When the player union’s own chief executive says some of his members have been offered more than A$1 million to play overseas during the Australian summer, the conversation about what Cricket Australia was trying to fix with its Big Bash League privatisation push changes entirely. The “cash grab” label that has followed this process since April does not survive contact with that number.
“Some of our players have been offered in excess of A$1 million Australian to go to the SA20. When you compare that to what they’re earning in the BBL, in some cases it is five times plus. It’s definitely real, there are lots of players who are getting offered pretty significant financial outcomes to go, and there are players who are weighing that up.”
Paul Marsh, ACA CEO, as reported by The Age, July 2, 2026
The BBL’s top salary is A$300,000. The South African SA20, which plays in the same January window, is offering Australian players three times that and more. At the SA20 auction last year, Dewald Brevis and Aiden Markram each went for A$1.3 million — four to five times what Australian stars were earning in their own competition. Australian players have also been receiving ILT20 offers of A$500,000 to play in the UAE, and the ILT20 has now moved to November, which threatens to pull players out before the BBL season even begins. A WhatsApp group of 12 prominent BBL players formed to discuss the pay disparity. At least five senior Australian cricketers held off signing national contracts over the same issue.
This is the environment in which Cricket Australia launched its privatisation push. Not greed. Survival.
Cricket Australia’s proposal, codenamed Project Nazare, was not a sale of Australian cricket to the highest bidder. Under the framework CA put to the six state associations, states could sell between 49% and 75% stakes in their BBL clubs. In a 49% sale, the state would own the remaining 51% outright rather than under its existing lease arrangement, and would receive a share of a central cash pool. Private investors in that model would have zero cricket decision-making power — no involvement with state cricket, no seat at CA’s board, no control over scheduling or player selection. CA also explicitly ruled out wagering revenue expansion as a funding alternative. The states would choose their own investment partners. The fear that IPL groups were being handed the Australian summer was, as Greenberg said, “overblown.”
“Our whole project has been about balancing the risks that come with that and making sure the controls are in place for Australian cricket to bring private capital in but continue to operate the way the game has been governed and should be governed.”
Todd Greenberg, CA CEO, press conference, May 2026
Cricket Australia lost A$31.9 million in 2023-24, recovering to A$11.3 million in the red in 2024-25. Its television deal is locked until 2031 — there is no renegotiation lever before then. CA has already cut costs across administration, pathways and community cricket. It reduced national contracts from 24 to 21, a form of creative accounting to concentrate more money into the hands of its best players from a fixed pool. Without private capital, none of those options close the gap fast enough.
The salary floor mechanics make the problem harder to see from the outside. The BBL and the SA20 have similar total salary caps — approximately A$3.2 million each. But the BBL sets a minimum wage of A$52,000 to protect lower-order domestic players who would otherwise earn almost nothing. The SA20 minimum is around A$17,000. That gap in floors means the SA20 can concentrate money at the top of its roster in a way the BBL structurally cannot. This is not a reflection of what CA is willing to pay its best players. It is a consequence of how the competition was built — to protect the bottom of the squad. That was a sound and admirable decision. It has also become a competitive disadvantage at exactly the level that now determines whether the best players stay in Australia or leave.
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The salary floor problem is real, but it only tells part of the story. The BBL has survived this long on something the numbers do not measure — cultural glue. The Australian summer, the conditions, the primetime crowds, the prestige of a Big Bash game at the MCG. The current generation of Australian players will sacrifice significant money to play here. Todd Greenberg has acknowledged this directly. The open question he posed publicly, and it is the right question to ask, is whether the next generation will make the same calculation.
A young Australian white-ball specialist with no established Test history and no national fan base yet faces a different decision to Pat Cummins or Travis Head. The loyalty that has kept Australia’s senior players in the BBL is earned over years of international cricket, of becoming part of something. That loyalty does not transfer automatically to the players coming through behind them. The global franchise economy is targeting them before that loyalty forms. That is what the salary gap actually represents at ground level.
