Mohammad Amir, Misbah-ul-Haq, Younis Khan and Mohammad Hafeez are among 52 Pakistan players in the BPL foreigners list. Forty-eight England players have also made it to the list, such as Samit Patel, Paul Collingwood and Ravi Bopara. The list includes 25 players from Sri Lanka, 33 from West Indies, five from Zimbabwe, four from Australia, four from South Africa, two from New Zealand, and 13 from Associate Nations.

This season, a franchise will be able to recruit a player, local and foreign, in two ways. As per the first method, a player who is enlisted in the roster provided by the BPL will be a draft pick on October 31, to subsequently be chosen in turn by the six franchises. Such players will be paid by the BCB.

As per the second method, players can be directly contracted by the franchises, in which case the payment will not be guaranteed by the BCB, and the player has to take his fees from the franchise. If a player chooses to be directly in contract with a franchise, he will be taken out of the BPL-provided list.

The BPL organisers are confident that this two-way player recruitment system will make this year's competition more robust than the previous two editions. Ismail Haider Mallick, the tournament secretary, said that franchises were signing big-name players directly, while more than 180 players were included in the foreign list.

"The response is better than the last two tournaments," Mallick told ESPNcricinfo. "I have heard that many big players have signed up with the franchises while we also have a pretty strong list of players which we will make available to the franchises. We have appointed a company to help us out. Except for those players who are busy at the time, we have a lot of players available for this season's BPL."

Each franchise can register seven foreigners in total, and use a maximum of four such players in a match. The highest price bracket for the foreign cricketers is USD $70,000 while the lowest is USD $30,000. Player payment issues dogged the first two editions of Bangladesh's domestic T20 competition, with the 2014 season being completely scrapped.