When the PSL started in February 2016, Pakistan’s marketing industry wasn’t sure what to expect. Brands were also unsure. No one saw the cultural phenomenon coming. Brands rushed to join something they had been too cautious to support before. Some succeeded. Many failed. A few failed so badly that people still remember. Eleven seasons later, with brand partnership values up 1,226% since the first season, it’s time to review not the cricket, but the business ecosystem that has developed around it. The good, the routine, and the truly bad.
Era One (2016–2018): The Wild West. Everyone Improvising.
The PSL’s inaugural season was, by the admission of those who were there, organised amid doubt and immense criticism with little activation and an atmosphere of dread. Nobody had pre-planned integrated marketing campaigns. Nobody had done the research. Most brands bought airtime and watched, rather than built narratives.
The smartest business move in PSL 1 didn’t come from a consumer goods company or a telecom, but from a bank. Habib Bank Limited paid about PKR 300 million to put its name on the tournament itself. Not just as a sponsor, but as the title. From then on, every commentator, news anchor, and even people at tea stalls called it “HBL PSL.” Those three letters were said billions of times, for free. It remains one of the most cost-effective brand placements in Pakistan’s corporate history, and HBL knew exactly what it was doing. The title sponsorship value has since increased by 505% from the original 2016 deal, and HBL has extended its deal through 2027.
HBL: A masterclass in naming rights. The bank didn’t need a clever ad. It bought the noun.
Beyond HBL, PSL 1 brand communication was characterised more by presence than purpose. Mobilink (before rebranding to Jazz) was visible but generic. ZIC Oils showed up. Giggly Boom Boom Bubblegum, and yes, that brand really existed, actually did something clever: they put Darren Sammy in an endorsement ad that had genuine recall. The international face, the local product, the playful energy. It worked. It was weird. Nobody talks about it now, which is its own tragedy.
The real standout micro-innovation of PSL 1 was Oye Hoye, the local snack brand, sponsoring boundary announcements by commentators. Every time a boundary was hit, the commentator called it an “Oye Hoye boundary.” It was shameless, disruptive, and brilliant. Consumer recall for that integration was reportedly sky-high, precisely because it was embedded in the moment of excitement rather than interrupting it. In a sea of flat 30-second spots, Oye Hoye understood what sports marketing actually means: be the emotion, not the interruption.
Oye Hoye: The scrappiest, smartest brand integration of the entire PSL era. An object lesson nobody learned from.
The uncomfortable truth about Era One is that most international FMCGs were too conservative and risk-averse to invest properly. They were driven by KPI models built for predictable returns, and PSL was an unknown quantity. Local brands like Tapal were bold enough to experiment while the multinationals waited and watched. The irony is that the multinationals who hesitated in 2016 ended up paying significantly more to enter the same platform later, because by then everyone knew it was gold.
Era Two (2019–2021): Scale Up, Creative Down
By PSL 4 and 5, the league had proven its commercial credentials. In 2019, 88 brands sponsored or advertised during PSL matches. The question was no longer whether to be there; it was how. And the honest answer to “how” for most brands during this era was: not very imaginatively.
PSL 5 (2020) was a landmark edition for reasons unrelated to advertising. It was the first season where all matches were played on Pakistani soil, a homecoming that deserved to be celebrated with powerful, resonant brand storytelling. The moment was ripe. Pakistan had cricket back. The nation was emotional. And what did the advertising community largely deliver? The same formula. Celebrity faces. Generic slogans. Cricket imagery. Emotional music beds. Repeat.
The telecom sector, which had so much to gain from a digitally engaged young audience watching PSL, was particularly uninspired. Jazz (formerly Mobilink) had been around the PSL since day one and had the awareness numbers to prove it, but awareness without emotional depth is just familiarity, and familiarity without creativity eventually breeds indifference.
PSL 6 (2021) brought the infamous Groove Mera anthem controversy, which had an unintended marketing effect. The outrage drove views, which drove streams, which drove downloads. The anthem became the most-liked and most-disliked PSL track on YouTube. Brands whose logos appeared in the music video got coverage they hadn’t paid for, in content they couldn’t have planned. This was chaos marketing at its most accidental, and oddly effective.
Lesson of Era Two: Brands scaled their spending without scaling their thinking. The platform grew. The creativity didn’t.
