Not Price but Scarcity: Where the Real Ledger Sits in Cricket's Franchise Window

At last November's auction, Rishabh Pant fetched ₹27 crore, and the first line in my notebook that night was something else entirely. In the international series immediately before it, Pant's strike rate sat below 128, it was barely nine months since his return from a back injury, and his T20 form curve was pointing down. Yet he became the most expensive player of that auction. I turned my eyes from the laptop screen to the window. The question was now clear: was I looking at a number that described the cricket field, or a number that described nothing but a scarcity in a market?

The answer was not easy. At the same auction, a top-order batter who had held identical consistency in T20 cricket across two seasons went for roughly half of Pant's price. The year before, Mitchell Starc had gone for ₹24.75 crore and Pat Cummins for ₹20.5 crore—place those two numbers side by side and it becomes clear that price here is not a certificate of performance. It is a negotiation, conducted at a fixed time, under fixed rules, for a fixed number of slots.

The context needs stating. Franchise cricket's calendar is now woven tightly into the international calendar. The windows of the IPL, SA20, ILT20, The Hundred and the BBL are arranged from January into February in a way that makes it nearly impossible for a national board to issue No Objection Certificates (NOCs) to all of its centrally contracted players at once. I have been tracking the overlap of these windows for three years. One pattern is clear: a player who features in multiple leagues in the same season becomes almost impossible to workload-manage, and smaller boards are gradually forced to hand their best players to the big leagues as 'half-finished products'.

That is where my real work begins. Looking for a relationship between auction price and performance, I found that a direct one simply does not exist. So I sat down to rebuild the dataset.

I rebuilt the dataset three times before the numbers stopped arguing with each other. In the first version I placed every batter's strike rate and every bowler's economy against auction price—the correlation was near zero. The second time I split them by role: opener, middle-order, finisher, powerplay bowler, death bowler. Some signal appeared, but it was wildly unstable. The third time I added a single variable that nobody normally accounts for—the number of overseas slots. That one column is what finally settled the picture.

The difference lies here. A franchise XI has four overseas slots and seven domestic players among eleven. Competition for an overseas player is therefore far greater, and the slots far fewer. I calculated that for an overseas player, the price per unit of performance is roughly one and a half to two times that of a domestic player. Auction price is never the price of performance; it is the price of scarcity and rules. A player who fills a domestic quota, however well he may have played in history, has his price artificially suppressed.

Is this only the IPL's story? No. The same machine runs in the SA20 under a different guise. Domestic South African players are considerably cheaper there, because the contest for overseas slots is additional. In the ILT20 it is the reverse—where overseas stars crowd in year after year, domestic players play almost for free. I have set one player's prices across three leagues side by side: performance nearly identical, price in three different places. That one table was enough for me.

This is where I see something different from the ordinary viewer. We treat auction night as a field-level yardstick—who is good, who is bad. In reality it is a constrained auction, where supply is set by board contracts, visas, the calendar and the number of slots. I once ran a simulation on a full auction dataset: if the number of overseas slots had been six instead of four, what would top overseas batters have cost? The result was astonishing—several would have dropped below half, while a few domestic names would have nearly doubled. In other words, what we today call a 'record price' is a record not of the player but of the rule.

I like watching the game from the ground, because a table never tells you why a delivery landed in the wrong place. But a table does tell you how often that mistake happens. My work sits at the meeting point of the two. In T20 cricket I have noticed that franchises now buy a batter as 'the right to bat at the top' and buy a bowler as 'the courage to bowl at the death'. The two are evaluated by different methods, so comparing two players by a single auction price is impossible. Every time someone says 'this pacer costs more than this batter, so he is more valuable', I look silently at the dataset—because I know the comparison is being made in the wrong column.

This is where my second proverb is formed. The new media wanted speed. I gave it a standard instead. In the franchise market, rumour, price and trade news arrive daily. But speed and standard are not the same thing. I once tracked roughly two hundred trade rumours across a specific window over six months, and found that only twenty-seven of them came true. That is three rumours for every four. If a newsroom cannot strike out three of those four, it does not understand the market—it is merely writing about it.

Now I come to my real conclusion, the one that goes against my own first hypothesis. I initially thought it would be wrong to say price and performance are unrelated—surely some hidden link existed. I trimmed the data three times and the correlation stayed negligible. But one thing changed my mind. I saw that it is not auction price but the pattern of release and retention that gives the true signal. A player a franchise keeps is either injury-free or cheap in the overseas slot. A player who is released, however big the name, has had his market value marked down in the franchise's ledger.

Twelve auctions, one pattern, and a spreadsheet that refused to be romantic. When I place retention lists beside auction prices, I see that release and retention decisions are made almost entirely on things other than performance: age, injury history, the overseas and domestic quotas, and workload. In other words, franchises run an algorithm, not an emotion. The rumour-mongers sell emotion; the clubs do arithmetic.

And here an old argument of mine returns in a new form in franchise cricket. In the way small clubs build half-finished players for big clubs through loan-with-obligation deals, small boards are now building half-finished cricketers for big leagues. A twenty-two-year-old pacer is developed over three years by a small board, then plays three leagues in six weeks on that NOC and returns with his form broken. The board invests in his development; the league reaps the harvest. In this arrangement a small board can never bring a finished product to market, because its player is always busy in someone else's window.

To test this claim I placed one country's centrally contracted players' league workload over five years alongside their international performance. The result was clear: a player who featured in more than two leagues a year was roughly one and a half times more likely to have an injury break in the following international season. This is correlation, not causation—I say so plainly. Perhaps those who play more simply take on more load, or perhaps fear of injury is exactly why they take more league opportunities. But the pattern persists, and that is what makes it useful for a board's planning.

I have learned to remember one thing here: correlation is not causation. I made this mistake myself once—in one season I thought a low death-bowling economy meant a higher auction price. The next season the data silenced me. Since then I write beside every claim, 'this is correlation, not causation'.

Now to what lies ahead. In the next window my eye will be on three things. Whether the gap between overseas slots and the domestic quota widens further is the first question. Whether small boards change their NOC policy, because that determines the future of small cricket. And the price gap for the same player across two leagues—the wider that gap grows, the more it proves the market is not efficient.

If someone says 'look at that price' on the night of the next auction, I want them to ask once: which rule, which scarcity, which slot does this price belong to? The answer may change their mind. And my task—a line I write from forty-five years of watching the game—is to drag the invisible rule standing behind the number in front of the reader, so that cricket's story and the market's arithmetic never blur into one.