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November 6, 2025
Harmanpreet Kaur, captain of the Indian girls’s facet and skipper of Mumbai Indians Girls within the WPL, has taken a noteworthy step. Whereas her retention deal for the upcoming WPL 2026 season is ₹2.5 crore, it comes with an attention-grabbing caveat: a near-40 % pay rise on her earlier contract regardless of being retained because the second decide by her franchise.
In easier phrases: Over the past three seasons she was drawing about ₹1.8 crore from her WPL deal.Now with ₹2.5 crore, that’s an increase of ~38.8 %.
The twist: The franchise gave its high retention slot (₹3.5 crore) to Nat Sciver‑Brunt, which means Harmanpreet agreed to play second fiddle within the retention pecking-order—regardless that she leads the group and is India’s skipper.
Why that is vital:
It alerts her willingness to prioritise group construction and technique over purely private acquire.
It exhibits how contracts and pay have gotten extra nuanced in girls’s sport: management, model worth, technique all play a task.
From a broader lens, girls’s cricket is accelerating in monetisation and professionalism.
Smriti Mandhana’s Improve & Personal Document
In the meantime, Smriti Mandhana — star batter and chief of Royal Challengers Bengaluru Girls — has additionally secured a hike. She’s been retained at ₹3.5 crore, up from roughly ₹3.4 crore from her earlier deal.
Though the rise could appear modest in absolute phrases, the retention worth and her constant efficiency make it important. It additionally underlines her standing among the many elite gamers within the league.
What’s Behind the Scenes
The WPL’s retention construction clearly lists set slabs: Participant 1 = ₹3.5 crore, Participant 2 = ₹2.5 crore, Participant 3 = ₹1.75 crore and so on.
In that context, Harmanpreet accepting the Participant 2 slot (₹2.5 crore) as a substitute of looking for Participant 1 exhibits a strategic resolution.
For Smriti, touchdown the Participant 1 slot at ₹3.5 crore confirms her standing.
These contracts come on the again of India profitable their first-ever Girls’s World Cup in 2025, which has amplified girls’s cricket visibility and worth.
The Broader Implications
These strikes replicate the rising business and aggressive weight of the ladies’s sport. The truth that retention values are in crores emphasises it.
For gamers: It’s not nearly match charges anymore. Management roles, group retention technique, model worth, and cricketing achievements all feed into the contract.
For franchises: The steadiness between retaining home stars and abroad marquee names, price range allocation, and squad constructing is now a fancy puzzle.
For the game: It’s a virtuous circle — higher pay attracts extra expertise, which improves league high quality, which pulls extra viewers and sponsors, which then helps increased pay.
Harmanpreet Kaur’s “sacrifice” is much less about shedding out and extra about selecting a place that serves her group and the league’s broader pursuits whereas nonetheless incomes a good-looking uplift. Smriti Mandhana’s slight hike is a reinforcement of her elite standing. Collectively, they sign that the ladies’s sport in India is not only evolving — it’s accelerating.
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