Surrey may not qualify for the lucrative end-of-season Champions League, with only two places going to English teams and rows still rumbling about the eligibility of certain county players, but they have already done very nicely out of the Twenty20 Cup this season.

Last night's match against Kent at the Brit Oval, which was attended by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, was watched by a capacity crowd of 23,000 and the county announced yesterday that ticket sales for their five home matches had now brought in more than £1million.

This is the first time that Surrey's ticket sales have broken the million-pound barrier, helped by there being five matches at home rather than four. “It's massive and the impact is much wider,” Paul Blanchard, Surrey's sales and marketing director, said. “Not just in terms of secondary spend, such as at the bar or in the shop, but in getting a different sort of cricket-watcher coming. The long-term knock-on benefit of that is hard to calculate.”

The £1million in ticket sales to non-members for the Twenty20 Cup roughly equates to the amount that Surrey take from their 10,000 members in season-ticket sales. Members get free entrance to all county matches. It vastly outweighs the amount the county get from non-members for LV County Championship matches. “We are only talking hundreds of pounds a game from them,” Blanchard said. The bulk of Surrey's income still comes from staging England matches. A one-day international will earn the county about £700,000 and a Test match can raise up to £3million in ticket sales.

Surrey's fortunes in the shortest format have gone backwards since winning the first Twenty20 Cup under Adam Hollioake in 2003. Second in 2004 and beaten semi-finalists in the next two years, they did not even reach the quarter-finals last year and lost heavily in their opening match of this season to Essex.

If Lalit Modi has his way, Surrey will not be allowed to compete for the £2.5million first prize in the Champions League this autumn. Modi, the chairman of the Indian Premier League, yesterday reiterated his demand that counties with cricketers who participated in the unauthorised Indian Cricket League (ICL) will not be allowed into the Champions League, even if those players do not compete.

Surrey's Abdul Razzaq and Saqlain Mushtaq played in the ICL and with 15 of England's 18 first-class counties having links to the league, the matter is likely to end up in the courts if Modi maintains his position. “Only teams that have no ties at all with ICL players will be invited,” Modi said yesterday. “Others are automatically disqualified.”

A further complication emerged when Nasim Ashraf, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, said that his country had been promised a place in the Champions League. At present it is due to be an eight-team event involving two sides each from India, England, Australia and South Africa.

“It is not correct that Pakistan is not in the Champions League,” Ashraf said yesterday. “When the idea of this event was discussed in Mumbai sometime back I was there and the Indian board invited Pakistan to send one team for the championship.”

Modi said that he could not comment on this until after the Indian board meets next weekend. Pakistan have not held a domestic Twenty20 competition since December 2006.