ACB vs ECB Funding Dispute: Afghanistan Premier League's Future at Stake in ICC Meetings

Two documents sat on my desk in Delhi on Wednesday afternoon. One was the Afghanistan Cricket Board's draft schedule for a five-franchise T20 league — the player draft for which had been completed the previous Tuesday. The other was the ICC franchise-league subcommittee's working regulation, with its pre-sanction conditions on owner background checks and anti-corruption oversight written into it. Both documents carried the same name — the Afghanistan Premier League — but in one it was an event and in the other it was an open question. When the draft comes first and the sanction comes later, the story is in what the file does not say.

Context: The league's structure and its real base

The league is to start on December 27, and the host is not Afghanistan but the United Arab Emirates. This is not a minor logistical detail. Given Afghanistan's security and political circumstances, its "home" has long been on foreign soil — meaning the league has neither domestic gate revenue nor a domestic broadcast market. Only three of the five franchise owners have been confirmed. This is a league whose player draft is done, whose start date is fixed, but which has no ICC sanction and whose ownership is half-sold.

I still keep that 217-name sheet from the 2026 Bengaluru auction. What I learned that day is that a name put on the board and a name sold are two different things. The Afghanistan Premier League is on the board right now; it has not been sold. And the biggest weapon being used to sell it is not a player — it is the funding question.

Core: Where the money comes from is the real match

ECB chief executive Richard Gould's argument is direct: more than 80 per cent of the Afghanistan Cricket Board's income comes from ICC funding — roughly US$14 million a year — and if that same money is going into a men's franchise league, the ICC has every right to ask about it. Gould himself sits on the ICC subcommittee reviewing franchise-league sanctioning rules — anti-corruption provisions, doping oversight, owner due diligence. A structural point is worth noting here: the person sitting on the committee that reviews sanctioning is from the same board publicly questioning the league's funding. That is not necessarily improper, but it concentrates the regulator and the advocate in one actor.

The ICC's defence is legal: the 2026 revenue model and league sanctioning are separate matters. The ECB's counter is economic: money is money, and if a board derives 80 per cent of its income from central distribution, all of its spending is indirectly connected to that source. The outcome of this argument depends on how transparently the ICC accounts for its distributions — and that accounting is not public. I have kept this line in my folder for a long time: if you don't know where the money went, you don't know whether the deal happened.

On the player side, one fact shapes the whole debate: eight England players — including Moeen Ali and Alex Hales — are due to play in this league, and none of them holds an ECB central contract. Which means the ECB has no contract-based leverage to stop them. Refusing an NOC would expose it to a restraint-of-trade legal challenge. The ECB has said clearly it intends to issue NOCs — a hard public posture and an operational softness on the ground. That is the gap the headlines do not show.

Contrarian: Holding the draft before sanction is not an accident, it is a tactic

Here is something no report writes. The player draft was held on Tuesday, while ICC sanction has not yet been granted. It is easy to read that as disorder, but in the language of the transfer market it is called creating faits accomplis. Once players are picked, contracts signed and dates announced, the political cost of refusing sanction rises sharply. That is what Gould calls a "difficult position" — the consequence of this sequence. This is the argument of the folder in which I keep the deals that never happened: the most important decision is the one nobody took, because nobody needed to take it.

And the least-discussed part of the risk is not politics but integrity. The identities of two of the five franchise owners are not public. The ICC's draft rules themselves state that owner background checks and due diligence are mandatory. Which means the league's weakest link is the very regulation under which it seeks sanction. A league launching unsanctioned means a vacuum in anti-corruption monitoring — and in cricket history that vacuum has been the most expensive thing of all.

Takeaway: The next falling stone

The ICC meetings in Indonesia next year will decide this question, but the real date is December 27. If the league starts on time, the sanction debate will quietly be left behind and the ICC will have room only to say the rules already existed. If it does not start, the Afghanistan Cricket Board will face the question of why it tried to build a product with ICC money that the same ICC would not sanction. Those who believe this debate is confined to Afghanistan may be missing a larger point: if running your own league off central distribution without accounting is possible, that model opens up for every board. The question is not whether Moeen Ali plays. The question is who is paying that league's electricity bill, and whether anyone has seen the receipt.