Era Three (2022–2023): TikTok, T-Shirts, and Token Gestures
The most revealing sponsorship deal of the modern PSL era was TikTok becoming the official entertainment partner ahead of PSL 7 in 2022, a deal renewed for PSL 8 in 2023. On the surface, this looked like PSL meeting its audience where they live. Young Pakistan. Short-form video. The app that had colonised the attention of an entire generation.
In practice, the TikTok partnership produced exactly the kind of bland, official content that TikTok users actively scroll past. The “official entertainment partner” label generated press releases and logo placements. What it did not generate was authentic content that felt native to the platform. When a sponsorship exists primarily as a badge rather than a behaviour, you’re buying the association, not the relationship.
The more interesting PSL 8 story was KFC’s entry as the official snack partner. Internationally, the chicken chain bringing stadium-snack energy to cricket would be unremarkable. In Pakistan’s context, with the Israel-Palestine conflict generating active boycott sentiment against American brands, it was a commercial decision made with apparent indifference to the cultural environment. The #BoycottPSL hashtag trended nationally. The PCB quietly deleted its announcement tweet about the partnership before reinstating it. It was crisis communication at its most reactive.
J. (Junaid Jamshed clothing), a Pakistani fashion brand, became an official PSL partner from 2022. This was genuinely interesting, a premium local brand with cultural cachet aligning with cricket. The association made instinctive sense: cricket whites meet kurta culture, Pakistan identity meets Pakistan’s game. Whether the activation lived up to the potential is another matter, but at least the conceptual fit was there.
The verdict for Era Three: brands started to fit better with the PSL, but their campaigns remained uninspired. The KFC situation showed that the PCB prioritized revenue over cultural issues.
Era Four (2024–2026): Big Numbers, Bigger Questions
By PSL 9 in 2024, 149 brands were sponsoring or advertising during matches, up from 88 in 2019. The business side had almost doubled. Brand partnership rights for 2026–2029 were sold at a 1,226% increase over the first deal. The numbers are huge, but the quality of brand communication does not match them.
The KFC and Pepsi boycott controversy returned with renewed intensity in PSL 9 and 10. To be clear about the context: this was not a fringe reaction. #BoycottPSL trended at the top spot in Pakistan within hours of the KFC announcement. The PCB’s response, removing the tweet, then restoring it, then proceeding as normal, was the institutional equivalent of pretending the fire alarm was going off in someone else’s building. A league that had grown on the back of national emotional investment was being asked by its own fans whether the financial relationship with its sponsors had become more important than its cultural relationship with its audience. That is not a small question. Nobody at the PCB answered it publicly.
Cadbury, on the other hand, did something genuinely commendable. Its scholarship program, expanded in 2024 to empower young girls through cricket, was one of the few PSL brand activations in the league’s history that connected commercial investment to a social purpose that felt authentic rather than performative. In a sponsorship landscape dominated by logo placements and celebrity endorsements, Cadbury was building something. Whether it was enough to cut through the clutter is debatable. That it tried to do something meaningful is not.
Cadbury: one of the few brands that found a real purpose in the PSL beyond just being seen. Their small program made a big statement.
PSL 10’s “X Dekho” anthem, co-produced with Pepsi as its entertainment partner, illustrated the anthem-as-advertising problem in its purest form. The song wasn’t just a creative misfire; it was a product. The Pepsi branding, the “decade” narrative crafted for commercial purposes, the assembled cast designed to hit demographic checkboxes, all of it bled through the music into something that felt less like a national celebration and more like a sponsored post that ran for three minutes.
Walee Technologies, which had won the global media rights (excluding India) and later bought the Multan Sultans franchise in 2026, represents a new type of PSL stakeholder, a tech-media hybrid that simultaneously straddles content, distribution, and ownership. It’s a model that raises interesting questions about the future of commercial independence within the PSL ecosystem. When the entity broadcasting the league also owns a franchise competing in it, the lines between partner and participant blur in ways that deserve scrutiny.
Pepsi: The Return of the King, and What It Costs
The most structurally significant commercial development of PSL 11 is Pepsi’s elevation from franchise sponsor to Official Beverage and Entertainment Partner, with the beverage and entertainment rights separated from the traditional sponsorship portfolio and sold as a standalone entity for the first time.
