Which Twenty20 league is hardest to play in?

Hundreds of cricketers play in several Twenty20 leagues in the same year. What they do in each one is the only honest way to compare them.

Every discussion of league quality runs into the same wall: a hundred in one competition is not a hundred in another, and there is no obvious exchange rate. Averages cannot settle it, because the leagues are not playing each other.

But hundreds of players do play in several of them, often in the same season. That overlap is the exchange rate. If a batter strikes at 150 in one league and 125 in another, in the same year, against the same body of bowlers, something about the two leagues differs — and with enough such players the difference can be separated from the players themselves.

How this is measured

A two-way model over players and competitions, solved by alternating between the two. Each player is credited with an ability, each competition with an ease, and the two are fitted until they agree with what actually happened. Competitions with few shared players are pulled toward neutral, because a league nobody leaves cannot be compared with anything.

Twenty20 internationals are graded in the same bracket as the leagues rather than assumed to be hardest, so international cricket has to earn its place in the table like everything else.

The table

Higher means harder. The batting column is how difficult it is to score there; the bowling column how difficult it is to take wickets cheaply.

What it says

The SA20 and the Caribbean Premier League come out as the hardest places to bat, and the Bangladesh Premier League, the Lanka Premier League and the T20 Blast the easiest. Nobody voted on this. It is what the same cricketers did in both.

The practical consequence, and the reason it exists: without this correction a strong season in a weak competition rated the same as a strong season in a hard one. In the first version of these ratings that produced John Davison — five Canadian seasons — as the best player in the game at 95, above Tendulkar, Dravid, Ponting, Kallis and Sehwag at 91. Grading the competitions is what fixed it.

A caveat worth stating: this measures how hard it was to score and to take wickets, which is not quite the same as which league has the best cricketers. A tournament played on slow, used pitches will look hard, and a short competition with a small overlap of shared players carries more uncertainty than the table’s tidy numbers admit.