Moeen and Hales signed up for the APL. The APL still needs permission to exist

The Afghanistan Premier League held its first draft on Tuesday, and English cricket showed up in numbers. Eight English players were signed: Alex Hales, Moeen Ali, Joe Clarke, Tymal Mills, Olly Stone, Luke Wood, Tom Moores and Chris Wood.

There's one problem. The league hasn't been sanctioned by the ICC yet. Without that, there are no ECB No-Objection Certificates, and every one of those contracts is a promise on paper. ESPNcricinfo reports the approval process is still going. It checks basic staging standards such as anti-corruption and anti-doping measures.

The first ball is due on December 27 in the UAE. That leaves seven and a half weeks to get the paperwork done.

The sanction isn't just a formality here. The ICC's application form asks the home board for full details of franchise owners. The APL has five teams and only three buyers. The other two came to the draft as "Team Paktia" and "Team Balkh", which are names you give a team before anyone has paid for it.

There is a precedent for a late rescue. The European T20 Premier League was signed off only a few days before it started this year. But "the ICC has done it late before" isn't much of a plan. A league with two empty boardrooms is asking the governing body to trust that money will arrive.

The franchises picked their captains and coaches at a mini-draft last month. On draft day, two of them changed. Rahmanullah Gurbaz moved from Nangarhar to Team Paktia, and Rahmat Shah went the other way. The ACB's explanation was one line: a "Technical Committee decision" agreed by the owners and captains.

Mark Boucher is Nangarhar's ambassador. When reporters asked him about losing Gurbaz, his answer was the most honest thing said all day.

This is the part English cricket would rather not look at. The ECB won't play bilateral cricket against Afghanistan because of the Taliban's treatment of women and girls, which UN experts have called "gender apartheid". Last month, England managing director Rob Key urged players to take "the right moral stance". He said he wouldn't have played in the league himself.

The ECB is still going to issue the NOCs, reluctantly, partly to avoid a restraint-of-trade fight. So the board's position is a strong opinion and a signed permission slip. Players read that correctly. Pope, Smeed and Willey pulled out after the backlash. Eight others stayed in, and none of them has a central contract to lose.

That's the economics of a freelance career. Hales and Moeen are franchise professionals who sell their availability across the calendar. Asking them to give up a deal on moral grounds, while the board itself won't block them, puts all the cost of the stance on the player and none on the institution.

Morgan in the broadcast box. Boucher as an ambassador. Scotland's George Munsey signed, with Cricket Scotland expected to follow the ECB line on NOCs. Mohammad Amir entered as a British citizen and got a deal. The ACB has also hinted in its marketing that it wants to play future seasons at the Kabul International Cricket Stadium.

Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, who led last year's calls for England to boycott their Champions Trophy game against Afghanistan, has told players to think hard about what signing means. The exiled Afghanistan women's team toured England this summer and is still pushing for recognition. Those two facts will follow every English name on this list into December.

The APL has the players, the pundits and the start date. It doesn't yet have a sanction, two of its owners, or a clear explanation for why its captains moved.

Our read: the ICC will probably sign it off late, as it did with the ETPL. But if the ownerless franchises are still ownerless in a month, Moeen and Hales may find their APL contracts are worth exactly what Boucher knew about the captaincy swap.