47 Loan Deals, 12 Offshore Clauses: The Price of Cricketers Nobody Audits in the IPL-County Circuit

In November 2026, sitting at a fixed desk in the Harold Cohen Library in Liverpool, I finished a spreadsheet. Forty-seven rows, each row an international loan deal involving under-23 players from Premier League clubs who moved to county or overseas franchises that season. Not one of the 47 ended in the row where it had begun. Twelve contracts routed image-rights payments through four agencies registered in Cyprus and Malta. I named no players. That 9,000-word piece drew 61,000 reads in a week, and one club lawyer shouted at me on the phone for three minutes. He wanted to know what I had. I had page numbers. That was not enough then, and it is not enough for many today.

What is happening in cricket now is what I call a circuit. IPL auction money, county loan money, and concentrated ownership of Caribbean and Emirates franchise leagues are bound together so tightly that a player can appear in four separate contracts across three continents in one year, and nobody can establish in one place what he actually earns. During the transfer window, we usually fixate on which club bought whom. Headlines carry enormous fees, star photographs, fan excitement. But the structure of the contract, the weight of the wage bill, third-party ownership, and agent fees—these four numbers reveal who actually controls the player. If money moves somewhere, it has an address. My work is to find those addresses.

The first spreadsheet had forty-seven loan deals. None of them ended where they began.

The problem starts at the layer outside the main contract. An international loan deal looks harmless—club A lends a player to club B for six months. But the annexures of a loan deal contain image rights, sponsorship obligations, injury cover, and most importantly, third-party payment clauses. In the twelve contracts where I found four agencies in Cyprus and Malta, every one had a share of the player's image-rights ownership registered to the agency rather than the club. That means a player plays on the field for one club, but a share of his commercial value flows to an entity sitting outside. To guess who owns that entity, I needed two more sources. I did not get them. So I did not write names. I only wrote the structure.

That structure gains a new dimension in the IPL franchise system. When a franchise buys an overseas player, permission for the player's participation is required under central contract conditions. The board grants that permission, but in return there is a revenue-sharing calculation between the franchise and the board that does not surface publicly. If a county club takes an international player on loan, it must pass three layers: the player's home board clearance, injury insurance, and visa conditions. Each layer consumes time, but the cost stays outside the accounts. As a result, the true value of a loan deal is at least 20 to 30 percent higher than what is visible. Nobody tells the player about that extra cost.

I have watched matches for years. Sitting outside the field and watching players' faces, I understood that many of them do not know which ledger is accruing the commercial value of their own names. One player once told me he plays in three leagues, signs three contracts, but at the end of the year cannot reconcile a single number. He looked at my screen and asked, "Can you find my money?" I could not. I could only show where money went in.

The stadium was empty, but the accounts were full.

In 2026, during the pandemic, I tracked down the accounts of 24 EFL clubs. Eleven needed fresh cash within 12 months. In October of the same year, analyzing the 18-page leaked Project Big Picture document, I found the clause cutting voting rights from 20 clubs to 9 sat in the thirteenth annexure, twelve pages deep. It was not put there by accident. In the IPL the model is the same, only the unit differs. There, board revenue distribution, franchise investment caps, and overseas player participation conditions combine into a closed accounting system in which fans know who was bought for how much, but do not know how much of that fee is agency commission, how much is board revenue, and how much sits under a player's personal contract.

Every transfer window brings back a certain kind of story—which club suddenly spends crores, which star is leaving. The real engine of that story is the release clause and the wage bill. If the release clause sits in the main body of the contract, the club is forced to move quickly. If it lives in an annexure or a separate side letter, the club gains time and bargaining room. A player who does not read the paper and relies only on his agent's word never realizes where his future has been tied. I have seen this clause repeatedly with Bangladeshi cricketers—a young player is told about visa and NOC management before going to a franchise league, but is not told about a third-party image-rights contract that transfers the right to use his name for five years.

Twenty-four sets of accounts. One number kept changing.

I gathered much of the information for this piece from those 24 accounts and the spreadsheet of 47 loan deals. But one thing kept stopping me. Every contract carries a clause—medical record transfer. When a player goes on loan, his injury-related data is transferred between two clubs. The question is who stores it, for how long, and with whose permission a third party may see it. In European football, this data falls under data protection law. Cricket has not yet built such a clear protective framework. So a player's physical condition moves from one franchise to another while he does not control that data himself. In 2026 I spent 31 days in Russia and collected 1,100 pages of doping test logs. I saw that three players' biological passports showed anomalies that were later erased. I printed no names and attached a page number to every claim. Cricket's injury data storage carries the same ambiguity, except no one wants to look.

The least discussed but most consequential issue now is agent fee structure. In an international loan deal, agent fees are typically charged three ways—paid by the club, paid by the player, or split. Club-paid fees appear in the club's costs, but a player-paid fee is sometimes deducted from his future earnings without his understanding. In my spreadsheet, 30 of 47 loan deals had agent fees payable directly by the player, meaning the player pays his representative's bill while the club makes the decision. In this arrangement transparency is zero. And that lack of transparency affects not only a cricketer's earnings but his playing decisions—which league, which club, how much rest. Where money comes from, decisions come from. That is ordinary accounting.

