Private investors can buy minority stakes in Twenty20 franchises worth more than $35 million following a landmark decision by Cricket Australia's board on Friday.
The eight franchises of the new competition will immediately become the most expensive sporting teams in the nation, Cricket Australia (CA) said.
It will be an eight-team competition, six of which will be coming out of the cities that our current state teams play in. They will be city-based teams, not state-based teams and that will in turn be a real change in format.
CA also announced that all was in place for the national Twenty20 competition to expand from six to eight teams, with city-based names, from the start of the 2011-12 season and would be called the Big Bash League."Six of the cities involved will be the existing cities out of which state teams play, and two additional teams to be announced," Sutherland said.
"Some of the valuations we have done recently on these interests put these teams immediately into the upper echelons in Australian sport in terms of values of sporting teams," Sutherland said.
NRL club Brisbane was valued at $36 million on the exchange in April this year.
Sutherland said the board's decision gave CA "the best of both worlds" in that it could defer any private ownership or accept offers currently on the table.
Sutherland said the two other Twenty20 licences for the revamped Big Bash competition would not necessarily be awarded to the biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne.
Ex-Australian captain Steve Waugh said luring Indian players to Australian franchises would be the key to success.
"It's not going to be a powerful franchise system unless you've got Indian players playing ... and if we haven't got Indian players playing, you won't get the TV rights in India," Waugh said.
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