Imran Khan was right about regional cricket because talent rises through competition, and the system that resisted his reform implemented only its narrowest part, abandoned the workers it was meant to transfer and then used their suffering to restore departmental control.
Pakistan cricket has one standard for the player and another for the people who run it. A batsman fails for three matches and loses his place, a bowler loses pace and returns to domestic cricket, and a selector can end a career with one decision, and yet Auditor General observations reported by Geo News for 2023-24 exceeded Rs6 billion. They included a Rs198 million surface-travel contract awarded without open competition, a reported Rs439.9 million loss from media rights sold below the reserve price, Rs22.5 million wasted on hired coasters, irregular international broadcasting rights worth Rs27.4 million and Rs5.3 billion in sponsorship payments the PCB had failed to recover.
The audit also questioned Rs4.17 million in utility, fuel and hotel benefits paid to the current chairman while he simultaneously served as federal interior minister. PCB management disputed several findings and defended the payments under its bylaws. Audit rejected the defence of the chairman’s dual benefits and ordered recovery of Rs1.16 million in hotel costs. These observations identify questioned transactions rather than criminal guilt, but the comparison with the player is devastating: the PCB found Rs2.4 million for one official residence’s utility bills and Rs563,000 for fuel, and yet 192 domestic cricketers spent much of the 2022-23 season waiting for contracts and salaries while inflation exceeded 20 per cent.
Look at what the system teaches a young cricketer. Runs matter, but a recommendation can matter more. Fitness matters, but belonging to the right department can protect a place. Performance matters, but the structure itself can disappear when the government changes. The boy is told to work harder while the people above him rewrite the competition, appoint one another and refuse to publish the decisions that control his future.
Imran Khan’s argument began from the simplest fact in sport: the best improve only when they compete against the best. Pakistan’s abundant talent has been trapped inside a system too weak to make performance defeat influence. A bank can employ a cricketer and a gas company can pay him well, but neither institution represents Faisalabad, Peshawar, Karachi or Quetta, and neither should decide which players reach Pakistan’s highest domestic level.
The 2019 reform was right, while the machinery responsible for carrying it out delivered only the contraction at the top. Around 400 cricketers lost livelihoods tied to departmental teams, about 200 curators, groundsmen and regional workers were displaced, and the new system initially offered only 192 domestic contracts. The PCB removed teams before it built the paid regional pyramid and the state ended an employment structure before its administrators secured salaries, pensions and transfers for the workers inside it. Those were failures of implementation by institutions that knew how many people depended on the old arrangement, and the defenders of patronage then used the damage as proof that Khan’s reform had been wrong.
Competition is the only honest selector
In September 2020, Khan defended the regional structure in the language he had used throughout his cricketing life. Pakistan possessed unmatched talent, club players were reaching international cricket without a serious domestic route, and stronger competition would force better players forward. He pointed to Australia because its states had identities, grounds, supporters and a visible route into the national side. The comparison concerned competitive structure, not Australian wages or social protection.
The logic is direct: twenty weak teams allow ordinary players with strong connections to survive, while a smaller and stronger premier division makes every place difficult to win. Regions give the teams an identity that a child can understand and club and district results give him a route he can follow, allowing the player with no uncle in a department to answer a recommendation with runs, wickets and a public record.
The PCB reduced the first-class level to six teams before it constructed the system Khan had argued for beneath them. It produced associations on paper faster than paid second teams, functioning grounds, district calendars and worker protection. Pakistan then judged the idea of regional cricket through an implementation that withheld the structure required for regional cricket to work, and restored the departmental order before the new pyramid received a fair season to mature.
The resistance was public before the reform began. In February 2019, departments rejected the proposed role of sponsoring regions because they wanted to retain their own teams, while regional officials warned that powerful departmental heads on the PCB Board of Governors were suppressing elected associations. Khan was trying to remove institutions from elite selection, and those institutions already held seats inside the board being asked to remove them. Pakistan called the resulting obstruction consultation.
