How much will Kane Williamson go for at this year's IPL auction? Photo / Photosport.
How much will Kane Williamson go for at this year's IPL auction? Photo / Photosport.
How do you put a price on a cricketer? In domestic Twenty20 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 very, very 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 big egos, big data and luck.
In the auction room in Bangalore, each of the eight sides must choose how to spend what remains of their 80 crore budget - about £9 million (NZ$17.38m). 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.
They have been planning for this moment for eight months, since the end of the last IPL. Teams conduct mock auctions to hone their techniques during the day, and even map where they think players will end up in each round of the auction.
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.
"Everybody has access to largely the same data," one insider says. "The difference is interpretation."
The analysts take into account copious variables. Sides will prioritise different things from different batsmen: the consistency that comes with a low failure rate; a high 'activity rate', meaning that players score off almost every ball and are skilled in playing around big hitters; or even how quickly an opening batsman scores against spin, to combat the growing trend of spinners bowling in the first six overs.
Franchises also send scouts - both to India and around the world - to gauge a player's character and how he copes under pressure. Through a local state league, Kolkata Knight Riders identified KC Cariappa - who had never played a professional match - in 2015; he ended up costing £280,000 (NZ$540,700).
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.
Another side has a shortlist of about 50 overseas players who they would like to sign, to fill their remaining seven overseas slots, and have a general rule that, if one player is bought for over their guide price, another must be bought under by the same amount. Yet the auction itself is far too volatile to allow for a team to have a non-negotiable limit on what they are prepared to pay.
On auction day, randomness - simply where players' lots are drawn in each round - can make millionaires. "Where they come out is important," says one insider. For instance, this year many teams might know they want a highly-skilled No 3 batsman to build around. Whether they go for Joe Root or Kane Williamson might depend on nothing more than who is up for auction first. Players who are drawn later in a round can also be handicapped: in 2011, Chris Gayle wasn't picked up in the auction at all. He was later selected as an injury replacement - and was then the player of the tournament.
West Indies star Chris Gayle has been a standout in the IPL for many seasons. Photo / Getty Images.
In previous years, when the auction player pool was small, players with specific skills have been extraordinarily lucky. If a player is unavailable, teams often seek to replace them with one with similar traits: what psychologists call prediction by representativeness. Perhaps the best instance was last year, when Mitchell Starc pulled out just before the auction. In his place, Bangalore were keen on another left-arm quick bowler. The one in the auction with by far the highest pedigree was Tymal Mills; he attracted a fee of £1.4m (NZ$2.7m) - about five times what insiders expect he will go for this year.
While planning has been underway since the end of the last IPL, teams reevaluate players' worth right up until auction day itself. That was true of Mills last year, who enjoyed a fine T20 series in India just before the auction. This year, it is Jofra Archer and D'Arcy Short who are soaring.
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 seven deadly sins are covered in the IPL auction," says one insider. 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 £1.7m (NZ$3.28m) for Ben Stokes last year. "Some just want a player because someone else wants them." The most sought-after players can be affected by the winner's curse: they end up being over-priced, destabilising the rest of their team's auction strategy.
Owners' wealth only counts for so much: unlike the Premier League, 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 try and do this, teams study who their opponents want - for instance, it is believed that Chennai Super Kings covet Stokes this year. With this knowledge, teams bid for players they know others want, to try and 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. This year, the process is complicated further by the right-to-match system, allowing each team to match the auction price of between two and four players they had previously owned (depending on how many players they already retained). If a team knows that another side is desperate to retain a particular player, they might be inclined to pay more for them during the auction, hoping the other side then use their right-to-match cards.
Which southpaw will be a hit in the Vivo #IPLauction? Get the answers on Vivo IPL Auction 2018 – Curtain Raiser on Jan 26 on Star Sports. pic.twitter.com/yrkMM0Oyfq
While teams evaluate each player, they also compare them with the Indian talent available; each XI can only select four overseas players. Traditionally, this has damaged overseas spinners - because there are so many fine Indian spinners - and helped overseas quicks. Many teams also believe in continuity - which helps explain why English players have seldom been embraced by the IPL - but, especially for the limited overs specialists allowed to play the entirety of the 2018 season, this auction could bring unprecedented riches.
In a league set up on the model of Indian TV soap operas, teams are not just dictated by sporting needs, but also commercial considerations. Gayle is said to open up new sponsorship opportunities: not enough to 'pay for himself', but perhaps enough to justify spending another £100,000 (NZ$193,000) on him.
And yet there remains a fundamental madness to it all: the sort that is inescapable when cramming some of India's wealthiest individuals into a room so hot that Richard Madley, the auctioneer, has been known to get through several shirts during a day of auctioneering.
IPL auctioneer Richard Madley. Photo / Getty Images.
"I wish I could tell you it was more intricate," one auction veteran reflects. "The process is still immature."
The IPL action is "not efficient at all", says Dan Weston, from Sports Analytics Advantage. He believes that 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.
With each year, the IPL auction is becoming more sophisticated. But it remains far less scientific than drafts in US sports leagues: an auction in which the simple luck of the lots can change a cricketer's life forever.
