At 6pm on a recent evening, moments after breaking the Ramadan fast, customers at a popular Rawalpindi cafe shift their attention to a wall-mounted flat screen, where the Pakistan vs Pakistan World Cup cricket match is about to be broadcast. England. Behind the counter, a waiter tosses a cricket ball between orders, catching it with soft “fwaps,” and a security guard by the door repeatedly abandons his post to check the result.
Cricket is by far the most popular sport in Pakistan, as in the rest of the subcontinent. Success can turn a player into a lifelong hero, as happened with former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who used his exploits on the cricket field as a springboard to launch his political career. But few of the Pakistani players in Tuesday’s match came out strong.
“The Pakistan cricket team has fallen far behind its competitors,” complains Qazafi ur Rehman, sipping a cup of chai, as he watches Pakistan lose to England. “The public is rapidly losing interest in the game.”
Why do we write this?
There was a time when cricket was a bridge between India and Pakistan. But in recent years, Delhi has increasingly used sport as an extension of its foreign policy, overshadowing Pakistan’s players and, some say, changing the spirit of the game.
Pakistan, once considered a cricketing giant, is now nothing more than a middling power. In only one of the game’s three iterations has the national team ranked among the top five in the world. Its decline has coincided with the rise of archrival India as the game’s predominant superpower. Analysts say that as India’s control of the sport has grown, it has slowly pushed Pakistan away from top-level leagues, stifling the development of cricket in Pakistan.
“Cricket is a huge weapon of nationalism in India,” says veteran sports journalist Barney Ronay. “Politics is ruining cricket and Indian nationalism is certainly taking over” the game.
Indian Premier League promotion
India and Pakistan have been antagonists since the partition of British India into two separate countries in 1947. In the 79 years since they gained independence, India and Pakistan have fought four wars and have also been involved in several border skirmishes, most recently in May 2025.
But the cricket relationship between Pakistan and India has been historically positive. It was seen as a powerful cultural bridge, as demonstrated by the famous “Cricket for Peace” visit in 1987, when an unannounced trip by Pakistani dictator General Zia-ul-Haq to Jaipur helped calm tensions between the two neighbors.
However, over the past two decades, India’s rise as a cricketing superpower and its shift towards a hyper-nationalist ideology has allowed it to effectively marginalize Pakistan from the cricketing arena.
In 2007, India launched the Indian Premier League (IPL), which quickly became the most competitive tournament in cricket. Pakistani players have been banned from the league since 2008, when India blamed Pakistani actors for a series of terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
“Everything is based on the IPL and if you don’t play in it, you don’t stand a chance,” says journalist Ronay. That tournament involves players from every other cricket nation, he says, meaning Pakistani players are excluded “from all those resources, practices and everything else that constantly influences every other nation.”
This includes world-class training and innovative training methods. “Each IPL franchise has three to four world-class coaches, analysts and cricket scientists” who will help their players develop, says Pakistani cricket analyst Nauman Niaz. “Our players don’t get such exposure.”
Then there is the financial element. Indian Premier League players are paid more than $500,000 for a two-month period, with top earners earning multiples of that amount. By contrast, the average player in the Pakistan Super League, the smaller and less powerful equivalent of Pakistan’s IPL, earns less than $70,000 over the course of the competition.
All these factors have combined to stifle Pakistan’s development as a cricketing nation. In the first two editions of the ICC T20 World Cup, which were held in 2007 and 2009, Pakistan finished second and first. In the seven competitions since then, they have only reached the final once.
The spirit of the game.
The Indian Premier League is not the only competition from which Pakistani players are excluded. India’s rise as a cricket economy (the economic impact of the IPL has been measured at more than $10 billion) has allowed it to influence tournaments in other countries.
No Pakistani player has been selected in the SA20, the South African equivalent of the IPL, where all teams are also owned by IPL franchise owners. There are now reports that the four franchises linked to the IPL owners in The Hundred, a relatively new cricket tournament based in England and Wales, may also not be considering Pakistani players for their teams.
“I can’t express how ugly and disgusting this is,” says English journalist Peter Oborne. “This cannot continue. If this persists there will be calls, which I would support, to boycott the competition.”
The problem is not limited to India and Pakistan either.
Last year, amid rising geopolitical tensions between India and Bangladesh, IPL franchise Kolkata Knight Riders decided to release a Bangladeshi player from their team. The decision created a political maelstrom that resulted in Bangladesh refusing to travel to India to play in this year’s World Cup. In the end, Bangladesh was replaced by Scotland in the tournament.
While Pakistani cricket may be losing its edge on the field, there is one thing that keeps it relevant globally: the fans.
They may be frustrated with their team’s performance, but the fact is that Pakistanis still watch a lot of cricket and matches between India and Pakistan consistently produce the best ratings. When Pakistan threatened to withdraw from this year’s World Cup in solidarity with Bangladesh, stakeholders panicked over the potential loss of revenue. The Pakistan Cricket Board subsequently revoked its boycott, “with the objective of protecting the spirit of cricket.”
However, Pakistan’s defeat to England this week has left their semi-final qualification hanging in the balance. They must beat Sri Lanka by a wide margin in Saturday’s match or be eliminated from the tournament, dashing hopes of a showdown between India and Pakistan. Pakistani cricket fans – and many interested in the World Cup – will be praying for a victory.
