Eight IPL franchisees will be getting together to bid for the cricketers they want in their teams. On offer, for a price, are some of the world’s finest cricketers, from Ricky Ponting to Shaun Pollock, Chris Gayle to Shoaib Akhtar, Mahendra Singh Dhoni to Muttiah Muralitharan. Eager to buy them are some of India’s biggest corporate names, from United Spirits to Reliance Industries, and a couple of the country’s brightest faces – Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and leading lady Preity Zinta.
The cell phones will ring off the hook, the “open bidding” will take place behind closed doors inside the Regal Room at the Hilton Towers. About six representatives from each of the eight teams will be seated around separate tables with computer screens to track the action.
The auction process is complicated and tensions will rise, each team has to spend a minimum of $3.3 million but can’t go above $5 million.
The bid starts with the annual “base player fee” that has already been fixed by the IPL. This base player fee assumes that the player is available for the entire tournament. This fee will be adjusted on a pro-rata basis, depending on the players’ availability.
The players will be divided into “sets” of approximately 12 each, according to their base player fee, cricketing speciality and expected availability for the opening season. But the bids will start with a set of marquee players like Gilchrist, Dhoni, Ricky Ponting and Chris Gayle. A random draw will decide the order in which players go up on the block.
Bid increments have been fixed at $5000 for bids up to $100,000, $10,000 for bids between $100,000 and $250,000, and $25,000 for bids between $250,000 and $500,000. Increments over the $500,000 mark will be at the auctioneer’s discretion.
The minimum “percentage availability” for any player included in the auction will be 25 per cent. Thus, even if a player is expected to be either completely unavailable or only available for less than four of the DLF IPL matches in 2008, 25 per cent of the player fee bid for that player in the auction will count against the $5 million purse. For example, the purchase for $400,000 of a player who is expected to be completely unavailable in 2008 will cause a deduction of $100,000 from the franchise’s overall $5 million purse.
If more than one franchise is interested in signing a particular foreign player from outside the current pool, the IPL’s organisers will hold another auction. But Indian players who are not in the pool can be signed at any time.
Each team has to choose 8 international players, 4 under 22 players, 4 players from the local catchment areasThere is no cap on the number of Indian players but no team can select more than two Aussie players.
Sachin, Ganguly, Dravid, Sehwag and Yuvraj are the Icon players and will not be available for auction.
We will keep on updating this thread as the auction progresses.
You are more than welcome to post your picks for different teams.
Thanks TOM,
But if you are a cricket follower I would appreciate if you leave your comments about cricket also.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Tom Stanley