Of the seven Pakistani cricketers signed by four Nepal Premier League (NPL) franchises this season, only one is playing. Karnali Yaks resolved the issue for Hussain Talat. The other six, including Pakistan’s T20 captain Sahibzada Farhan, are sidelined because the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has not cleared them to play, according to The Kathmandu Post. Janakpur Bolts’ Iftikhar Ahmed and Hunain Shah are in Kathmandu but will not play for the franchise. Chitwan Rhinos, without Usama Mir and Hasan Ali, have brought in replacements straight from the airport.
The figure at the centre of the dispute is US$25,000 per player, which franchises say the PCB demanded at the last minute. Karnali Yaks director Grihendra Ghimire said the board sought that amount for players who had already arrived in Nepal. Janakpur Bolts Chief Executive Niroj Khatiwada told the Post: “In a broader context, it is a big blow for overall Nepali cricket.” The PCB has not commented publicly, and its own NOC guide, in place since 2020, makes no mention of the fee.
It is easy to call this a shakedown. It is more useful to ask why a board would do it, and the answer says as much about the economics of international cricket as it does about Pakistan.
A fee that has been building for years
The NPL is not the first league to run into the fee. In 2023, several Pakistani players’ participation in Major League Cricket (MLC) was left in limbo after the PCB reportedly asked for US$25,000 per player. cricexec heard about the fee from an MLC insider during the 2025 season. It became public again in July 2026, when MLC franchise sources said the board was charging US$25,000 per player for an NOC. The PCB neither confirmed nor denied the policy, but Chairman Mohsin Naqvi reportedly told one franchise that the fee was the board’s right and a source of revenue.
The market responded. Haris Rauf, signed by the San Francisco Unicorns, was the only Pakistani player in MLC 2026. The fee is not a blanket ban: according to the Post, around 40 Pakistani players had been granted NOCs for leagues in 2026 as of August. But Nepal now looks like a repeat of MLC, on a smaller stage and with less money to absorb it.
Boards want a return on the talent they create
Set the timing aside and the PCB’s underlying position is rational. A national board funds the academies, coaches, age-group tours and domestic competitions that turn a promising teenager into a player a franchise will pay. When a private league signs that player, the league captures the value. Under the NOC system, the board’s role is reduced to signing a form.
If a board develops players good enough to command fees around the world, it will want to be paid too.
Football has run on this principle for decades. Under FIFA’s transfer rules, clubs that trained a player are owed training compensation when the player signs his or her first professional contract or moves while still young. They also share a solidarity contribution of 5% of later transfer fees, divided among the clubs that developed him between the ages of 12 and 23. The difference is who does the developing. In football, it is clubs and academies. In cricket, it is largely the national boards.
The principle is already established at the top of the market. The Indian Premier League (IPL) began compensating overseas boards ahead of the 2011 season, understood to be 10% of foreign players’ fees. That reportedly rose to 20% in 2017, and reports since suggest it has returned to around 10%. The world’s richest league accepts that home boards deserve something for releasing their players. In effect, the PCB is asking every other league to do the same.
India sits at the opposite extreme. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) does not release its active men’s players to overseas leagues at all; they must retire from Indian cricket, including the IPL, before they can play abroad. Janakpur’s Khatiwada noted that NPL franchises cannot sign Indian national cricketers. The world’s most powerful board does not charge for its talent. It keeps it. Set against that, a board willing to release its players for a fee looks less like an outlier and more like one point on a spectrum of boards protecting what they have built.
West Indies show why boards are hunting for revenue
If the PCB’s demand looks aggressive, Cricket West Indies (CWI) shows why boards are chasing every available source of income.
CWI faces an annual funding shortfall of US$20 million to US$25 million. It has proposed cutting international player retainers by 25%, reduced domestic retainer contracts to seven months and suspended domestic competitions.
Chief Executive Chris Dehring has traced much of that pressure to a 1997 ICC vote, carried nine to one, that ended touring fees and allowed host boards to keep their bilateral broadcast revenue. As a result, West Indies’ tour of India earns CWI no broadcast revenue at all. Dehring said: “A series that could generate $20 million to $30 million in India brings West Indies cricket no revenue.”
Nor can CWI fall back on the region’s governments. Dehring told The Gleaner: “… any business model that is dependent on Caribbean governments is not a safe, secure business model.” He has pointed out that 90% of CWI’s earnings come from outside the Caribbean, describing the board as one of the region’s biggest exporters of intellectual property. President Kishore Shallow has backed his CEO’s call for an amendment to the ICC’s commercial model that would help smaller members.
That is the context in which release fees matter. Boards like CWI and the PCB produce talent that the global franchise market depends on, but often lack the home markets to make money from it. When a board’s main export is its players, a fee for releasing them is one of the few levers it controls.
Where the PCB has got it wrong
The problem is method, not principle.
The IPL’s payment is a percentage of the player’s fee, so it scales with the player’s value, and franchises know the terms before the auction. The PCB’s charge, as reported, is a flat US$25,000 whether the player is a headliner or a squad member. For a league the size of the NPL, that can be a large share of what a player actually costs.
The timing makes it worse. In both MLC and Nepal, franchises say the demand arrived after squads were set; in Nepal’s case, after players had landed. A fee announced during recruitment is a cost a franchise can budget for or walk away from. A fee allegedly produced on the eve of a tournament looks like leverage.
And the cost falls hardest on the players. Chitwan and Janakpur simply signed replacements. Iftikhar and Hunain lose a tournament, and franchises told the Post they will be wary of Pakistani cricketers when they sign overseas players next season. One Kathmandu Gorkhas official said the franchise had signed a Pakistani player it has been unable to announce. The damage will outlast this season.
Can release fees become a standard?
History suggests a single board cannot impose one. In 2016, the West Indies Cricket Board announced a levy of 20% of a player’s contract fee before it would grant NOCs for overseas leagues. Cricket Australia and Cricket South Africa publicly refused to pay, and the levy never became a global norm. Only a handful of boards, including India and Bangladesh, agreed to pay it.
The weakness is the same today: a league can always recruit elsewhere, as Janakpur and Chitwan have just shown. For release fees to stick, they would need to look like the IPL model, a percentage agreed up front. Ideally, they would be set collectively through the ICC, so that no league can route around the boards that charge.
Shallow has suggested the ICC’s commercial model may be revised. If it is, player release fees belong on the agenda alongside bilateral revenue. The boards that develop the game’s talent should be paid for it. The question is whether they can agree on how before more players are sent home.
