Cricket news: Saudi Arabia in talks with IPL to create new T20 competition.

It has the potential to shake up cricket as LIV has changed golf - but will the ICC play ball on a landscape-changing new competition in Saudi Arabia?

Saudi Arabia is in talks with the owners of the Indian Premier League to set up a lucrative T20 competition that could divide the sport in the same way the controversial LIV tour has done with golf.

Discussions between IPL owners and representatives of the Saudi government have taken place in recent months. The new tournament in the Middle East would feature teams that are linked to IPL franchises; players could then be offered 12-month contracts and play for linked franchises in multiple T20 events.

Saudi Arabia has already invested heavily in football, Formula One and, with serious ramifications, golf. The LIV Golf tour, which was formed in 2021, has used hugely valuable contracts to lure top players from the PGA Tour, leading to bad blood and high-profile legal cases, with no amicable resolution in sight. Now the Gulf state is looking to expand into cricket in partnership with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

IPL franchises would be linked to the new competition. Picture: AFP

India players are banned by the BCCI from participating in franchise tournaments other than the IPL, such as the Hundred, but the proposed partnership with Saudi Arabia is likely to change this, with stars such as Virat Kohli being contracted to play for their franchises in other tournaments.

Several IPL franchise owners have stakes in tournaments elsewhere, such as the ILT20 in the United Arab Emirates, which began this year, the SA20 in South Africa, the Caribbean Premier League and Major League Cricket (MLC) in the United States, which begins in July.

With stakes in at least five tournaments throughout the year, the next move for the franchises would be to explore offering big-name players 12-month contracts, which would give cricket one of its biggest shake-ups since the Kerry Packer World Series breakaway in Australia in 1977.

It would move the sport closer to a football model, whereby players are “owned” and paid by their club rather than being centrally contracted by their national board. It would then be the club who release the player to play for their country, rather than the other way round.

Details about when a tournament in Saudi Arabia would be played are unclear. However, to avoid a clash with the IPL, it would not be in April or May.

Would the stars of the cricketing world join a Saudi-backed tournament?

It is understood that year-round contracts worth about pounds 5 million could be on offer – more than five times the value of the highest England central contracts.

Richard Gould, the new England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chief executive, said last week that the governing body was concerned about the impact of global tournaments and would be substantially increasing the match fees paid to England players, in addition to offering some players multi-year deals. Smaller contracts would be on offer to play to play in at least three of the tournaments, raising new concerns about the impact on bilateral international cricket and, pertinently for the ECB, the English domestic summer.

MLC is already set to clash with the T20 Blast and, with future expansion, could be played at the same time as the Hundred. “This is an existential issue for us,” Gould said. “We cannot afford not to have our best players available when we really need them.”

Greg Barclay, chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC), has previously spoken about future Saudi Arabian investment in the game. “If you look at other sports they’ve been involved in, cricket is something I imagine would be attractive to them,” he said.

The ICC has the power to refuse to sanction any new tournament, because Saudi Arabia is not one of its full member nations, although that would not stop players being able to participate. Some England players featured in the inaugural ILT20 in January, despite that tournament not being sanctioned by the ICC.

Batting and bowling figures were not included as part of official T20 statistics, but the money on offer, and the links to IPL franchises, meant that Joe Root, Moeen Ali, Alex Hales, Dawid Malan and Sam Billings all featured.