Before the auction, teams were allowed to make a maximum of four direct signings, meaning established internationals such as England captain Nat Sciver-Brunt and spinner Sophie Ecclestone, along with overseas stars Ellyse Perry and Smriti Mandhana, had already been snapped up.

In the women’s competition, teams have £880,000 to assemble their squads, with a £2.05m pot available to each team in the men’s competition.

The sums spent on the likes of Gibson, Wong and Cortneen-Coleman are a huge increase on a salaries available to women in the first season of the Hundred in 2021, when the highest wage available was £15,000. The top-earning women in 2025 had a salary of £65,000.

The lowest base price for women in the auction is £15,000, and there was criticism over “disparity” from Sam Billings, a Hundred-winning captain with Oval Invincibles, now MI London.

“Auction will always only benefit a few and probably deserved for those few players,” Billings wrote on X.

“However, the disparity is too much. The draft structure was clearly far better from an overall player standpoint. As players we did feed this back.”

In February BBC Sport reported that the four Hundred franchises linked to teams in the Indian Premier League would not consider buying players from Pakistan.

The England and Wales Cricket Board and the eight franchises then released a joint statement saying “players must not be excluded on the grounds of their nationality”.

There are two Pakistan players – Fatima Sana and Sadia Iqbal – in the women’s auction. A Pakistani woman is yet to feature in the Hundred and neither Sana nor Iqbal is expected to be bought on Wednesday.

There are 17 Pakistan players in the men’s auction, with pace bowlers Haris Rauf and Shaheen Afridi and spinner Usman Tariq among those who could attract attention.