A new dawn for European cricket

In mid-February 2025, I met Abhishek Bachchan, one of Hindi/Indian cinema’s leading stars and the son of legendary actor, Amitabh Bachchan.

He was networking in London as the England and Wales Cricket Board was auctioning off equity stakes in The Hundred. Alongside him were Priyanka Kaul, Dhiraj Malhotra and Saurav Banerjee. Together, they had established Rules Sport Tech, a private limited company, headquartered in Haryana, India, to create a European T20 Premier League, or ETPL. This was to be based on a partnership between the national cricket boards of Ireland, Scotland and the Netherlands. It had recently been sanctioned by the International Cricket Council.

The ETPL was scheduled to start in August 2025, with six teams based in six cities. When I met Bachchan six months earlier, I did feel that he and his team had their work cut out to achieve that aim. This proved to be the case as the launch was delayed for a year, but this provided time to refine their plans and attract impressive investors.

In January 2026, the ETPL announced the identity of the first three franchises based in Amsterdam, Edinburgh and Belfast. Former Australian captain, Steve Waugh, is among those owning the Amsterdam Flames franchise, which will have Australia’s Mitch Marsh as captain and Steve Smith in the squad. The Edinburgh Castle Rockers franchise has a strong New Zealand influence, owned by former New Zealand players, Kyle Mills and Nathan McCullum, while current New Zealand white ball captain, Mitchell Santner, leads the team. Glenn Maxwell, who played 279 ODI and T20I s for Australia, scoring almost 7,000 runs, will co-own and captain the Belfast Wolves. Kevin O’Brien, a legendary Irish cricketer, will be the coach. It is