Go to a neglected club ground and ask the boy batting there how he reaches first-class cricket. He should be able to name the district competition, regional second side, first-class team and performance standard at every step. If his answer instead depends on which organisation is hiring, who controls its sports quota and whose telephone call reaches a selector, Pakistan has selected the connection before it has selected the cricketer.
A job cannot own a player’s future
For decades, WAPDA, SNGPL, SSGC, PIA, KRL, PTV, National Bank and State Bank gave cricketers something the PCB could not guarantee: a salary that might continue after a bad season. A departmental job could keep a family in one city, provide a pension path and leave a player with work when his knees no longer allowed him to bowl. In a country where sporting careers are fragile and social protection is thin, that security mattered.
A 33-year-old first-class cricketer who never receives a Pakistan cap may still have built an honourable cricketing life. He may want to raise children near his parents in Faisalabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi or Multan, remain in competitive local cricket and keep a permanent job. The system should honour that life. The PCB’s implementation reduced contracted places before creating the paid district and second-team cricket that should have absorbed experienced players, turning people Khan’s regional pyramid needed into casualties of an administrative shortcut.
Employment gave the department a duty to its worker rather than ownership of elite cricket, because a gas utility cannot represent the people of Faisalabad and a bank has no cricketing constituency in Peshawar. A public corporation can employ athletes, fund grounds and sponsor academies without controlling a first-class team, its selection and the job attached to that selection. Under the departmental model, one institutional chain could influence whether a player was hired, whether he played and whether he remained economically secure, making obedience rational and dissent expensive even when no envelope changed hands.
Pakistanis know this mechanism as sifarish. Sometimes it is a direct call. More often it is an announcement that reaches one club before another, a trial list built around familiar names, an employee retained after performances decline, a sports-quota post shaped for a preferred player or a selector whose institutional relationship is never declared. The public cannot examine most of these decisions because selection minutes, scoring criteria, conflicts and employment records are not routinely published. Opaque discretion becomes the pathway, and the player outside the network must defeat both the bowler and the office.
Many departmental coaches and administrators served cricket honestly, but their institutions received the power to hold employment, selection and survival inside the same closed room. Khan was right to open the door.
Pakistan needed regions and built only the top floor
The 2019 PCB Constitution replaced departments and the older regional structure with six cricket associations and 90 city cricket associations. Central Punjab, Southern Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Northern formed the first-class level, while clubs and cities were supposed to supply a visible route upward. The PCB offered 192 domestic contracts and later divided them into performance-based categories.
The principle was clean. A cricketer should begin in a club, move through district and city competition, represent a region and reach first-class cricket through published performance. The teams at the top should belong to communities that can watch them, criticise them and identify with them. Australia does not ask a bank’s human-resources division to represent New South Wales, and England does not make a utility company the gatekeeper for Yorkshire. Those countries are richer than Pakistan, but wealth does not explain why a gas company should control a first-class place. Pakistan’s weaker social protection strengthens the case for protecting the employee; it does not strengthen the department’s claim over selection.
The six-team level increased concentration and could raise competitive standards, but the pyramid below it was not built fast enough. Ninety city associations on paper did not automatically create accredited clubs, functioning grounds, coaches, transport or salaries, and six first-class squads were too narrow for a country of Pakistan’s population without a second level carrying professional contracts and genuine promotion.
Khan refused a 2020 delegation’s request to restore departments, and he was right to refuse because restoring control would have buried the reform before the PCB completed it. One member of the delegation admitted the force of Khan’s argument while objecting to the speed of implementation: the structure could not be changed in one move without an alternative for cricketers. The PCB and the relevant state institutions owed those cricketers a labour transition alongside the sporting reform.
Instead, the regional structure inherited the PCB’s own failures. In December 2019, the board said its audit of 63 grounds developed or supported by the PCB found “staggering mismanagement and misuse of valuable funds” and deplorable conditions. The PCB also acknowledged that it had begun paying curators directly in 2010 after complaints that regions had delayed or reduced their wages. The evidence showed that regional cricket without audited money, elected local bodies and enforceable labour standards could reproduce the same abuse under a geographic name.
