Most Popular Cricket Tournaments in the World (2026 Rankings)

The Indian Premier League is the most popular cricket tournament in the world in 2026, ranked by commercial value, media rights, and combined audience. A 2025 Houlihan Lokey study put the IPL’s overall business worth at $18.5 billion, and its 2025 season pulled a combined TV-and-digital audience north of 1 billion viewers. Behind it sit the ICC’s global showpieces — the Men’s Cricket World Cup, T20 World Cup, and Champions Trophy — plus a widening tier of franchise leagues turning cricket into a near year-round broadcast product.

How We Ranked These Tournaments

There is no single, universally published cricket-audience index the way Nielsen ratings work for US TV, so this ranking combines the closest available proxies: independent franchise valuations (Houlihan Lokey), broadcaster-reported viewing minutes and peak concurrent audiences (ICC, Disney Star, SuperSport, Star India), in-stadium attendance where the tournament is gate-driven, and media rights values. Every figure below is cross-checked against at least two independent reports and reflects the most recent completed season as of August 2026. Where a league’s numbers are trending down rather than up, that is flagged rather than smoothed over.

Most Popular Cricket Tournaments at a Glance

Tournament	Format	Organizer	Signature 2025-26 Stat	Primary Market
Indian Premier League (IPL)	T20	BCCI	$18.5B business value (2025)	India + global
ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup	ODI	ICC	87.6B live-viewing minutes (2023 final)	Global
ICC Men’s T20 World Cup	T20	ICC	India’s 3rd title, March 2026	Global
ICC Champions Trophy	ODI	ICC	368B viewing minutes (2025 edition)	Global, India-led
ICC World Test Championship Final	Test	ICC	109,227 attendance at Lord’s (2025)	Global
Big Bash League (BBL)	T20	Cricket Australia	~21,400 avg. attendance/match (2024-25)	Australia + UK
Pakistan Super League (PSL)	T20	PCB	48.5B streaming minutes, PSL X (2025)	Pakistan + diaspora
Caribbean Premier League (CPL)	T20	CPL T20 Inc.	1.17B combined viewers, record (2025)	Caribbean + South Asia
SA20	T20	Cricket South Africa	2.37M unique viewers, +47% YoY (2025)	South Africa
The Hundred	100-ball	ECB	580,000 tickets sold (2025)	United Kingdom

1. The IPL Is Cricket’s Runaway No. 1

Nothing else in the sport is close. Houlihan Lokey’s 2025 valuation study put the IPL’s overall business at $18.5 billion, up 12.9% year-on-year, with the league’s stand-alone brand worth $3.9 billion. Its 2023-27 media rights cycle sold for $6.2 billion across Disney Star, Viacom18, and Times Internet, making it the world’s second-most valuable sports property on a per-match basis, behind only the NFL. The 2025 season drew a combined TV-plus-digital audience of over 1 billion, and the 2024 final was the most-watched cricket broadcast in Indian TV history at 169 million viewers. That kind of money is also why the IPL sets the market for highest-paid cricketers globally. In 2026, Royal Challengers Bengaluru beat Gujarat Titans in the May 31 final to become only the third franchise to defend an IPL title.

ICC’s Global Showpiece Events

ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup (ODI). Held every four years, the 50-over World Cup still produces the single biggest audiences in cricket. The 2023 India-Australia final generated 87.6 billion live-viewing minutes worldwide and a 130-million peak TV audience in India alone, and the tournament broke the 1-trillion-minute barrier overall — records the ICC has confirmed no other cricket event has matched. The next edition arrives in 2027, co-hosted by South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia.

ICC Men’s T20 World Cup. Now cricket’s second-biggest ICC event by reach, the T20 World Cup returned to India and Sri Lanka in February-March 2026, with India beating New Zealand by 96 runs in the Ahmedabad final to claim a third title — the first team to do so. The 2024 final in Barbados had already set a digital high, peaking at 53 million concurrent viewers on Disney+ Hotstar.

ICC Champions Trophy. The 2025 edition, hosted across Pakistan and the UAE, became the most-watched Champions Trophy ever with 368 billion global viewing minutes, up 19% on 2017. India’s final win over New Zealand alone drew 65.3 billion viewing minutes, making it the third most-watched ICC match of all time behind only the 2023 World Cup final and semifinal.

ICC World Test Championship Final. Test cricket’s one truly global event still pulls a crowd: the 2025 final at Lord’s, won by South Africa over Australia, drew 109,227 in-person fans across four days plus 2.94 billion TV minutes in India — the most-watched non-India Test on record, despite India not playing.

The Franchise League Boom Beyond the IPL

Big Bash League (BBL). Cricket Australia’s domestic T20 competition remains the model for prime-time evening cricket, averaging roughly 21,400-22,300 fans per match across the 2024-25 season’s 44 games — the strongest in-stadium draw of any T20 league outside India. It’s frequently compared to the IPL, and the honest answer on whether Big Bash is bigger than IPL is no — not on value or global audience, though it out-draws the IPL on average live attendance.

Pakistan Super League (PSL). PSL X in 2025 was a record season, racking up 48.5 billion cumulative streaming minutes and a 647% jump in digital consumption over the prior year. The 2026 season (PSL 11) told a different story: independent trade reports pegged viewership down roughly 45%, with average views per match falling to about 50 million from 91.7 million, largely blamed on security-driven no-crowd matches. See the full comparison on whether PSL is bigger than IPL.

Caribbean Premier League (CPL). The CPL posted a record 1.17 billion combined digital-and-linear audience in 2025, up 3.5% on 2024, driven by Star India adding Hindi-language highlights for the first time and reaching the South Asian diaspora that fuels much of the league’s growth.

SA20. Cricket South Africa’s three-year-old league is the fastest-growing tournament on this list: total unique viewership climbed 47% year-on-year to 2.37 million in 2025, and the season final drew 688,618 viewers, nearly double Season Two’s 398,615. The 2026 season wrapped in January with Sunrisers Eastern Cape as champions.

The Hundred. England’s 100-ball competition sold 580,000 tickets in 2025 and set records at four different grounds, while the standalone women’s competition broke the global attendance record for a women’s cricket tournament at 349,401 fans. Sky Sports’ audience was up 38% on 2024.

Where the Tournament Landscape Stands in 2026

By mid-2026, the pecking order looks largely settled at the top and unsettled underneath it. The IPL closed its season with RCB’s back-to-back title and no signs of slowing broadcast money. India’s men added a third T20 World Cup, while Australia’s women won a record seventh Women’s T20 World Cup title in England in July. Among the franchise leagues, SA20 and the CPL are still climbing, The Hundred is finally drawing crowds to match its ambition, and the PSL’s sharp 2026 viewership drop is a reminder that a single record season doesn’t guarantee the next one — off-field disruption can undo a year of gains fast.

Cricket’s overall center of gravity remains anchored to Indian broadcast and streaming money, even as the sport spreads into more countries and formats than at any point in its history.