One lakh rupees, 100,000, is worth about $2000. One crore rupees, 10 million, is worth roughly $200,000. Normally such information would be useful mainly to tourists. This afternoon it will be at the forefront of the minds of cricketers round the world.
The 11th Indian Premier League auction, occurring over the next two days at Bengaluru’s five-star Ritz-Carlton Hotel, will feature more lakhs and crores than ever: salary caps have been swollen by a fifth to $16 million per franchise, and there are more Australians, 55, out of 578 players.
Some of these are almost radioactively hot, the Big Bash League by its timing having become an IPL audition, almost a feeder tournament. By the time his Hurricanes have finished with the Stars at the MCG today, for example, D’Arcy Short could be a great deal wealthier, partaking of a payment pool inflated by last year’s $3.2 billion broadcast deal.
Australians and Englishmen in Perth will likewise be glued to their phones, not least Joe Root, who subsequent to declaring for the auction withdrew from England’s T20 squad to freshen up. Indians and South Africans might find it difficult to concentrate on their third Test in Johannesburg, but this, Faf du Plessis said last week, was “normal and human”, the IPL being “a big part of our lives”.
A decade ago, of course, nobody knew quite how large it would loom. Only 78 players put themselves on the block at Mumbai’s Hilton Tower for the inaugural auction in February 2008, and the beginning was muted. In his Cricket Czars (2016), Alam Srinivas says one of the first names read out was that of Shane Warne, but that there was a pregnant pause when bids were called for. How, after all, did you value a cricketer? What was a legend worth? A star? A mere pro? The Rajasthan Royals came in at Warne’s base price of $US450,000 and scooped him up. A bargain, as he would lead them to a stunning victory.
In hindsight, it was quaintly informal. Michael Hussey learned he was headed to Chennai when he turned on his laptop at home; Ricky Ponting that he was bound for Mumbai from the ticker on Fox Sports News.
But the sums quickly became eye-watering. In his autobiography, Brett Lee recalls the telephone call from his agent Neil Maxwell advising that he’d been purchased for $US900,000 — twice as much as Warne. “Bullshit!” Lee said. “No way!”
As he recalls: “Maxi laughed. So did I. Wow! This was just crazy.”
Of all the innovations of the IPL’s founder Lalit Modi, in fact, the auction has proven perhaps the greatest. A process hitherto private and confidential — contract negotiation — was turned inside out. An idea previously defined by locality and patriotism — team allegiance — was left to the dictates of an indifferent market. The only way to avoid going somewhere you didn’t want was to go nowhere by sitting the auction out. To participate, then, has been to submit to an exquisite bondage.
Third parties are only tenuously connected. The league has no players’ association. The role of player agents and national boards is acutely circumscribed. It is pure superstar economics.
At the last big auction, four years ago, a quarter of the spending was on 10 players.
Trickle down is minuscule. Other Indian domestic players remain dismally paid, in the hundreds of dollars a day. Indeed, it is not unknown for Ranji Trophy batsmen, hearing that an IPL scout is looking on, to suddenly burst into a blaze of strokes as a means of showing their chops.
For all that, the auction remains, all things considered, a low-key event: just a bunch of casually dressed men sitting at circular tables in a hotel ballroom periodically brandishing paddles as auctioneer Richard Madley, star of the BBC’s Bargain Hunt, knocks the talent down with his signature gavel.
Last year I happened to be in India at the right time to watch the auction live, and enjoyed its hokey charm.
You could savour the incongruity of grizzled Brad Hodge of the Gujarat Lions sitting alongside his twentysomething IT geek owner Keshav Bansal, communicating by winces and shrugs.
Then there was Stephen Fleming’s priceless reaction when Rising Pune Supergiant bought Ben Stokes for 14.5 crore, joining in a communal shaking of hands with an expression that read: “What did we just pay?”
This year Stokes returns, beneath the legal cloud he now tows everywhere; so does Chris Lynn, amid great expectations but also worrisome fitness. They are the prestige properties; they also have potentially the greatest downside. Valuation mechanisms are more precise, but can still be confounded by chance and impulse.
Tension is provided by the salary cap, and the sense of dwindling options. How tightly the cap fits has never been entirely clear (it’s interesting that no team has ever been caught rorting) but it makes publicly consequential the flow on from a big buy.
Last year, for example, Royal Challengers Bangalore arrived in pell-mell pursuit of a left-arm quick, Mitchell Starc having withdrawn just days before. Everyone knew it, too, and the bidding for Tymal Mills seemed as much about depleting RCB’s kitty as about obtaining his services: at 12 crore, he cost more than Mitchell Johnson, Pat Cummins and Nathan Coulter-Nile put together, only to bowl a total of 107 balls in five matches as RCB plunged to the bottom of the table.
For all the array of talent on display, too, the auction shows the IPL to have grown ever more like itself, as an expression of Indian nationalism. Media coverage invariably rejoices in the minting of slumdog millionaires — the offspring of rickshaw drivers and dabawalas turned into crorepatis.
Last year’s toast was pace bowler Thangarasu Natarajan, a porter’s son not long graduated from tennis ball cricket, listed at 10 lakh and bought for 3 crore, although, again, he ended up bowling only 76 deliveries for Kings XI Punjab for the tournament.
The auction draws cricketers from Ireland, Canada and Nepal, and no fewer than nine from Afghanistan. But there will, again, be no Pakistanis, out of deference to politics and ideology. Indians, meanwhile, seem no closer to playing in other T20 leagues round the world.
Perhaps the auction’s subtlest yet most pervasive impact is reflected in my first paragraph: the steady evolution of the rupee into cricket’s reserve currency.
In 2008, MS Dhoni was acquired by Chennai Super Kings for what was reported, for its reassuring ring, as $US1.5 million. This year Dhoni will not feature in the auction, having been “retained” for CSK for what is reported, with perfect confidence, as 15 crore rupees ($3 million). It is, then, the IPL’s world; cricket just lives in it.
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