The PCB must earn the trust it demands
The board’s resistance to scrutiny is documented beyond the latest audit. In 2022, the Pakistan Information Commission considered an appeal after the PCB did not initially provide requested records about the selection criteria, candidates, contract and financial package for the head of women’s cricket, along with contractual information about PCB officeholders. The PCB argued that it operated independently, appointed people on merit and could withhold remaining details under statutory exemptions and confidentiality clauses.
The Pakistan Information Commission rejected the broad claim. It held that the PCB is a public body under the Right of Access to Information Act and that contracts signed by a public body are public documents subject only to specific, severable exemptions. The order also recorded the public subsidy beneath the board’s claim of financial independence: the PCB paid Rs1,000 a year for about 180 kanals at Gaddafi Stadium and Rs1,210 per acre annually for leased government land in Karachi. Pakistan gave the board valuable public assets at token rent, and yet a citizen needed an appeal to obtain information about how it selected and paid officials.
The same institutional habits appear across decades. An audit of the 2004 home series against India found that the contract for 3,000 fibreglass chairs at Karachi’s National Stadium had been awarded verbally without competing quotations and reported a Rs30 million loss connected to ticket sales and distribution. The Auditor General’s review of 2004 to 2008 later questioned Rs10.744 million paid under different heads to a former chief operating officer and described several senior appointments as non-transparent, including one made without advertising the post or conducting the stated selection process.
The 2023-24 figures are larger, but the conduct is familiar: restricted competition, weak documentation, unrecovered money, appointments or benefits defended after audit and an institution insisting that autonomy reduces the public’s right to inspect it. You cannot separate that record from domestic cricket because the same PCB approves associations, recognises clubs, writes contract categories, appoints selectors and decides which structure will exist next year. A board that hides how it spends money cannot ask a young player to trust how it spends his career.
The documents establish the governing culture without an invented story about a talented boy rejected after refusing a bribe. Public land is subsidised, contracts resist disclosure, auditors repeatedly identify non-competitive awards and players are expected to trust that the closed selection room operates by merit alone.
The old system returned with the old power
In December 2022, after Khan’s government had been removed, the 2019 Constitution was repealed. On January 2, 2023, the PCB restored the 2014 framework, including 16 regional associations and departmental or service organisations. The board presented the decision as a rescue of hundreds of cricketers and a return to a “tried, tested and winning” model. The workers needed rescue, but the old model deserved no such revival.
The restoration also returned departmental influence to PCB governance. Under the 2014 framework, departmental representatives occupy seats on the Board of Governors alongside regional representatives and patron nominees. Employers with teams therefore help govern the competitions in which their teams participate. No fair competition should allow a contestant into the room where the rules and money are decided.
By 2025-26, the PCB had expanded departmental cricket into three tiers. In June 2026, it raised the annual participation fee from Rs5 million to Rs15 million and required Grade-I departments to pay players at least Rs125,000 a month or Rs1.5 million annually. The salary floor is overdue and should be enforced. But a structure financed through increasingly expensive institutional entry does not create a public pathway. It sorts departments by their ability to pay and leaves players dependent on which employers decide that cricket still serves corporate prestige.
The PCB can raise the fee next year, merge a tier, change a qualification rule or alter which competitions count toward selection. In 2025, its selection criteria for the domestic season again drew controversy over which tournaments and prior performances would qualify. When the rules keep moving, a cricketer learns that last season’s scorecard has an expiry date while proximity to the next administrator does not.
That is why administrative churn becomes a market for favour. The prime minister serves as PCB patron, nominates candidates or management arrangements, and changes in government have repeatedly brought new chairmen, constitutions and domestic maps. Pakistan calls the board autonomous while political power determines who gets to redesign it, producing patronage with a boundary rope instead of public accountability or sporting independence.