There is also a historical layer here that gives CA’s push a context the “cash grab” framing completely misses. In 1977, Kerry Packer walked an employee into the Australian dressing room at the Centenary Test with theatre tickets for Greg Chappell, Rod Marsh and Dennis Lillee. The tickets were sign-on bonuses for World Series Cricket. The cricket establishment called it a raid on the game. What it actually was — whatever Packer’s own motivations — was the structural intervention that forced professional wages into a sport that had been undervaluing its players for decades. In 2026, the roles are reversed. CA is the one chasing private money to pay its players. NSW is holding the line against it. The dynamic of private capital being framed as the enemy of cricket’s values, while being the mechanism that actually protects player welfare, is not a new story in this game.
Not everyone opposing privatisation is wrong. The ACA’s position deserves to be understood clearly. Paul Marsh and the players’ union are not against private capital in principle. The current MOU proposal from CA does not improve the player revenue share percentage, does not guarantee salary increases across all player categories, and does not address the pay disparity between Australian and overseas players in the BBL’s own draft system. Australian BBL players have been earning between A$100,000 and A$200,000 less per season than the overseas players alongside them in their own competition. The ACA’s constitution gives players a formal right to veto privatisation. Marsh’s position was precise: “Given that any sale of these teams is forever, we need to get this right, now.”
New South Wales believes CA can generate more revenue through existing streams — broadcast optimisation, ticketing, commercial partnerships. That argument has some merit, particularly on wagering fees where NSW challenged whether CA is receiving fair value for its product. But with the broadcast deal locked to 2031, the capacity of those optimisations to close a A$700,000-per-player annual gap against the SA20 is difficult to reconcile. Queensland went further and questioned whether player pay needs to increase at all. That position ignores what the market is already offering in writing. Ian Healy called the entire privatisation process “greedy and desperate, a shemozzle” — directed primarily at Cricket Victoria’s unilateral decision to merge the Melbourne Stars and Renegades administrations without consulting other states, an act even the pro-privatisation bloc described as “rogue.” The criticism of that specific act was fair. But it has been too easily blurred with criticism of the structural case for why private capital was needed in the first place.
As of July 6, 2026, Project Nazare is unresolved. Western Australia, Tasmania and Victoria rejected New South Wales and Queensland’s call to pause the process, warning jointly in a signed memo that delay would “risk allowing a strategic window to close.” All six states agreed in principle to a self-determination model at the June 15 meeting, but the ACA has not signed off, and without player agreement the process cannot legally proceed.
Australian cricket continues to move forward in the meantime. The BBL|16 fixture dropped yesterday, and the season opener heads to Chennai — the first time an Australian domestic T20 match is being played in India. The 2026-27 season will look exactly as it always has. Any privatisation changes cannot take effect before 2027-28 at the earliest.
Greenberg admitted CA should have done a better job of explaining the rationale. That is an honest concession about a genuine communication failure. But the problem was never that the argument was wrong. The salary gap between the BBL and the SA20 is not a negotiating position. It is arithmetic. Private capital was CA’s structural answer to that arithmetic. Whether the process was handled well is a separate question from whether the push itself was necessary. The evidence says it was.
Sources
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- Paul Marsh, ACA CEO, interview with The Age, July 2, 2026: CricketAddictor
- Todd Greenberg, CA CEO, interview with SEN’s Whateley, May 17, 2026: SEN
- BBL privatisation in jeopardy after rejection from key states, July 6, 2026: SEN
- Ian Healy on BBL privatisation, June 10, 2026: SEN
- CA and states agree in principle to BBL privatisation, June 15, 2026: ESPN
- BBL privatisation bid in trouble after ACA rejects current proposal, June 14, 2026: Cricinfo
- Senior Australia players hold off CA deal amid BBL pay frustration, May 9, 2026: ESPNcricinfo
