2012 Champions League T20 winning team Sydney Sixers. Photo: Sydney Sixers/X
The Champions League Twenty20 (CLT20) – started in 2009 and last played in 2014 – is set to make a comeback in a bigger and better avatar. Members of the International Cricket Council (ICC) have taken a formal decision to revive the tournament on the sidelines of the ICC’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Singapore recently. The CLT20 is a Twenty20 league formulated as a high-end international tournament for top franchises of domestic T20 leagues from across the world. The member nations of the ICC are optimistic about restarting the tournament from early 2026.
However, planning for the league’s return remains in a nascent stage, with many particulars yet to be decided. In particular, formulating the eligibility criteria is of immediate priority. As franchise-based T20 leagues have mushroomed across the world, many owners now operate teams across different leagues. Addressing this cross-team ownership pattern will be one of the biggest challenges for the yet-to-be-formed authorities of the tournament. In their next meeting, according to Cricbuzz, the member nations will work on forming a Governing Council (GC) to run the league.
The CLT20 was discontinued in 2015. Initially, only franchises from a handful of major Test-playing nations were allowed to participate in the tournament. But a decade later, global T20 cricket has grown by leaps and bounds, with even Associate members of the ICC – including the USA, Canada, Nepal, and UAE – running their own franchise-based leagues. At present, there are around 11 major franchise-based leagues across the world, including The Hundred in England.
Finding a window to organise the tournament in an already cramped calendar will also pose a challenge to the member nations. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), which was not a member of the CLT20 earlier, is expected to join the planning process along with Cricket Australia and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the richest cricket board in the world. Cricket South Africa – one of the three boards that founded the original CLT20 – is also expected to join the talks.
However, it must be noted that despite the popularity of T20 leagues, the Champions League T20 had turned out to be a flop show, with the tournament failing to grasp eyeballs to the expected extent, resulting in its suspension following a proposal by Star Sports in 2014. Incurring heavy financial losses, Star Sports had offered a compensation package to the three boards, who agreed to the same in 2015.