Protect the worker and complete the reform
The correct response in 2019 was a verified employment guarantee for every existing departmental cricketer and support worker. Departments should have been prohibited from terminating employees solely because their first-class teams lost elite status. The PCB and federal government should have funded a multi-year wage bridge where genuine posts could not continue, with pension credits, health insurance and injury protection preserved during the transition.
Older cricketers should have received paid routes into coaching, scouting, umpiring, scoring, grounds management, fitness, school cricket and district administration. Curators and groundsmen should have been transferred into properly constituted regional bodies on protected contracts. Every payroll required an independent audit so real workers were protected without allowing ghost positions to hide behind welfare.
Pakistan kept forcing the worker’s security and the department’s selection power into the same argument. The worker has a right to his job, pension and dignity, while the department has no right to own elite selection. A permanent job can survive without a first-class team, and a regional first-class system can grow without discarding the people who maintained the old one.
The institutions executing the reform failed to construct that bridge and handed opponents a human case for reversal. Khan had supplied the sporting principle and held his ground when departments demanded their teams back, while the PCB and state administration left displaced players asking about rent, school fees and whether reform included their families. Protecting those workers would have completed Khan’s policy and deprived the old order of the grievance it later used to return.
Answer the case for departments
Supporters of departmental cricket can point to decades of Pakistan players developed while departments dominated the first-class game. The record is real, but it proves that talented cricketers found employment inside the only funded system available to them. It does not prove that the employer needed to own the team. Pakistan also produced great players despite broken club grounds, unstable schedules and closed selection, and nobody would defend those conditions because Wasim Akram once survived them.
The employment defence is stronger. Families did live on departmental salaries, older players remained in the game and public corporations carried costs the PCB avoided. That is an argument for binding employment protection and for making departments finance cricket through audited sponsorship. Giving an employer control over a player’s selection because it pays his wage is like giving a scholarship sponsor control over the examination result. The money deserves recognition and the recipient deserves security, but the result must belong to an independent system.
The talent-pool objection also confuses the summit with the mountain. Six first-class teams alone did reduce paid places and exclude too many cricketers, while a complete regional pyramid would place a hard premier division above paid second teams, district cricket and thousands of functioning club places. Khan was right that the best must play the best. Pakistan can create that pressure at the top without telling everybody below it to go home.
The final defence says Pakistan lacks the institutions to run clean regions. The audits of grounds and the history of regional mismanagement give that objection force, and yet departments do not cure institutional weakness because their decisions are even harder for the public to inspect. The answer is to publish the money, criteria, votes, contracts and appeals, then remove officials who violate them. Pakistan cannot answer failed governance by surrendering cricket to organisations whose primary public purpose is banking, electricity, gas or television.
Build the regional system properly
Pakistan needs a domestic constitution that survives changes of government. Parliament should define the system’s public obligations in law and leave playing regulations to an independent domestic-cricket authority inside the PCB, protected by fixed terms, published removal grounds and annual parliamentary audit. The prime minister should lose the power to install the board through patron nominations. Regional representatives should reach the governing body through elections conducted under a public register, while departments that sponsor cricket should hold no vote over selection rules, competition entry or central grants.
The map must be large enough to find talent and small enough to sustain serious competition. Six first-class teams narrowed the top level before the lower floors could carry the players excluded from it. A workable system begins with eight to twelve regional first-class organisations whose boundaries follow established cricket populations, travel routes and existing facilities rather than provincial political convenience. The final number should follow a published census of registered clubs, grounds, active players and travel costs. Karachi cannot be treated as administratively identical to a thinly populated region, and Balochistan cannot be handed an enormous map without the transport budget required to cross it.
Each regional organisation should be a non-profit public-interest body with audited accounts, elected club delegates, one players’ representative, one women’s-cricket representative and independent finance and safeguarding members. No serving politician, PCB employee, departmental team official, betting-company representative or person holding a procurement contract with the region should sit on its board. Terms should be limited, related-party transactions disclosed within fourteen days and meeting minutes published after commercially sensitive details are removed under a stated rule.
