Building a fanbase from the ground up, Abhishek Bachchan’s vision for the ETPL
Building a sports franchise in a market where your sport sits outside the mainstream is not a venture for the faint-hearted. It demands patience, creativity and a willingness to resist the instinct to measure yourself against the dominant codes. It is a challenge Abhishek Bachchan knows intimately.
The actor and entrepreneur has, over the past several years, assembled a portfolio spanning three sports across two continents. He co-owns a Kabaddi franchise in the Pro Kabaddi League. He holds a stake in a football club. Now, as co-founder of the European T20 Premier League, he is bringing those hard-won lessons to cricket's next great frontier.
"The biggest mistake we could make is try and compete with the big sports in Europe," Bachchan said at the ETPL's Dublin launch event, where the league unveiled its sixth and final franchise owner in Indian cricket legend Rahul Dravid.
"They have been around for, in the case of football, over a hundred years in an organised franchise fashion. That is not something you can compete with. But you can learn from it, build your own fan base and then allow it to grow itself."
The candour is telling. Where some league founders might sidestep the question of cricket's standing in markets where it is not the first sport people reach for, Bachchan addresses it head-on. His confidence in doing so comes from lived experiences.
In India, Kabaddi and football occupy a position not entirely unlike cricket's in Ireland, Scotland or the Netherlands. The sport is loved and followed, carries history and generates genuine passion at the grassroots level. However, its not cricket. Bachchan has seen what it takes to build audiences for both and the central lesson translates cleanly across geographies, do not define yourself against the competition. Define yourself on your own terms.
"It is about creating your own unique product and creating your own unique fan base to start with," he said. "Then it will organically grow into something."
That philosophy sits at the heart of what the ETPL is attempting. The league, launched in partnership with Cricket Ireland, Cricket Scotland and the Royal Dutch Cricket Association (KNCB - the cricket board of Netherlands), is set to begin in August 2026.
Its six franchises span Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Rotterdam and Amsterdam, drawing ownership groups that include Dravid, Steve Waugh, Jonty Rhodes, Faf du Plessis, Heinrich Klaasen and Glenn Maxwell.
The ambition is not to dislodge football or rugby from their perches. It is to create something that earns its own loyal following, its own rituals, its own reasons to show up. Bachchan believes the raw material is already there. European cricket, he notes, has a grassroots culture that is often underestimated by those who only observe the sport from a distance.
It is this realistic outlook that is forming the core identity of the ETPL. By moving forward at peace with Europe's existing sporting market, the league consciously rejects the pressure to directly compete with entrenched mainstream sports. Instead, the vision is centered entirely on carving out a distinct, self-sustaining space, allowing European cricket to grow organically and thrive on its own unique terms.
It is this realistic outlook that is forming the core identity of the ETPL. By moving forward at peace with Europe's existing sporting market, the league consciously rejects the pressure to directly compete with entrenched mainstream sports. Instead, the vision is centered entirely on carving out a distinct, self-sustaining space, allowing European cricket to grow organically and thrive on its own unique terms.