Pepsi and cricket in Pakistan have a history older than most PSL players. In the nineties, Pepsi forged its association with cricket so effectively that the two became culturally inseparable. The return of Pepsi as co-architect of the PSL anthem is, in one sense, a full circle. In another sense, it’s the formalisation of something fans had been grumbling about for years: the anthem is no longer a cultural artifact. It’s a sponsored product.
One fan’s tweet after the PSL 11 anthem launch captured the sentiment with painful accuracy: “Pakistan Super League or Pepsi Super League?” That’s not a new joke; it’s been made every time the anthem feels more like an ad than a song. But the formalisation of Pepsi as an entertainment partner means this tension is now structural rather than incidental. The PCB has essentially outsourced the cultural identity of its anthem to a cola company. Pepsi’s Senior Marketing Director described the goal as making “a statement about the future” and creating “something bigger than just music.” Which is a lovely corporate sentence. Whether it produced something bigger than just music is, based on fan reaction, very much in dispute.
Pepsi’s PSL 11 play: Strategically brilliant. Creatively suspect. And the beginning of a question the league will have to answer for the next three seasons.
The Structural Problems Nobody Talks About
After eleven seasons, some habits in PSL brand communication have become deep-rooted problems that money alone cannot fix.
First: the anthem as advertisement. The decision to make the official entertainment partner the co-producer of the official anthem is a category error. An anthem is a cultural statement. An advertisement is a commercial statement. These two things can coexist, but only when the commercial intent is secondary to the creative one. In the PSL ecosystem, that hierarchy has reversed. The anthem is increasingly designed to serve the sponsor’s brand narrative, and the creative ambition adjusts accordingly. The result is songs that sound like very expensive radio jingles featuring famous people.
Second: the proliferation problem. Going from 88 brands in 2019 to 149 brands in 2024 sounds like commercial success. It is also creative death. When 149 brands compete for the same eyeballs on the same platform, differentiation becomes nearly impossible. The brands that shout loudest tend to be remembered for shouting, not for what they said. The brands with genuinely interesting ideas, and there were some, get lost in the noise. The PCB has been excellent at selling inventory. It has been less excellent at curating an ecosystem where brands can do their best work.
Third: the cultural due diligence gap. The KFC controversy was not an anomaly. It was a symptom. The PCB operates a tournament that sits at the intersection of Pakistani national identity, sporting pride, and deep cultural feeling. Bringing in brands without asking how they will land in that context is not just a PR risk; it’s a disrespect to the audience the PSL depends on. The fact that #BoycottPSL has trended in multiple consecutive seasons over sponsor-related controversies suggests this isn’t a one-time oversight. It’s a gap in the process.
Fourth: the activation gap. Most brands that sponsor PSL do so for visibility, not engagement. They buy logo rights, run generic TVCs with cricketers, and call it a PSL campaign. The few brands that do more, that build narratives, create fan experiences, use the platform to say something, stand out immediately and disproportionately. Cadbury’s girls’ cricket programme. Oye Hoye’s boundary call integration. HBL’s literal ownership of the tournament’s name. These are not complicated ideas. They are ideas that require someone to think beyond the logo placement. That thinking is still rare, eleven years in.
The Verdict: The PSL has seen 1,226% commercial growth, but it still faces a creative problem.
The numbers tell one story about PSL brand communication: extraordinary growth, expanding reach, and a commercial ecosystem that has outperformed almost every expectation set in 2016. The PCB has built something genuinely valuable, and the brands that stayed loyal, HBL above all, have been rewarded.
But numbers measure presence, not quality. And the honest qualitative verdict on eleven years of PSL brand communication is that the creative ambition has not kept pace with the commercial scale. Too many brands arrived at PSL with a cheque and left the creativity at home. Too many anthems became product placements in musical form. Too many controversies were handled with silence rather than substance.
The PSL brings together 240 million people with real passion for over a month each year. This is a huge opportunity. Brands that bring the right ideas can create something lasting. Most, however, have just followed the usual formulas.
The 1,226% growth in brand partnership value is real. But only a few brands have truly grown with the PSL in culture, creativity, and emotion. That gap sums up eleven years of PSL brand communication. It is clearly a huge missed opportunity.
Oye Hoye still had the best idea. Nobody has done better since.