Canada Super60

A football stadium, sixty balls a side

Canada Super 60 rests on a simple bet: that the shortest professional form of cricket works better inside a downtown stadium than on a suburban ground at the mercy of a Canadian autumn. Each side faces ten overs — sixty balls, hence the name — at BC Place in Vancouver, under the venue's retractable roof, in what the organisers bill as the first indoor T10 competition anywhere. A match runs about ninety minutes, which is short enough to stack several into one afternoon and sell them as a single session.

The backing came from two directions. Yuvraj Singh, the former India batter, joined as league partner and remains the public face of the project. Cricket Canada supplied the sanction and the argument for it: its president, Amjad Bajwa, has framed the league as a step forward for the growth of the sport in Canada and across North America. The six franchises are named for cities spread across the country rather than for the one hosting them — Brampton, Mississauga, Montreal, Toronto, White Rock and Vancouver — which keeps Ontario and Quebec on the board while every ball is bowled in one building on the Pacific coast.

October 2025: the first season

The inaugural tournament ran from 8 to 13 October 2025, six days, all of it at BC Place, with men's and women's competitions running alongside each other from the outset rather than the women's arriving later as an addition.

Scoring behaved the way the format promises. Leus du Plooy of Mississauga Masters finished as the leading run-scorer with 238 runs in six matches at a strike rate above 230. Alex Hales made 86 not out from 32 balls, Max Chu hit 82 from 23, and Martin Guptill struck 79 from 25 with eleven sixes. The counterweight was Dillon Heyliger of Brampton Blitz, who took 13 wickets in seven matches, with a best return of four for nine — a reminder that on a short indoor boundary the bowler who misses his length is finished, and the one who does not can win a game in two overs.

Brampton Blitz won the men's title, beating Montreal Royal Tigers in the final, having built the campaign on aggressive middle-overs batting and disciplined bowling at the death. Their captain's line afterwards — that the championship belonged to the fans as much as the players, and that Brampton had always been the heartbeat of Canadian cricket — read as a claim on the domestic map as much as a victory speech. Toronto Sixers took the women's competition and the Mel Jones Trophy.

The July draft and the 2026 squads

Squad-building for the second season went through a draft in July 2026, run to a fixed shape: each of the six teams took one marquee player, two wildcard picks, four overseas professionals, five Canadians and three players from associate nations. The five-Canadian floor is the structural detail that matters most, because it is a quota rather than a gesture — a third of every XI-sized pool has to be domestic.

The marquee picks went Jonny Bairstow to Brampton Blitz, Sikandar Raza to Mississauga Masters, Andre Russell to Montreal Royal Tigers, Nicholas Pooran to Toronto Sixers, Sam Billings to White Rock Warriors and Mustafizur Rahman to Vancouver Anchors. Beneath them the squads read as a cross-section of the county and franchise circuit: Tom Curran, Tymal Mills and Hardus Viljoen at Brampton; Alex Lees, Richard Gleeson and Azam Khan at Mississauga; David Willey, Isuru Udana and Scott Kuggeleijn at Montreal; Imad Wasim, Will Smeed and Tom Kohler-Cadmore at Toronto; Jake Ball and Kane Richardson at White Rock; Moeen Ali, Ben Sanderson and Tom Moores at Vancouver.

It is a recruitment pattern familiar from the shorter leagues — power hitters, death bowlers and a handful of names that sell a ticket — but the September slot helps. It falls after the English county season and before the winter's franchise calendar proper, which is why so many of the internationals are available at all.

The local half of the field

Roughly a dozen of the players in the 2026 tournament come from Surrey, British Columbia, a short drive from the stadium: Ali Khan, Kaleem Sana, Aryan Sidhu, Gurneek Johal, Newab Singh, Ajayveer Hundal, Mannat Hundal, Jessica Joseph, Finley Dixon, Prabhpreet Bhullar and Sukhjinder Singh among them. For most, this is the only cricket they will play in front of a full stadium in their own city, and the only time they will share a dressing room with a Test-capped wicketkeeper.

The timing is not accidental. Cricket returns to the Olympic programme at Los Angeles in 2028, which gives North American competitions a reason to exist beyond their own gate receipts and a case to make to sponsors. And 2026 is the year BC Place also stages FIFA World Cup matches, so cricket is not the only sport being introduced to that building's expanded audience.

Season two, and national television

The second season runs from 29 September to 4 October 2026 — six days again, this time 24 matches rather than the smaller inaugural programme. The substantive change is distribution. CBC has taken the broadcast rights: every match streams free on CBC Gem, with selected fixtures, including the women's championship final, carried on CBC television. A domestic T10 league on the national public broadcaster is a materially different proposition from one behind a paywalled stream, particularly for a sport still arguing for its place in the Canadian mainstream.

Brampton Blitz return as defending men's champions and Toronto Sixers as the team to beat in the women's competition. Yuvraj Singh, announcing the return, pointed to the first season's reception as the reason for a second; the league's own framing has shifted from proving the concept to holding the audience it found. Tickets are sold through Ticketmaster, as single sessions and as multi-day passes covering the whole tournament.