Cricket South Africa (CSA), earlier this year, decided to come up with a new T20 league, the first edition of the tournament will take place early next year. The competition, CSA T20 League has witnessed great traction for acquiring teams.
The upcoming tournament has six teams and the bids for all of them were won by the owners of the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchises. The entire bidding process was conducted by the audit and consultancy firm, Deloitte.
The five-time IPL winners Mumbai Indians (MI) bagged rights for Cape Town, Chennai Super Kings (CSK) acquired Johannesburg, one of the two new franchises of IPL Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) walked away with Durban, the 2016 IPL winner Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) won Port Elizabeth, Delhi Capitals (DC) attained Pretoria and the inaugural IPL champions Rajasthan Royals (RR) snapped rights for Paarl.
The CSA T20 League is the innovation of Sundar Raman, who is the former COO of IPL. The former South African captain, Graeme Smith has been announced as the League Commissioner. The former international cricketer becomes the first player to head a T20 cricket league.
Delloite has been looking into drafts and agreements of the franchises and the official announcement will be made between Tuesday and Thursday.
CSA also recently cancelled its tour of Australia for an ODI bilateral series in January 2023 for the proper scheduling of the forthcoming T20 league.
With these recent acquisitions in the CSA T20 League, the owners of the IPL teams continue their pursuit of global outreach as they have also acquired teams in the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) and UAE T20 League.