Game changer. Watershed day. Historic payday. Jackpot. The Women’s Premier League (WPL) auction, which was held on February 13, was each of these and more.
First, the numbers — because that’s what grabs everyone’s attention. Smriti Mandhana’s ₹3.4 crore/$412,000 salary is rarely seen in women’s team sport. The best team sport salaries usually come from football, where the highest earner, Australian Samantha Kerr, plays for Chelsea Women in the Women’s Super League (WSL) in England. Her salary estimates fluctuate
Game changer. Watershed day. Historic payday. Jackpot. The Women’s Premier League (WPL) auction, which was held on February 13, was each of these and more.
First, the numbers — because that’s what grabs everyone’s attention. Smriti Mandhana’s ₹3.4 crore/$412,000 salary is rarely seen in women’s team sport. The best team sport salaries usually come from football, where the highest earner, Australian Samantha Kerr, plays for Chelsea Women in the Women’s Super League (WSL) in England. Her salary estimates fluctuate between $410,000 and $506,000 a year. In August last year, when Trinity Rodman signed a $281,00-a-year, four-year $1.1m contract with Washington Spirit for the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) in the United States (US), it was said she would be the league’s highest earner.
The biggest leagues for women — WSL and NWSL — were launched in 2011 and 2013. Another one, the Women’s NBA (WNBA) in the US, which pegs its highest salary at $228,094 ( ₹1.88 crore), was formed 26 years ago. Each one has 12 teams. Each one is in the US or United Kingdom.
As of this week, WPL — a league on the eve of its inaugural, five-team season — has promised to pay nine of its top 10 earners more than the highest WNBA salary. It is not so far off from women’s football’s highest numbers either. In match-day earnings, WPL cricketers will be the highest paid in women’s team sport everywhere. Last season, Kerr played 22 matches, Rodman played 18, and in the WNBA, Lloyd played 36. WPL1 will feature 22 matches, and the maximum number of matches any player will be involved in is 10.
The WPL auction was the endorsement that women’s cricket in India had been made to wait too long to be given and received. The fallout is already visible. There are reports of a push to fast-track the number of women umpires, scorers, coaches, trainers, and physios around the game. Last week, this newspaper reported an increase in the number of women’s T20 tournaments in Mumbai. Next month will see the first season of the Maharashtra Cricket Association’s women’s club league, the foremost women’s club cricket competition in India, featuring 56 teams and 800-odd women players, its biggest cohort ever. Seven groups of eight teams each will play a total of 203 matches. This will no doubt be of varying ability, but those numbers indicate that the narrative of there not being good enough players for a women’s IPL (even after the national team reached the finals of white-ball World Cups in 2017 and 2020) was bunkum.
On Monday, apart from cricket folk, people working and playing women’s team sport would have felt the ground stir beneath their feet.
India’s highest-paid female athlete, like anywhere around the world, plays an individual sport. Badminton star PV Sindhu’s $7 million earnings rank her at no. 12 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest female athletes, dominated by tennis players. Still, no one who plays hockey or football for India can ignore the WPL figures. Football salaries for Indian women, who have played overseas, remain modest, but match fees in hockey have unfortunately remained a taboo topic, both for men and women. This is despite the Odisha government’s largesse of a ₹100 crore, 10-year sponsorship. The WPL auction’s ripple effect across other Indian sport may appear minor at this point. Olympic sports governors, firmly seated in their chairs and on their hands, will complain about cricket taking away the cash. But on the ground, no cricket coaching academy can avoid starting a women’s programme. The WPL numbers will automatically raise questions among parents and coaches of young girls in the 10-12 age group across small towns — about ambition, opportunity and growth.
Cricket may quickly take the top spot among women athletes. Who wants to bust their chops trying to make it in a sport where at the top, there’s only one spot per weight category whenever you want to represent the country? Especially when you can give yourself a chance at something in a 15-a-side sport whose skills are complicated but widely taught? Where athletic requirements for women are upper-body strength for ball-striking and lower-body endurance and flexibility? There is no audit on what sport the best female athletes in India gravitate towards because our schools and university sporting structures are broken.
But do other sport offer our young women and their families what cricket seems to promise over the next 10 years? The chance of more game time than any other sport as a junior, the possibility of a reasonable pay cheque and, most importantly, post-career transition opportunities into the private industry? The answer is a no-brainer.
There is a chance that those running the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) may not comprehend what this auction has set in motion. It has gathered, generated and released the energy of women’s sport in India and regardless of what the men may do (World Cup year, guys, tick tock), that genie is now out of the bottle.
But amid this jubilation and the pulling on of a glowing, smooth new skin, we must not ignore Indian franchise cricket’s most visible and itchy scratches. That while the rest of the world may come to play, India’s T20 leagues do not include Pakistani talent. And that BCCI doesn’t allow Indian men to play in leagues elsewhere. The women have been allowed to play elsewhere until now, but once WPL begins, they may find similar fetters binding them too.
Sharda Ugra is a senior journalistThe views expressed are personal
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