Multi-million dollar WPL auction signals huge step forward for women’s sport

I t was only a few days ago that members of the Australian women’s cricket team were contemplating how best to navigate the impending “distraction” of the inaugural Women’s Premier League auction, scheduled during the first week of the T20 World Cup. “It’s a little bit awkward,” captain Meg Lanning said in South Africa last week. “But it’s just trying to embrace that and understanding it’s actually a really exciting time and you actually don’t have a lot of control over most of it, so you’ve just got to wait and see.”

What a pleasant distraction it turned out to be. Lanning herself will be $192,000 richer for three weeks’ work with the Delhi Capitals. Her teammate, Ash Gardner, will earn three times that playing for the Gujarat Giants. The allrounder’s figure of $558,000 is more than Sam Kerr pockets in a season with Chelsea and more than the WNBA’s top earner, Jackie Young.

If that sounds like a watershed moment, it’s perhaps because it is. And it is not the only one this past week. The NRLW made its own wage-related headlines on Tuesday, to the effect that the next (agreed in principle) collective bargaining agreement will bring with it a $1.5m salary cap in 2027, at an average salary of $62,500. Women’s rugby, too, is making moves, with news on the weekend that Rugby Australia will begin contracting the Wallaroos.

In other words, things are happening in women’s sport. That is a sentence used quite a few times before. Like when 86,174 packed into the MCG for the 2020 Women’s T20 World Cup final, or in 2017 when people were still queueing at half-time to get into an already-full Princes Park to watch the inaugural AFLW match, or last November when the Women’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand broke all-time attendance