Four levels and one visible route
The first level belongs to clubs. Every club must register its officers, home ground, coaches, squads and accounts on a national portal before entering an official competition. Registration cannot become another bribe point, so the requirements must be objective: a minimum number of active players, access to a playable ground, safeguarding compliance, transparent membership and completion of a scheduled league. A rejected club should receive written reasons and an appeal to a body outside the district association.
District cricket forms the second level. District leagues should run home-and-away competitions in red-ball and limited-overs cricket on dates announced before the season. Scorecards, playing conditions, umpire appointments and disciplinary decisions must appear online within forty-eight hours. District squads should be selected from club performance, with open trials reserved for players returning from injury, education abroad or areas where no accredited club yet exists. Trials cannot replace a season of evidence because the private trial is where the recommendation call defeats the scorebook.
The third level should contain regional second divisions with paid contracts, promotion and relegation. Each region needs at least two squads below its first-class side, including an under-23 development team and an open-age second team where an experienced 34-year-old can still earn through performance. District teams should qualify for this level through results rather than invitation. Promotion must carry money, fixtures and access to better facilities; relegation must follow a published table, not a chairman’s decision after the season.
The fourth level is the premier regional championship. Every side should play enough first-class cricket to test technique across conditions, with a balanced home-and-away schedule and a separate one-day competition. The calendar must be published for three seasons at a time, subject only to weather, security and international scheduling changes explained in writing. Pakistan has spent too many years asking players to prepare for competitions whose formats, teams and selection value change with the officeholder.
Movement between all four levels should be recorded on one public player profile. Runs, wickets, minutes played, fitness availability, disciplinary findings and selection history should travel with the player from club to district and region. Statistics cannot make every judgment, but they can expose a selector who ignores two seasons of production for a familiar name. The system should allow every Pakistani to see how a player reached the first-class dressing room.
Selection must leave a record
Regional selectors should apply through public advertisements and serve fixed, staggered terms. The appointing panel should include a former player elected by registered domestic cricketers, an independent statistician and a regional board member barred from participating if a family, business or departmental relationship creates a conflict. Selectors must declare employment, agency, club and family connections before every squad meeting.
The criteria should be published before the first ball of the season. A region may weigh recent form, multi-season performance, fitness, role balance and development potential, but it must state the weighting and cannot invent a new qualifying tournament after results are known. Shortlisted squads, reserve lists and injury replacements should be published with concise reasons tied to those criteria. A player denied selection cannot demand a place, but he is entitled to know which rule defeated him.
Appeals should address process rather than cricketing opinion. An independent panel can examine an undeclared conflict, a missing scorecard, an ineligible selection or a criterion changed after the deadline without deciding whether one cover drive looks better than another. Proven interference should remove the selector, reopen the affected decision and trigger publication of the finding. Sifarish survives because everyone knows it happened and nobody has to sign for it. Make them sign.
Pay the player before the administrator
Every tier above club cricket needs a published minimum payment. District players should receive match fees, travel, meals, equipment support and injury cover. Regional second-division players need seasonal retainers, while first-class players need twelve-month contracts with pension contributions, medical insurance, maternity protection for women cricketers and guaranteed payment dates. The PCB should place contract money in protected accounts before approving a team for the season, preventing a region from fielding players first and searching for their salaries later.
Contracts should recognise different lives. A young prospect may accept a development retainer and central hostel place. An older player with children may need a higher match fee, local placement and a route into coaching qualifications. Education grants, vocational training and paid off-season work should sit inside the contract system. Pakistan should stop treating every domestic cricketer who misses the national side as waste from the selection process.
A national players’ association, funded by a fixed levy on PCB commercial revenue but governed by players, should negotiate minimum standards and operate a confidential complaints service. Salary delays, harassment, selection pressure and unsafe facilities require a route outside the team hierarchy. Annual reports should state how many complaints were received, resolved and referred for discipline without exposing complainants.
