Before the auction, teams were allowed to make a maximum of four direct signings, meaning established internationals such as England captain Nat Sciver-Brunt and spinner Sophie Ecclestone, along with overseas stars Ellyse Perry and Smriti Mandhana, had already been snapped up.
Sciver-Brunt and pace bowler Lauren Bell were the most lucrative pre-signings, bought for £140,000 by Trent Rockets and Southern Brave respectively.
In the women’s Hundred, teams have £880,000 to assemble their squads. It is the second most lucrative women’s cricket league in the world, behind India’s Women’s Premier League (WPL) with its pot of about £1.3m.
India batter Mandhana, a Hundred pre-signing for Manchester Super Giants for £90,000, is the highest-paid player in the WPL, on about £370,000.
The sums spent on some of the players for the latest edition of the women’s Hundred are a huge increase on a salaries available to women in the first season of the competition in 2021, when the highest wage available was £15,000.
The lowest base price for women in the auction is £15,000, and there was criticism from Sam Billings, a Hundred-winning captain with Oval Invincibles, now MI London.
“Auction will always only benefit a few and probably deserved for those few players,” Billings wrote on X.
“However, the disparity is too much. The draft structure was clearly far better from an overall player standpoint. As players we did feed this back.”
In total, the eight franchises are investing up to £7.2m in salaries for the women’s Hundred alone in 2026. As a commercial return, some are expecting to break even within two years.
In February BBC Sport reported that the four Hundred franchises linked to teams in the Indian Premier League would not consider buying players from Pakistan.
The England and Wales Cricket Board and the eight franchises then released a joint statement saying “players must not be excluded on the grounds of their nationality”.
There are two Pakistan players – Fatima Sana and Sadia Iqbal – in the women’s auction. A Pakistani woman is yet to feature in the Hundred and neither Sana nor Iqbal is expected to be bought on Wednesday.
There are 17 Pakistan players in the men’s auction, with pace bowlers Haris Rauf and Shaheen Afridi and spinner Usman Tariq among those who could attract attention.
