IPL auction: Working out worth of cricketer

Corey Anderson at the press conference at McLean Park, Napier, before the cricket test against Bangladesh this month. Photo / Duncan Brown

How do you put a price on a cricketer? In domestic T20 leagues, the teams that win are those with the best answer to that question.

This weekend, 578 players - including 24 from New Zealand - will enter the Indian Premier League auction, hoping to become rich. The salary cap is up by 20 per cent this year; millionaires will be created in the couple of minutes it takes to complete each lot. All but 18 players retained by their franchises are available for the 182 remaining slots.

Once players enter the auction they are helpless: they become commodities with no say at all over where they will end up. Their fates are determined by not merely cricketing skills, but a cocktail of egos, data and luck.

"The seven deadly sins are covered in the IPL auction," says one insider.

In the auction room in Bangalore, each of the eight sides must choose how to spend what remains of their 80 crore budget - about $17m. The burden falls on five or six decision-makers - typically the chairman, chief executive, head and assistant coaches, team manager and analyst - who sit at their franchise table and bid for players to assemble a team.

As they prepare, analysts conduct exhaustive research on all potential recruits. They aim not merely to find excellent players, but to identify players who are undervalued, leaving ample money to spend elsewhere.

The Knight Riders, regarded as at the cutting edge of cricket analytics, use a computation system to rank players before the auction "but that's just a referral point and might not have a huge bearing", according to their analyst and head scout, AR Srikanth. They also use real-time software during the auction to predict what other teams will do and assist in their decision-making. In the auction, decisions made in split seconds can define a team for many years.

One trend in IPL history is the shift from reputation - witness Bangalore buying Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Rahul Dravid and Jacques Kallis, a coterie of formidable test players, in 2008 and promptly coming second last - to recent form. Yet some believe that this has actually gone too far, and teams suffer from recency bias - over-paying for those who have performed most strongly in the very final weeks before the auction.

The notion of good value can be abandoned as owners - who generally have the final say on players - seek to sign their favourite cricketers: recall the horrified look of Stephen Fleming, the Rising Pune Supergiants coach, after his side paid $3.28m for Ben Stokes last year. "Some just want a player because someone else wants them."

Owners' wealth only counts for so much. The IPL has a strict salary cap, designed to ensure competitive balance. Ultimately, then, the way to beat the competition isn't to out-spend them; it's to out-think them.

To do this, teams study who their opponents want - for instance, it is believed Chennai Super Kings covet Stokes. With this knowledge, teams bid for players they know others want, to try to ramp up the eventual price and leave them less cash to invest elsewhere. Sometimes this can go wrong and sides can be lumbered with players they didn't truly need. The fundamental madness is inescapable when you cram some of India's wealthiest individuals into a room so hot Richard Madley, the auctioneer, has been known to get through several shirts during a day with the gavel.

The IPL action is "not efficient at all", says Dan Weston, from Sports Analytics Advantage.

He believes many teams still prioritise the most prominent international players over those with better T20 numbers, not recognising how distinct the format is, and that teams generally spend too much on batsmen but not enough on bowlers.

And for all the focus on the razzmatazz of overseas recruits, most tournaments are actually won by the sides with the best Indian players.