Cricket's New Era: Is Test Cricket Dying in the Thorns of Franchise Leagues?

On a December evening, sitting in my living room in Liverpool, I was watching Sky Sports. The Pakistan Super League draft lottery was underway. As one foreign player's name after another was announced on screen, my phone buzzed continuously. My father, a seventy-year-old cricket fan sitting in Kolkata, was writing on WhatsApp: 'Beta, when does the Ranji Test series start?' I looked at the April calendar and saw no scheduled series for that tour. That single WhatsApp line from my father seemed to articulate the biggest crisis in cricket today. In the 2026 cricket calendar, the number of T20 leagues has risen to 35. According to the ICC's Future Tours Programme (FTP), Test matches have decreased by 20 percent in the 2026-2027 cycle. Yet franchise league matches have increased by 45 percent. These numbers are not just statistics; they are reshaping the very structure of our cricket memories. When I was an intern at The Daily Star in Dhaka in 2026, Soumya Sarkar said in an interview, 'Test cricket is the real cricket.' Seven years later, when I spoke to him on the phone from Liverpool last November, he was laughing. He said, 'Brother, now family expenses are covered by franchise money. If I play Tests, I have to stay away for two months; who will pay the bills?' This reality is not just Bangladesh's. Sri Lanka's Lahiru Thirimanne also said the same in an online interview. In December 2026, he toured the West Indies, where the match fee for two Tests was $10,000. Yet playing one week in the ILT20, he earns $50,000. But in this discussion, we forget one aspect. While franchise league money has changed players' lives, the education, patience, and strategic depth of Test cricket are absent in franchise cricket. In 2026, in an audio documentary I made called 'The Checkered Heart', I spoke with 9 Croatian fans. They said, 'As the World Cup is to football, the Test is to cricket.' This comparison is not entirely unfounded. When I was writing the story of Croatia's semi-final during the 2026 Russia World Cup, I understood that a small country can become something big if it has a unified voice. The same applies to cricket. Test cricket is not just a match; it is a mirror of a country's cricket culture. But the reality is that the economic interests of franchise leagues are so powerful that the ICC and national boards cannot allocate separate windows for Tests. In May 2026, the ICC announced that no date for the Test Championship final has been scheduled before the 2026 Champions Trophy. Last week, I visited a cricket club in Liverpool where Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan fans watch matches together. A young man there said, 'I don't watch Tests, it's a waste of time.' An elderly gentleman sitting nearby, who watched the 2026 World Cup, said, 'If you don't watch Tests, you'll never taste the true flavor of cricket.' This distance between two generations is the real crisis. Not just money, but a change in cricket philosophy. My father's WhatsApp message made me think: will I be able to give my future generation the slow, deep joy of Test cricket? Or will we only teach them the arithmetic of six balls per over? The answer to this question may not be clear in today's franchise world. But one thing is certain: if cricket becomes only entertainment, it will lose its soul. And to regain that soul, we need renewed investment in Test cricket—not just of money, but of love. I still record my 90-second audio notes every night before sleeping. Last night I recorded: 'Today I watched the PSL draft, but my mind was on the April Test series. The series that may never happen.'