Home›News›Buttler Ranks The Hundred Above IPL — Names England Franchise League His Favourite Over Gujarat Titans
2026-07-28By Gamezy Cricket Desk•8 min read
Buttler Ranks The Hundred Above IPL — Names England Franchise League His Favourite Over Gujarat Titans
England white-ball captain Jos Buttler has ranked The Hundred above the IPL on his personal list of favourite franchise T20 leagues, telling reporters at Old Trafford that the feeling of playing at home in front of familiar conditions outweighs even the 100,000-seater Narendra Modi Stadium he calls home in the Gujarat Titans jersey.
#IPL 2026#Jos Buttler#Gujarat Titans#The Hundred#Manchester Super Giants
Jos Buttler took 56 balls to remind the franchise cricket world why he stays near the top of every global white-ball pay sheet. The England white-ball captain's 90 from Old Trafford carried Manchester Super Giants to 187/5 against Birmingham Phoenix and pushed MSG to two wins from two at the top of the men's Hundred table, an innings that closed with a fifty and included a six and a boundary off consecutive Saqib Mahmood deliveries early in the knock. It is the kind of evening that prompts a captain to talk about what he enjoys about where he plays, and on this one Buttler produced a personal ranking that will travel: The Hundred first, IPL second, SA20 third.
The quote landed on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after the close at Old Trafford, and the timing matters. England are two weeks out from a white-ball window, the IPL is six months deep into its off-season reset after the mega auction, and South Africa's SA20 has just opened its third season to a budget that South African Cricket has kept deliberately capped. Buttler's answer was about feeling rather than finance, and the grounds he is talking about are the ones in England that he has been walking into since he was a teenager at Crewe.
What Buttler actually said about The Hundred
Buttler framed The Hundred in personal terms. Grounds he had played on for Lancashire, county cricket, county second XI, age-group cricket, the academy. Hotel rooms he knew. Coaching staff he had worked with before. Crowds that recognise the walk-out music because they queued for the same player in 2014. None of that is unique to Buttler among England white-ball cricketers, but very few of them have also stood in front of 100,000 in Ahmedabad and in front of a Paarl-franchise crowd with Eoin Morgan and Jason Roy in the same XI.
"Playing at home in England, the familiarity of the grounds — that's the one," Buttler said when asked to stack the three leagues. He added that the only reason the IPL sits second rather than first on his personal list is "the biggest and best franchise league in world cricket" still being a label no one disputes, and that the only reason Gujarat Titans sit above his other franchise options is that the Narendra Modi Stadium at 100,000 is "a home ground" in a way most cricketers never get to use.
Why MSG sit two from two
Manchester Super Giants arrived at Old Trafford on the back of a comfortable opening win and left with a second statement performance. Birmingham Phoenix, deprived of Jacob Bethell because of an injury ruling him out for the rest of the Hundred, have had to reshape their middle order on the fly, and the loss to MSG underlines how quickly the men's table opens up when an Impact Player slot goes begging. Bethell's absence, noted in the league's injury update at the weekend, has shifted Phoenix's batting arithmetic away from their pre-tournament plan, and Buttler's 90 put the new arithmetic under immediate strain.
The MSG innings broke down into three clear phases. Buttler opened at his usual pace, identified the bowling change to Mahmood inside the first four overs, and launched the chase for boundary numbers with that six-and-four combination that gave the home end something to cheer on the third evening of the group stage. Phase two was a consolidation in which the innings slowed and a couple of wickets fell to spin, and phase three was a 30-ball restart that took MSG past 180. That post-restart acceleration is exactly what the Hundred's 20-balls-an-over scoring rule rewards, and it is also what fantasy players on Gamezy reading the scoreboard by ball will be circling as the captain-pick template for the rest of the men's competition.
Why the IPL was always going to come second
Buttler was careful to acknowledge the room he was talking inside. The IPL, he said, "is the biggest and best franchise league in world cricket" — a phrasing no serious cricketer contradicts in 2026 — and his own franchise within it is Gujarat Titans, the Ahmedabad side that has used the Narendra Modi Stadium as its home ground since the franchise's first season. The 100,000-seater arena is one of the very few in the game where capacity outranks the audience at most Test centres in England, and for a player who has spent two full IPL campaigns there, framing it as a "home ground" is the simplest possible description of what those seasons felt like from the inside.
