The BCCI has approved a 10-team IPL from 2022. The decision was ratified by the BCCI's general body comprising the state associations at the board's annual general meeting on Thursday in Ahmedabad. Deciding on two additional teams was among the main agendas for the board's 89th AGM, and with less than four months left for the next IPL, it was decided to stick to eight teams for the 2021 edition.

Another important agenda for the AGM was deciding about cricket's participation in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, which the BCCI deferred taking a final call on and will instead discuss it at a special general meeting in early 2021. With the ICC becoming more optimistic about the inclusion of cricket in the 2028 summer Olympics, the body had recently sent a questionnaire to all member countries asking them to quantify the "potential financial benefits" they could accrue from their respective governments if cricket was included in the Olympics.

The biggest decision at the AGM concerned the expansion of IPL which the BCCI has been deliberating since the successful organisation of the tournament in the UAE recently despite the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is understood that at the meeting on Thursday, both Sourav Ganguly and Jay Shah, the BCCI president and secretary respectively, stressed that the IPL must become bigger which would provide more opportunities to more players worldwide while adding new cities to the IPL map.

Accordingly the board members, the state associations, approved that the IPL can comprise upto 10 teams from the 2022 edition and authorised the IPL governing council to finalise the preparations for the addition of the new teams. That means the 2022 IPL could have nine or 10 teams. Both the state associations as well as the BCCI office bearers agreed that the constraint of time would not allow the IPL to have an additional franchise in 2021, which would remain an eight-team tournament.

One important decision the BCCI took was to limit one franchise per state. Consequently, the new IPL franchise(s) would be located in a state where no existing franchise has a home base. That would rule out Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana, West Bengal, Rajasthan, and the union territories of Delhi and Chandigarh. That would make venues like Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Visakhapatnam, Kochi/Thiruvananthapuram and Lucknow favourites as home venues for the new franchises.

More to follow...