Follow the money from Lahore to the club
The PCB should distribute domestic money through a formula published before each four-year cycle. The formula must account for registered players, women’s and youth teams, verified fixtures, travel distances, ground use and development in underserved districts. A base grant protects smaller regions, while additional money rewards cricket delivered rather than political access. No chairman should be able to rescue an allied association through a private supplementary grant.
Every rupee should appear in a public ledger: the PCB transfer, regional budget, district allocation, club development grant, procurement award and final payment. Contracts above a stated threshold require open tender, beneficial-ownership disclosure and publication of bids after award. The Auditor General should audit the PCB and regional bodies annually, and unresolved observations should remain visible beside management’s response until recovery, adjudication or closure.
Departments, banks and public corporations still have a large role. They can employ cricketers in real jobs, sponsor regional academies, maintain grounds, finance women’s cricket, fund scholarships and underwrite district leagues. Their money should pass through audited agreements that publish the amount, purpose, recipient and performance requirement. A sponsor may place its name on a competition or academy, but it cannot buy a first-class place, appoint selectors or make employment conditional on selection.
Broadcast and digital rights should support the base of the pyramid. A fixed share of net domestic commercial revenue should return to clubs and districts, with another protected share assigned to women’s cricket and underserved regions. The exact percentages belong in the audited four-year plan after revenue and operating costs are published. Inventing a generous number without the accounts would reproduce the same politics the blueprint is meant to remove.
Grounds are part of selection
Talent cannot rise through a ground that has no prepared pitch, changing room, drinking water or scheduled access. The PCB should publish a national inventory of grounds showing ownership, lease terms, condition, booked fixtures and development spending. Independent inspectors should grade pitches and facilities twice a year, while curators receive regional contracts, training and protected wages rather than delayed payments passed through local officials.
Districts with few grounds need transport and accommodation budgets instead of punishment for geography. Public schools, universities, municipal authorities and departments can lease facilities into the system under standard contracts that protect community use. New spending should repair playable local grounds before financing another ceremonial project in a major city. The player in Turbat or Mirpur Khas should encounter a cricket system before he encounters a Lahore office.
The transition requires three protected seasons
The first season should register the people and assets that already exist. The PCB must publish verified lists of departmental players, coaches, curators, grounds, clubs and pending employment claims, then guarantee current workers their salary and pension position while regional bodies are constituted. Club accreditation, selector recruitment, the ground inventory and the public finance portal should begin during this season. No worker should lose income because an administrator missed a deadline.
The second season should operate district leagues and regional second divisions alongside a reduced departmental competition. Players can move into regional contracts without surrendering accrued employment benefits, while departments choose whether to retain them in real jobs, finance the wage bridge or sponsor a regional programme. Independent auditors should certify every transfer and publish unresolved cases.
The third season should establish the full regional championship and end departmental ownership of elite teams. Promotion and relegation begin only after every participating district has completed a full qualifying season under common rules. Workers still inside the transition fund retain arbitration rights, and departments remain employers and sponsors under the published agreements. The old gatekeepers lose selection power only after the workers they employed receive enforceable protection.
An implementation commission should report every ninety days against named deliverables: registered clubs, fixtures completed, contracts paid on time, grounds certified, women’s teams funded, appeals decided and audit objections closed. Its meetings should be public, its data downloadable and its authority expire after the third season. Pakistan does not need another permanent committee built around the failure it was appointed to solve.
Imran Khan was right because he challenged the institutions standing between local performance and elite opportunity. His regional principle remains the only serious route forward, and implementing it now requires the work the PCB left undone: build every level below the first-class side, remove political appointment from domestic governance and guarantee the worker’s income through the change. Pakistan has seen the audit objections, hidden contracts, neglected grounds, unpaid players, departmental resistance and constitutional reversal, and yet Khan’s reform can still survive if every club, selector, payment and promotion leaves a record the next chairman cannot erase.