Seven Shirts a Year: Cricket's Real Transfer Window Is an NOC Office

Last January in the Mirpur press box I put two things side by side: an old scorebook and an open laptop. The scorebook carried one handwritten name — a young left-arm quick who had gone for eighteen in three overs that evening. The laptop carried the same man, in three different shirts, three countries, one season.

I counted twelve months and found seven shirts on that one body.

Outside the dressing room afterwards I heard him on the phone: “Four more games before I go home.” There was no anger in his voice. There was habit. The paper tag from his previous franchise was still hanging off the side pocket of his kit bag. Nobody had bothered to cut it off.

A cricketer's career can no longer be measured by a national team. It has to be measured by a loan ledger.

I left the press box at 46 and found the real draft room. It is not in a stadium. It lives inside an email.

The arithmetic behind it matters. January to February: the ILT20 in the UAE, the SA20 in South Africa, and our own BPL. They overlap almost entirely, and all three pull from the same pool of quicks, all-rounders and finishers. March to May: the IPL, with the PSL squeezed into the gaps. June and July: bilateral series, where a national side finally gets its own players back. August through October: The Hundred, Major League Cricket, the Caribbean Premier League.

In that grid a single player can hold seven different professional addresses in a year. And every single move requires one document — the No Objection Certificate. Without his home board's release letter, he cannot sign anywhere foreign.

The real transfer market operates exactly there. The auction is stagecraft — lighting, cameras, a giant screen with rising bids. The actual contract is signed in a board office, on a single sheet of paper, and nobody streams it.

The auction is for the audience. The NOC is for the player. The player is seated at neither table.

The World Cup is just a hero pick phase with better grass. But what the leagues run outside those matches is far less gentle.

Because ownership no longer stops at one border. Reliance controls Mumbai Indians, MI Emirates, MI Cape Town and the New York franchise. The Knight Riders Group runs Kolkata, Trinbago, Abu Dhabi and Los Angeles. The Chennai group holds Chennai Super Kings, Joburg Super Kings and Texas Super Kings.

So what happens when a player moves between two clubs under one owner? It stops being a transfer. There is no fee, no window, no negotiation, and nobody loses a bid. It is an internal posting — a job transfer wearing cricket clothes.

When Sunil Narine pulls on Kolkata's purple in winter, I no longer blink. A few weeks later he is in Trinbago red, then Abu Dhabi blue and gold. Andre Russell walks the same corridor. Kieron Pollard's MI Emirates and New York shirts are two rooms under one roof. Dewald Brevis plays in Cape Town and New York — same employer. For Faf du Plessis, Joburg Super Kings and Texas Super Kings are not separate buyers.

My old football colleagues find this baffling. In football a loan deal means a transfer. In cricket a loan deal now means a transfer between two branches of one company. I tell them this: football gave me the stadium, esports and cricket gave me the replay angle. And from the replay angle you can see exactly who fouled whom.

Now look at the real loan, the one that happens outside the ownership group.

A small board builds a fast bowler over eight to ten years. First-class cricket, under-19 tours, national nets, the physio's table — the cost, the grounds, the coaches, all of it borne by the small board. Then January arrives with a big league, the board issues an NOC for a fixed percentage, and the player leaves for six weeks.

In those six weeks the franchise takes the best days of the man — fitness, form, confidence. He comes home at the end of the season with the tape off, sometimes with a sore shoulder. And who is holding the risk when he lands? The board that already sold tickets for the next three months receives back a depreciated asset and a fresh medical report.

The house lends out the player; the outside club collects interest on his best weeks. The risk stays with the body, the profit leaves with the ledger.

The largest damage in this structure is not financial. It is institutional memory.

The death-overs playbook is a team's most delicate property — which bowler to which batter, which slower ball to which ground, which side the keeper stands on. That library is built by the same men being in the same room across years. When Mustafizur Rahman returned from bowling for Chennai Super Kings in the 2026 IPL, his slower balls were identical. The fielder assigned to read them was standing on a different ground, trained by a different coach.

A bowling quota looks to me like a resource bar — four overs, four charges. A franchise decides which over to spend the charge in and which over to bank it for. A board never gets that decision. It only gets the battery back and checks the remaining charge.

This is where the BPL's problem sits. Our league lands in a slot where nearly every major franchise competition on earth is already running. So the BPL either gets a tired star arriving late, or it has to pick someone the big leagues did not want. That is not a failure of our market. That is the position of our calendar.

And the money gap has to be stated plainly, because it is what makes every fairness argument collapse. At the 2026 IPL auction, Kolkata Knight Riders bought Mitchell Starc for 24.75 crore rupees — the highest auction price at that time, for roughly six weeks of work. At the next auction, Rishabh Pant went to Lucknow Super Giants for 27 crore. Place either figure next to the annual earnings of a small board's best cricketer and the gap is not something you can explain away by blaming the player's greed.

This is where some of my colleagues say the leagues are eating international cricket and the players have become mercenaries. I agree partly. But the mercenary charge is a simplification.

Players were never the mercenaries. They have always been the least protected stars in the room. The bilateral calendar that existed before 2026 also bought small-board labour cheap — it was just the board doing the haggling, and today it is the owner. The ownership of the loan changed. The worker stayed where he was. The golden age we keep mourning was not fair. It was merely less profitable.

So let me name what I would defend and what I would attack. I would defend the NOC itself, because it is the last lever a small board holds — the right to decide who is available, and when, ahead of which series. But I would attack the fee taken inside that system. The player carries the injury risk in his own body. The board takes a share by signing a sheet of paper. Whoever carries the risk alone should hold the upside alone.

We always reach for the West Indies example: the region that won the T20 World Cup in 2026 and 2026 now reconsiders its first-choice Test XI before every single series. But the leagues are not the only culprit. Two decades of board-versus-players'-association warfare, selection politics, and the slow loss of an audience for the longest format built that picture together. Blaming the leagues alone turns a complicated institutional failure into a one-page memo.

February 2026 brings the T20 World Cup to India and Sri Lanka. January will be full of the ILT20, the SA20 and the BPL — which means the final audition for those squads happens in the most exhausted, most travelled weeks of the year. So here is the question: the bowler who changed shirts seven times this winter — does any small board really have the nerve to put seven World Cup matches on that shoulder?

I still have not closed the scorebook in that Mirpur press box. There is one name written in it, and empty space underneath. What colour the next shirt is may already have been decided in an email I will never be allowed to read.