India’s cricket calendar is bursting at the seams. The next FTP could be a chance to fix it

When key stakeholders in world cricket meet at the ICC headquarters in Dubai in less than two weeks, the Indian representatives will have a tricky job on their hands. The meeting is scheduled to workshop the Future Tours Programme for the next cycle, which runs from May 2027 to April 2031. This might sound like a boring exercise of mere hygiene, but it’s much more than that.

The ICC FTP crystallises the most critical tours and tournaments. Fixture scheduling determines the financial landscape of the next cycle. Simply put, countries that can lock in commitments to host India for white-ball cricket get the biggest commercial bump.

These engagements provide the maximum return on investment. To that end, there will be a clamour to pack in as much as possible, but India are careful with sharing their time. Of course, they need a certain minimum number of days of white-ball cricket each year because the broadcaster who wins the BCCI’s home rights needs to be kept in business.


But the overcrowding of the calendar, is an issue that can no longer be wished away. For a long time, everyone grumbled about it, but nobody did anything to ease the congestion. But the effects of this have come home to roost, and now India are sitting up and taking notice. Shubman Gill, captain of the Test and ODI teams, publicly acknowledged that it was becoming increasingly difficult to plan a campaign, either in a long Test series or a global tournament, because players simply don’t stay fit long enough.

Gill called for greater preparation time in the lead-up to important Test series, especially overseas. More recently, Devajit Saikia, the BCCI secretary, said the FTP issue was giving the board a real headache.

“Players are having injuries because they have to play a lot of matches. If you look at the England [tour], a 15-player team went for the ODI and out of that 15, three to four players got injured,” he said. “But they had played two months of IPL prior to that. So all this takes toll on the health of the players also. And to avoid those kind of situations, what best we can do under the present windows and present FTPs, we are trying to find some ways out.” Saikia said the way forward was to be more sensible about planning the calendar. “…that is why in the next FTP, we will take certain measures,” said Saikia.

“We have instructed our FTP person, who we will be meeting very soon in various international forums, that our FTP should be scheduled in such a way that there is proper rest for the players as well as some kind of acclimatisation or some kind of friendly matches before any major series in SENA countries.” This sounds good, but the issue is that India stretch themselves in multiple ways.

Firstly, they want to play England and Australia in series of five Tests each, primarily for revenue reasons. Secondly, India schedule some fixtures for reasons not related to cricket. For example, India are playing Japan in a T20I because of a government-to-government agreement that this would be the first step in the “Sport 75” initiative. The Prime Ministers of the two countries reached an agreement to promote people-to-people exchanges and cooperation in sports. This is purely to buttress India’s ambition to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2036.

On the face of it, No. 1-ranked India playing No. 41 Japan looks fine, but the gulf between the two teams is so huge the contest is unlikely to be meaningful. India’s Olympic aspirations also mean the team plays in the Asian Games, again, excellent for optics but redundant for a sport that already has the Asia Cup. India have also added three ODIs at home against Zimbabwe in 2027 to the games scheduled in the FTP.

Taken individually, none of these significantly increases the workload, but every match adds travel and training days to a schedule with no room to breathe. The problem of cricket overkill is real, and the powers that be have even acknowledged it publicly, but their actions still don’t match their words, leaving players hung out to dry.