The IPL's structural advantages over The Hundred and SA20 are well catalogued. Ten franchises, a central player auction, an Impact Player rule that lets teams swap tactical shapes mid-match, a salary pool large enough that top overseas players can command auction purses that exceed central contracts in several Test-playing nations, a broadcaster ecosystem that puts every match on screen across 12 time zones, and a season length that creates 70-plus matches of live competition. None of that disappears when Buttler prefers the familiarity of Old Trafford, and the IPL's commercial gravity is unchanged by his personal preference. What does shift is how overseas England players talk to reporters about The Hundred, because each top-order England player in the competition is now also, in parallel, a contracted IPL player, and the daily question of which league they prefer is one most reporters keep on file for the entire English summer.
The South African piece of the picture
SA20 comes in third on Buttler's list, and the reason he gave is largely operational. Two seasons at Paarl Royals, the team owned and fronted by the broader Paarl Royals private-equity group, have given him a working knowledge of how the league is set up behind the cameras: the franchise-class travel schedule, the contracted lodging at the Pearl Valley Golf Resort in the Paarl region, the practice facilities, the analysis staff, and the small-English-cricket contingent in the dressing room. He named Eoin Morgan and Jason Roy among the Paarl Royals teammates he most enjoyed sharing a season with, calling both "great mates," and that bilingual dressing-room culture is part of what makes South Africa's domestic T20 competition a familiar destination for England players who want one more franchise stop without the IPL auction pressure.
SA20's third-place ranking is more about capacity than preference. The salary cap is lower, the season is shorter, and the window falls inside the English off-season rather than during the calendar summer. Buttler's framing is the kind of ranking that comes from a player who has played all three leagues in the same 14-month window and is being asked to pick the one he would choose first if every other variable were equal. He is not choosing where his next contract goes; he is being honest about feeling.
What the IPL angle means for fantasy readers
For Gamezy users building IPL 2026 squads around Gujarat Titans, Buttler's interview is a reminder that the franchise he plays for is also the franchise he frames as a "home ground," and that the matchup data Indian fantasy players already have on him — middle-overs tempo, spin-dominated run-ups, Wankhede-and-Ahmedabad combination — is what his own reference for a "home ground" is built on. Buttler at the Narendra Modi Stadium has historically been a high-base run scorer with an even higher ceiling when the pitch is flat and the boundary square is short, and that profile is exactly the matchup-fantasy rating that Gamezy's premium contest scoring rewards.
The wider IPL angle sits with the rest of England's white-ball core. Jonny Bairstow's Punjab Kings role, Will Jacks at Royal Challengers Bengaluru, Liam Livingstone at the now-cricket-traditional franchise mix, and the steady stream of England players moving through the IPL's Impact Player window, all add up to a small but consistent pipeline of English batters whose form at Old Trafford on a Hundred evening is a soft read of what they will produce at Wankhede or Chepauk in April. The IPL 2026 team page at Gamezy breaks down how each franchise is using those English pieces, and the next checkpoint will be the pre-season friendlies in early March where these players shift from Hundred whites to franchise colours.
What to watch next on the Hundred
Three things will tell us whether Buttler's ranking was a one-line quote or the start of a longer conversation. First, Manchester Super Giants' next fixture against Trent Rockets at Trent Bridge on Thursday, which will test whether the top-order balance Buttler mentioned in his post-match notes holds up against a different bowling attack. Second, the Hundred's central broadcaster's schedule, which now includes a fifth evening match per round to capture the audience Buttler spoke to when he referenced the familiarity of the grounds. Third, the rest of England's Hundred contingent, who will all be asked the same ranking question in the next ten days, and whose answers will tell us whether Buttler's list was his alone or a wider England dressing-room view.
What to watch next on the IPL and SA20 fronts
The IPL side of this story will move back into view in early September, when the franchises start their central auction planning for the next mega cycle and the Gujarat Titans decide whether the Buttler-Kane Williamson middle order is the one they want to take into the next season or whether they want to reset around a younger Indian core. The SA20 side moves faster: Paarl Royals' retention window closes in November, and the league's salary cap is the one Buttler did not comment on in his ranking but the one that will most influence which overseas players land in his XI next January.
Source attribution: This report draws on the cricketnews.com article published 28 July 2026 at 10:18 UTC, byline Soham Mukherjee, syndicated by Yahoo Sports, covering Jos Buttler's post-match comments and the Manchester Super Giants vs Birmingham Phoenix fixture at Old Trafford. Continue reading the latest cricket analysis on Gamezy's news room.
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