Pakistan players’ Abu Dhabi T10 spots in doubt as PCB demands $10,000 per NOC
Sheikh Zayed Cricket Stadium in Abu Dhabi — file photo (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0). The Abu Dhabi T10 is due to start here on November 7, but Pakistani players' participation is stuck over the NOC fee.
The Abu Dhabi T10 starts on November 7, but Pakistani players may not be there. The Pakistan Cricket Board has blocked their no-objection certificates unless the league pays $10,000 for every NOC it issues, and the demand landed only days before the tournament, leaving franchises scrambling for replacements.
Sixteen Pakistanis picked across five teams
Five of the six teams picked 16 Pakistani cricketers in the draft on September 30. The list runs from Naseem Shah and Shadab Khan to Fakhar Zaman, Mohammad Amir, Iftikhar Ahmed, Faheem Ashraf and Azam Khan. The league applied for the NOCs soon after the draft. The PCB, according to officials, only communicated its $10,000 demand at the start of this week.
Some players ready to pay out of their own salaries
With team owners balking at the extra charge, some players were planning to pay the fee themselves, out of their own salaries, rather than miss the tournament. Mediation was tried. It did not settle the matter, and teams are now lining up replacements while the clock runs down to Friday’s start.
The same row played out over Nepal last month
This is not a new fight. Last month the PCB withheld NOCs for the Nepal Premier League, asking $25,000 per player. Hussain Talat and Jahandad Khan stayed on and played in Nepal; most of the others came home without featuring. The board’s argument, as one official has put it, is about reciprocity: players from Nepal and the UAE are not in anything like the same demand in the PSL as Pakistani players are in their leagues, so the PCB charges for the clearance. The fee has surfaced on and off ever since the ILT20 launched.
A new policy, still wrapped in confusion
The PCB did overhaul its NOC policy in the new central contracts. T20 specialists, in Track C, had the cap on foreign T20 and T10 tournaments removed, with availability for national duty the only condition. Dual-format players in Track AB are allowed one league a year and white-ball specialists in Track BC two; red-ball specialists in Track A are allowed none. But the 2025-26 contracts lapsed on June 30, the new contracts have not been announced, and it remains unclear which players sit in which track.
Overseas doors were already narrowing
Even without this row, opportunities abroad have been thinning for Pakistani players. They are frozen out of the IPL, and no Pakistani has appeared in the SA20, where every team is owned by an IPL franchise. Abrar Ahmed turning out for Sunrisers Leeds in the Hundred and Usman Tariq playing in the Caribbean Premier League are the exceptions, not the rule. The PCB has not responded to queries on the T10 demand.