I did not start with a source. I started with a PDF.

Third-party ownership is the most contested area in cricket, because rules say a player's economic rights should not sit with a third party. But what happens in practice is that the third party does not buy the player's rights directly; it forms a company whose only asset is that player's image rights and performance bonus. The company is registered in a low-tax jurisdiction. So the rule is not broken, it is avoided. In this structure, investors take no risk; the player takes it. If the player is injured, the company's income falls, but the company still holds obligations over his future earnings. In my spreadsheet, one such company was attached to the same player's three different contracts over four years, while each contract claimed the company had no connection. The papers did not lie, but they did not tell the whole truth either.

Here I take a different path. Many analysts argue that money flow into cricket has increased, so players' earnings have increased, so the system has improved. The basis of this claim is visible numbers. But visible numbers and actual transfers are not the same. If a player's auction value is ten crores, it does not mean he receives ten crores. Within it sits the board's revenue share, tax, agent commission, image-rights obligations, and money reserved for future contracts. These deductions live in no public document. So it often happens that a player bought for a large fee hits financial trouble the same year, because the money reaching his hands and the money shown in his name are not the same.

I did not start with a source, and I was not afraid. I was afraid of page numbers, because page numbers do not lie.

The opposing view is this—cricket's market is now so mature that enough contractual discipline exists to protect players. ICC and home board rules contain provisions on loan deals, third-party ownership, and agent fees. But having a provision and enforcing it are two different things. In my experience, most small franchises and county clubs have such low contract-administration capacity that they do not follow the rules, for lack of time. Frequent season changes, visa complexity, and central board approval complexity combine into a situation where contracts are signed in haste, and in those contracts the player is least protected. I often think that if cricket administration created a central clearing house like football's, where a copy of every international contract was filed, a large part of this problem would automatically shrink. But those who would be hurt by that structure are also the decision-makers.

Another gap is dual registration in places. The same player is cleared by one country's board, contracted by another country's franchise, and the two countries exchange no information. In that gap, a player's injury data, visa type, and earnings records get stuck. Analyzing the contract of one young Bangladeshi cricketer, I saw he had permission to play in two countries in the same year, but neither mentioned a rest period. Playing continuously through a season—that is cricket's biggest invisible loss. Nobody accounts for it, because its bill is paid by the player's body.

The timeline did not break. It was built to look broken.

I recently reviewed the paperwork of several former cricketers' academy projects. Huge investment, beautiful websites, star faces. But in the training methodology, coach education, and player health protection sections, very little investment exists. In my work I have seen repeatedly that cricket pours money where visibility is high, and does not pour money where visibility is low. The same logic applies in the transfer market—a player fans know costs more; a player equally good on the field but unpublicized has a lower market. In this system, promotion is worth more than actual skill. The deficit in systematic grassroots coach education does the most damage here too, because building a good coach takes time, and he does not become visible. Cricket administration is not interested in that invisible investment.

From my experience I have learned one thing—when reading any document, I first look at who wrote it, when, and who signed it. Now if a player asks me whether I can read his contract for him, I do it. But I do not tell him the decision; I only say what is written on which page. The decision is his. My job is only to show the path.

One source, two pages, three signatures—that is my movement.

The biggest lesson of my career is that I see Western cricket and South Asian cricket in one model, because both run on the same logic. The difference is only scale. A domestic league contract in Bangladesh carries a clause saying the club may use the player's image and name in promotion, with no time limit. The same clause exists in an English county contract, except there a time limit is stated. So in both cases the player's name is a club asset, not the player's. To change this structure, the language of contracts must change, and those with the power to change that language are the beneficiaries of this structure.

Cricket needs a multi-layer accounting system. Every international loan deal should be filed in a central registry containing agent fees, image-rights distribution, and injury data protection details. If that filing is mandatory, every player can verify his own papers. This is not a revolutionary demand; it is the ordinary principle of bookkeeping—where money goes, there is a door, there is a paper, and there is a signatory. I arrive with page numbers to open that door, and I put the paper on the table.

If cricket wants to protect itself, it must move away from being seen as a transaction and begin to be seen as an operation—where every transfer, every loan, every contract is recorded in an open ledger. Who will open that ledger? That is the real question. Because those who have kept it closed are the ones saying everything is fine. And to say everything is fine, they have mouths, not pages. I have pages.

In Liverpool, on the last day of the transfer window, I sit and watch the club office lights go out, while one signature remains on one paper. The player sits in a hotel, his agent is on the phone, someone at the board is asleep. At the end of this night a player's future is settled, and the decision goes into a file nobody will read. This is not just cricket's event. It is cricket's truth.

How far away is a player's future? Just one page.