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Women's Premier League: Breaking barriers one season at a time
Summary
As it expands every year, the WPL is emerging as one of the world's top-most lucrative women's leagues, and giving women's cricket in India a boost
The stadium is packed every day, the matches are edge-of-the-seat affairs featuring muscular six hitting, wily spin bowling, pacers knocking down stumps, great catches and eye-catching athleticism on the field. The players are well paid—in fact they are paid far more at this tournament than anywhere else. Those who watch the IPL will be familiar with these details, but this is the Women’s Premier League, or WPL, we are talking about—breaking barriers and transforming women’s cricket one season at a time.
The third season of the WPL kicked off to a capacity stadium earlier this month, even though, for the first time in its short history, spectators have to pay to enter. This is particularly significant because it’s upending a core belief that held the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) back from organising a women’s league for many years—that people won’t come to watch them.
The crowded stands at Vadodara’s Kotambi stadium—one of the developments this season is that the league has spread to four venues instead of two, adding Vadodara and Lucknow, two cities usually starved of quality cricket, to last season’s venues Mumbai and Bengaluru—is like a real-life manifestation of a line from Nike’s latest ad featuring women athletes: “You can’t fill a stadium…so fill that stadium."
With an air of inevitability, the crowds got more than their money’s worth of excitement.
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The opening game featuring defending champions Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) and Gujarat Giants (GG) yielded a total of 403 runs, the highest aggregate in the IPL, and as the Smriti Mandhana led RCB smashed their way to overhaul GG’s total of 201, the spectators had the pleasure of witnessing the highest successful run chase in the league.
The story of Richa Ghosh, the 21-year-old India wicketkeeper from the foothill town of Siliguri in West Bengal, who hit a spectacular 26-ball 64 in that chase, is the story of how the WPL is radically changing women’s cricket in India.
Ghosh was marked as a special talent very early in her life. Her father took to umpiring after his cricketing career did not take off, and Ghosh would accompany him to matches when she was as young as three. By the time she was six years old, she was training at the local club, the only girl in a sea of boys. At 12, she was in the Bengal U19 team. At 14, she made the senior Bengal squad. At 16, she was the youngest member of the Indian national team, playing in the final of a World Cup.
Yet, she was barely earning enough to make the game into a career. In fact, there were hardly any matches to be played. After her appearance in the 2020 World Cup final, she would go 364 days before donning the national colours—the BCCI had neglected to schedule a match for the women’s team for nearly a whole year.
Now, Ghosh is one of the highest-earning cricketers in the world—a turnaround that happened when she was signed for ₹1.9 crore by RCB at the player auctions for the inaugural WPL in 2023.
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“All my parents wanted me to achieve was to play for India," Ghosh said to the broadcasters after the auction. “I want to captain my team and win a major trophy for India. I want to buy a flat (apartment) in Kolkata. I want my mother and father to settle down there. They have struggled a lot, and I want them to enjoy their life now."
The WPL is changing lives just like the IPL did and continues to do for male cricketers across India.
Consider the three highest-paid Indians at the mini-auction for the 2025 edition, all of them relatively unknown players yet to be called up for national duty: the big-hitting Simran Shaikh, 19, who lives in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum (her father works as an electrician) was signed by GG for ₹1.9 crore; Madurai’s Kamalini Gunalan is a member of the Indian team that won the 2025 U19 World Cup—she was signed for ₹1.6 crores by Mumbai Indians (MI) and became the youngest debutant in the WPL when she played in MI’s win over GG on 18 February, aged 16; Prema Rawat is 23, and comes from a small village called Sumti in Uttarakhand, where she was the only girl playing cricket.
For these young players, it’s not just the finances, but also the exposure to the highest levels of the game that’s transformational—they now get to play with and against the top women cricketers from around the world, be coached by the best coaches in the business, be a part of elite team environments and experience the stresses and competitiveness of a game played at its highest level.
“It’s great to see the women’s game getting this level of recognition, the WPL is playing a crucial role in growing the sport globally," said Australian Meg Lanning, one of the greatest players in the history of the women’s game and the captain of Delhi Capitals, at a press conference. “The development and improvement of so many players has been incredible. They have been getting better just with the opportunity the WPL gives them."
The IPL, when it debuted in 2008, immediately changed cricket forever—from the economics of the game, or the way T20 took over as the pre-eminent format of cricket in terms of mass appeal, the shift in the concept of cricket as only nation-state rivalries to a club-based game, and the way the tournament provided a financial boost of astronomic proportions to the hundreds of players who did not make it to the national level but toiled away in the anonymity of the domestic circuit.
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The WPL did that too, and it happened overnight. For most of its life the BCCI has been, rightfully and trenchantly, criticised for its lack of interest in developing the women’s game in the richest and most powerful cricketing nation in the world. Australia had debuted the eight-team Women’s Big Bash League in 2015 to great success, and England started the women’s Super League in 2016, before introducing The Hundred in 2021; the Women’s Caribbean League started in 2022, the same year that even Pakistan announced their plans for a women’s league. Yet India had nothing to show except a shoddy exhibition event featuring three matches between three teams (with no money involved) played to empty stadiums starting at 2pm on weekdays, so that the match could finish well in time for the “real thing", the IPL match, to start in its prime time slot at 7pm.
“When we played in the Big Bash before the WPL started, everyone used to ask us when we would have our own league," India and RCB captain Mandhana said at a recent press conference.
In 2023, all of that changed, with the WPL kicking off with five franchises sold to investors at ₹46.7 billion, broadcast rights sold for ₹9.5 billion and 87 players signed for a total of ₹59.5 crore—making this one of the most lucrative women’s leagues in the world, second only to the US basketball league WNBA, and with salaries five times more, for the biggest earners, than that of Big Bash League or The Hundred.
If the first season was played at just one venue and got 50 million cumulative views (TV and online) for the first 15 games (according to data made available by the broadcaster), the second season was spread to two cities and garnered 130 million cumulative views.
The only thing that is known is that the WPL will get a dedicated slot in 2026 in January-February, which means it will have the honour of kicking off the cricketing year instead of being a precursor to the IPL.
Among the unknowns, here’s a wishlist: expanding to eight teams, junior development programmes in each team, skill acquisition and knowledge sharing among the men’s and women’s teams, and fitness data banks for each cricketer, the way it is already done in the IPL.
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of Enter the Dangal, Travels through India’s Wrestling Landscape.
