At 6 p.m. on a recent evening, moments after breaking their Ramadan fast, patrons of a popular Rawalpindi café shift their focus to a wall-mounted flat-screen, where the World Cup Pakistan vs. England cricket match is about to air. Behind the counter, a waiter tosses up a cricket ball in between orders, catching it with soft “fwaps,” and a security guard by the door repeatedly leaves his post to check the score.
Cricket is by far the most popular sport in Pakistan, as it is in the rest of the subcontinent. Success can turn a player into a hero for life, as it did 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 game came out looking strong.
“The Pakistan cricket team has been left so far behind its competitors,” grumbles Qazafi ur Rehman, over his cup of chai, while watching Pakistan lose to England. “The public is rapidly losing interest in the game.”
Why We Wrote This
At one time, cricket was a bridge between India and Pakistan. But in recent years, Delhi has increasingly used the sport as an extension of its foreign policy, overshadowed players from Pakistan, and, some argue, changed the spirit of the game.
Once considered a cricket juggernaut, Pakistan is now no more than a middling power. In only one of the three iterations of the game is the national team ranked in the global top five. 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 hedged Pakistan out of high-level leagues, stifling the development of cricket in Pakistan.
“Cricket’s 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.
Rise of the Indian Premier League
India and Pakistan have been antagonists ever since the 1947 partition of British India into two separate countries. In the 79 years since they gained their independence, India and Pakistan have fought four wars and have also taken part in a number of border skirmishes, most recently in May 2025.
But the cricketing relationship between Pakistan and India has historically been a positive one. It was seen as a powerful cultural bridge, as evidenced by the famous “Cricket for Peace” visit in 1987 when an unannounced trip by Pakistani dictator General Zia-ul-Haq to Jaipur helped defuse tensions between the two neighbors.
In the last two decades, however, India’s rise as a cricketing superpower, and its pivot toward a hypernationalistic ideology, has allowed it to effectively marginalize Pakistan from the cricketing arena.
In 2007, India launched the Indian Premier League (IPL), which quickly became cricket’s most competitive tournament. Pakistani players have been excluded from the league since 2008, when India blamed a series of Mumbai terror attacks on Pakistani actors.
“Everything is based around the IPL and if you’re not playing in it, you don’t really stand a chance,” says Mr. Ronay, the journalist. Players from every other cricketing nation are involved in that tournament, he says, meaning Pakistani players are excluded “from all those resources, practice, and everything else constantly driving on every other nation.”
That includes world-class coaching and innovative training methods. “Every franchise in the IPL 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 do not get any such exposure.”
Then there is the financial element. Players in the Indian Premier League are paid upward of $500,000 for a two-month stint, with the top earners making multiples of that amount. By contrast, the average player in the Pakistan Super League, Pakistan’s smaller and less-powerful equivalent of the IPL, earns less than $70,000 over the course of the competition.
All of 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, they have only made the final once.
The spirit of the game
The Indian Premier League is not the only competition from which Pakistani players are being excluded. India’s rise as a cricketing economy – the IPL’s economic impact has been measured at over $10 billion – has allowed it to influence tournaments in other countries.
No Pakistani player has ever been drafted in the SA20, South Africa’s equivalent of the IPL – where all teams also happen to be owned by IPL franchise owners. Now there are reports that the four franchises linked to IPL owners in The Hundred, a relatively new cricket tournament based in England and Wales, may not be considering Pakistani players for their squads either.
“I can’t tell you how ugly and disgusting this is,” says English journalist Peter Oborne. “It cannot go on. If this persists, then there will be calls, which I would support, for the boycott of the competition.”
Nor is the problem confined to India and Pakistan.
Last year, amid escalating geopolitical tensions between India and Bangladesh, IPL franchise Kolkata Knight Riders decided to release a Bangladeshi player from its squad. The decision created a political maelstrom that resulted in Bangladesh refusing to travel to India to play in this year’s World Cup. Ultimately, 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 them globally relevant: the fans.
They may be frustrated with their team’s performance, but the fact is, Pakistanis still watch a lot of cricket, and India-Pakistan matches consistently produce the best ratings. When Pakistan threatened to pull out of this year’s World Cup in solidarity with Bangladesh, stakeholders panicked over the potential loss of revenue. The Pakistani Cricket Board later reversed its boycott, “with the aim of protecting the spirit of cricket.”
Yet Pakistan’s loss to England this week has left its qualification for the semifinals hanging by a thread. It must beat Sri Lanka by a huge margin in Saturday’s game or bow out of the tournament, dashing hopes for an India-Pakistan showdown. Pakistani cricket fans – and many World Cup stakeholders – will be praying for a win.
