Sport

SA20 has become one of the biggest events on the South African sporting calendar

MI Cape Town players celebrate winning the 2025 Betway SA20 title. (Photo: Arjun Singh SA20 / Sportzpics)

17 Feb 2025

The SA20 has quickly become a massive social gathering in a sport-loving country.

In three short years, the SA20 has grown into a big date on the South African sporting calendar.

At the 2025 tournament final at Wanderers in Johannesburg on Saturday, 8 February – which MI Cape Town won by 76 runs over the Sunrisers Eastern Cape – the stars came out to play.

Two-time Rugby World Cup winner and captain Siya Kolisi was in attendance, enjoying the spectacle at the Bullring, as was his teammate Trevor Nyakane.

sa20 wanderers The start of the SA20 final between MI Cape Town and Sunrisers Eastern Cape at the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg on 8 February 2025.

Wayne Parnell, whose SA20 season three didn’t take off because of an injury – having captained Pretoria Capitals in the first two seasons – was in one of the boxes, entertained by the performances despite not having a horse in the race.

More than half the matches this season were sold out, which is particularly impressive for a tournament that didn’t exist four years ago.

On the field, the entertainment has been enthralling, with sixes raining down in every match. Questions have been raised about when the entertainment will be brought to the rest of the country.

The six teams are placed in four provinces, while people living in the other five either have to travel across provincial borders to catch live action, or watch on television.

“I’ve said from the start, even before season one, that we’re contractually locked down to the six franchises for the first five seasons,” SA20 league commissioner Graeme Smith said. “[And that] we won’t look to expand and that we’d allow for the league to develop and the teams to find their roots and grow.

“I did feel the swell in sentiment of growing and adding new teams. Those are areas, with Cricket South Africa, that we need to sit down and think about how that looks into the future.

“We do get approached by franchises to be involved in the SA20, but for the first five seasons there was a commitment made that we wouldn’t [expand].”

Expansion

With each team contracting around 20 players per team, Smith is wary of watering down the product if new teams are added without commensurate growth in cricket in the country.

“A few areas that we need to consider is that you’d need to add another 30 South African players at least to the league,” Smith said. “One thing that we want to maintain all the time is the strength of the cricket.

MI Cape Town players celebrate winning the 2025 Betway SA20 title. (Photo: Arjun Singh SA20 / Sportzpics)

“We need to assess if there are another outstanding 30 players in the [country].

“Growing the player base, creating competition amongst players, improving the standards of the game, is important.

“You also need to look at – wherever the franchises go – to make it commercially viable for them as well.”

There have been questions about when a women’s version of the SA20 will be launched, in line with the successful establishment of women’s leagues in other franchise T20 tournaments, such as The Hundred in England and the Indian Premier League (IPL) in India. The Hundred men’s and women’s tournaments run concurrently, back-to-back at the same venues, while the Women’s Premier League takes place at a different slot on the calendar.

“We take our guidance from Cricket South Africa (CSA),” Smith said. “For the first time, they have invested in a domestic contracting programme (at the domestic women’s level).

“There’s a big attempt to grow the talent pool in South Africa and that’s why we focused on the under-19 women’s side and schools.

“There’s a lot of complexities in that discussion with the women’s IPL happening pretty much in our window as well and the Proteas women schedule getting busier as well.

“For us, we’ll sit down with CSA now in reflection and start to see what that future landscape looks like.”

New schedule

While the first four seasons of the SA20 were locked in for four weeks across the middle of January until the same point in February, there are changes for the next three seasons.

Season four will start in the same year season three ended, at the end of 2025, with the Proteas men having no home Test matches scheduled around that time.

“South Africa is in India until the middle of December, then there’s the T20 World Cup back in India in February,” Smith explained.

“With no international cricket fixtures scheduled back in South Africa, it gave us the opportunity to start a little bit earlier.”

This means that the SA20 has several local holidays to play around with, including Boxing Day and the first two days into the new year.

“In terms of where we’ll play, we haven’t sat down and done those things yet,” Smith said. “Getting the fixtures together in such a short space of time is not an easy thing.

“The trend [of] the first two seasons is to allow the winning team to host the opening game, so we need to reflect and see.

“We need to consider many factors. For example, over the holiday period, do you start with more games in coastal areas and then move up to the Highveld after that? There’s a lot of different factors to consider.

“[A] Boxing Day start does open up the opportunity to debate to have a match on that day [or even a] New Year’s Day game. These are the things we have to consider and look at the pros and cons of how we can maximise the opportunities for fans in season four.”

With the SA20 party growing season by season and the tournament moving into the holiday period for season four, crowd attendances are expected to skyrocket even more. DM

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Expansion

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