreed upfront, and ideally agreed collectively through maybe the ICC, so no league can simply route around the boards, because the PCB has put its finger on something real.
Boards create the talent franchise cricket is built on, and outside the IPL, most of them get paid nothing for it. But a principle only becomes a standard when it’s predictable. A fee that turns up after the players have landed isn’t a standard, it’s a negotiation. Boards should get paid, I think. The question isn’t whether they charge, it’s whether they can all agree on how.
