The Afghanistan Cricket Board says the long-delayed revival of its franchise T20 league is finally taking shape, with a player draft scheduled for the last week of October and the tournament itself now pencilled in to start on December 27, 2026, in the United Arab Emirates, pushing back an earlier plan to launch the league in October.
A league that has waited eight years
The Afghanistan Premier League first ran in 2018, when Balkh Legends won the inaugural title, but a planned second season never happened after the board withdrew the competition’s sanction amid a wider dispute, leaving Afghan cricket without a domestic franchise product even as neighbouring boards built out their own T20 leagues. Reviving it has been a stated priority for the ACB for several years, with the UAE emerging as host given the large Afghan diaspora in the Gulf and the logistical ease of staging matches there compared with venues inside Afghanistan.
The shape of the new competition
Five city-based franchises are planned for the relaunched league, representing Kabul, Kandahar, Balkh, Paktia and Nangarhar. Three franchise ownership groups have already signed on, according to the ACB, leaving two slots still to be sold. The board says five separate parties have expressed interest in those remaining spots, including groups from inside Afghanistan as well as from India and other markets, suggesting the league’s commercial appeal has grown since the idea was first floated for an October launch.
Players and the scale of interest
On the playing side, the ACB says roughly 1,500 players have registered for the draft, a pool a dedicated committee is now screening that the board says includes a number of international players alongside Afghan domestic talent. That registration number points to a league hoping to establish itself quickly as a genuine stop on the T20 franchise calendar rather than a purely domestic affair, competing for windows against the UAE’s own established competitions and other regional leagues for both players and broadcast attention.
The commercial backbone
The ACB has partnered with Cricket Venture, a joint venture between Trans Group and ITW Universe, to run the league’s commercial operations, a structure similar to the franchise-management models used to launch several other recent T20 leagues. That partnership is expected to handle everything from sponsorship sales to broadcast distribution once the five franchises and their squads are finalised, giving the ACB a dedicated commercial partner rather than running the league’s business side in-house. That arrangement mirrors how several other newer T20 leagues in the region have outsourced sponsorship sales and media rights negotiations to specialist operators rather than building that expertise inside a cricket board, a model the ACB is betting will get the league to market faster than if it tried to run those functions itself from scratch.
Why the timeline keeps shifting
The slippage from an October start to a December 27 launch reflects the practical difficulty of closing out two remaining franchise sales while simultaneously running a player draft and registration process at scale. ACB officials have struck a confident tone publicly, with the board’s chief executive describing the delay as a function of getting the remaining ownership deals right rather than a sign the project is in trouble, but the repeated date changes echo the uncertainty that dogged the league’s aborted second edition years earlier, when a similar mix of ownership and sanctioning issues ultimately sank the competition entirely.
What comes next
With the draft now set for late October, the next real test is whether the ACB can close the two outstanding franchise sales before players are allocated to squads, and whether a December 27 start date holds up against the congested international T20 calendar the Gulf region already hosts at that time of year. A clean draft and a settled ownership group would go a long way toward establishing the league as a durable fixture rather than a repeat of 2018’s one-and-done experience, giving Afghan players based at home and abroad a genuine domestic stage to go with the national team’s rising international profile. For a cricket board that has built its international reputation largely through its white-ball success on the world stage, a durable domestic league would finally give emerging Afghan talent a structured, well-paid pathway at home rather than relying solely on exposure through other countries’ franchise competitions to develop and showcase new players.
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