The PSL’s broadcaster wants a January window, and three of its four main venues sit in Punjab’s winter fog

Moving Pakistan’s T20 league to January would take it out of the IPL’s shadow and drop it straight into the Big Bash and SA20’s. That is the trade the PCB and its franchise owners are now arguing over.

The PCB and the owners of the eight PSL franchises spent part of their governing council meeting in London on 1 September talking about moving next year’s tournament to January. They came out of it wanting different things.

The broadcaster wants January

The proposal came from Walee Technologies, which holds the league’s broadcast and digital rights inside Pakistan until 2029. Its case is about advertising money rather than cricket. April and May land just after Ramazan, by which point companies have already burned through their marketing and television budgets, so the ad market the PSL sells into is close to empty by the time the first ball is bowled.

The owners are not sold. Their preference is to keep the April window. Part of that is a straightforward commercial worry: they want the broadcast revenue owed to them paid in full whichever month the league is played in, and they have seen the returns from the television deal come in below expectations. Under the agreement between the franchises and the board, the eight teams take 95 per cent of broadcast revenue from the central pool, so the health of Walee’s ad sales is their problem too.

Walee’s position in all this is unusual. It is not only the rights holder. It also owns Rawalpindiz, one of the eight teams, bought for a reported 2.45 billion rupees and rebranded in February when the league went from six sides to eight. The broadcaster pushing for a new window is sitting on the other side of the table as well.

January brings the player problem back

The first nine editions, from 2016 to 2024, were played in February and March. The last two got pushed into April and May, first by the Champions Trophy that Pakistan hosted in February and March 2025, then by this year’s T20 World Cup. Both of those editions ran alongside the IPL.

That overlap sounds ruinous and was not, because the two leagues do not fish in the same pond. The IPL takes Indian players, who do not play in the PSL anyway, and no other franchise competition was open in those weeks. Pakistan’s league had the rest of the overseas market to itself for the first time in years.

January undoes that. The Big Bash runs from 12 December to a final on 26 January this season, and the SA20 has occupied roughly the same weeks since it started. Both pay well for the overseas T20 professionals the PSL needs to fill its squads. Moving early would hand the league back a problem it had accidentally solved.

Fog in Punjab, and a Karachi start

Then there is the weather. Three of the four traditional PSL venues, Lahore, Multan and Rawalpindi, sit in Punjab, where January and February nights drop into single figures and fog can make an evening game unwatchable, both in the ground and on air. One suggested fix is to open the tournament in Karachi, where winter stays moderate, and move north to Punjab and Peshawar in the later weeks as the cold eases.

The international calendar, at least, leaves room. Pakistan’s home season is front-loaded: Sri Lanka arrive for three T20Is at Rawalpindi from 9 October, a seven-match one-day tri-series with Sri Lanka and England runs from 18 to 31 October, and England play two Tests, at Rawalpindi from 9 November and Lahore from 17 November. New Zealand then come in March for two Tests, Pakistan’s last World Test Championship assignment of this cycle. The weeks in between are the emptiest stretch on the board.

Esports and a second tournament

The window was not the only item on the agenda. The governing council also looked at pushing the league into esports, a fast-growing market in Pakistan, with an eye on the younger audience it might bring in. Behind that sits an uncomfortable admission from the franchise side: interest in the PSL has been sliding, and Pakistan’s results across formats are a large part of why.

The board floated a separate idea of its own, a mid-year tournament staged inside the existing rights agreement, which would give the teams and the broadcaster another revenue stream without reopening the contract.

Nothing has been settled. Peshawar Zalmi are still the holders, and nobody yet knows which month they will be playing to keep the trophy.

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