How much should we pay players in IPL4?

Srinivas Bhogle has some fascinating advice for IPL franchise owners as they prepare to acquire talent and reshape their team constructs for season 4.

With IPL3 ending, the three-year player contracts too will end, and it will be time to offer players new contracts.

The team cap on player prices has been raised by $2 million, so the total team purse is $7 million. This is a lot of money, as Lalit Modi gleefully remarked in his happier days.

It is a good idea to have uniform caps at the top; otherwise IPL could go the EPL way with a handful of very rich clubs at one end, and clubs facing bankruptcy at the other end.

But having an upper limit might be solving only half the problem. Since the intention is to ensure that all teams are equally balanced, we might also have to ensure that IPL teams don’t spend far below $7 million either. We already find that a team like RR spends less than half of what MI or RCB spend.

So let us briefly pretend to be rich, and let us try to guess how a rational franchise owner might choose to distribute his $7 million.

We have already discovered that the top four players take away 50% of the money and the top 6-7 players take away 75% of all the money. With $2 million more available for distribution, one might expect these percentages to drop by a bit. To be honest, these percentages were far too lopsided and I expect franchise owners to bid more sensibly in the next round and ensure a more equitable spread.

I also expect (or would advise) franchise owners to look at player clusters instead of looking at the players individually. Recall that the idea of icon players was an early attempt at clustering. How many clusters can we think of now?

Before we answer that question, let’s try to bring in some context. We must distinguish between (a) Indian and foreign players (because of the 7+4 rule) (b) all-rounders and ‘single skill’ players (c) ‘match-winning’ and utility players and (d) young and not-so young players (because IPL does have a ‘reserved’ quota for under-23 players). We could consider other factors like fielding ability, fitness record, player nationality etc. but that would complicate matters too much.

Remember too that we don’t want too many clusters, ideally about 6-8. So let’s start:


Cluster 1: Indian match-winning all-rounders. This includes players like M S Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh (if he is in a good mood), and, one notch below, players like Yusuf Pathan, Suresh Raina, Harbhajan Singh, Robin Uthappa and Rohit Sharma. These are likely to be the most expensive players.

Cluster 2a: Indian match-winning ‘single skill’ players. Players like Gautam Gambhir, Zaheer Khan, Virat Kohli, Pragyan Ojha, Amit Mishra, Ashish Nehra (if fit), M Vijay probably fit the ball.

Cluster 2b: Indian utility all-rounders. This cluster will include players like Irfan Pathan, Dinesh Karthik and perhaps Ravindra Jadeja (who didn’t play IPL3). A few notches below are players like Praveen Kumar, Ambati Rayudu and Vinay Kumar.

Cluster 2c: Indian not-so-young players who still offer significant value. Anil Kumble, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid,would make up this cluster, with Murali Kartik, S Badrinath and R P Singh a notch or two below.

Cluster 3a: Young Indian players with match-winning potential. Abhishek Nayar, R Ashwin, T Suman, Manish Pandey, Naman Ojha, Saurabh Tiwary, Siddharth Trivedi, Ashok Dinda are examples (and there are many more).

Cluster 3b: Will contain not-so-young Indian utility players such as L Balaji, Ajit Agarkar, Laxmi Ratan Shukla, Rajat Bhatia and others.

Cluster 4: Young and promising Indian players who make up the numbers and occasionally explode with match-winning performances.

Cluster 5: Foreign match-winning active all-rounders. This includes players like Jacques Kallis, Kieron Pollard, Chris Gayle, Kumar Sangakkara, Brendon McCullum, Kevin Pietersen, J-P Duminy, Shane Watson, Dwayne Bravo, T Dilshan and perhaps even Paul Collingwood and Stuart Broad. If Michael Clarke plays IPL4, expect him to be here too. Shahid Afridi too, if he’s allowed to play.

Cluster 6: Foreign, match-winning, single-skill, active players. This cluster will include Mahela Jayawardene, Dale Steyn, David Warner, Lasith Malinga, A B de Villiers, Daniel Vettori, Ross Taylor, Graeme Smith (who might captain RR)

Cluster 7: Foreign but retired match-winners. This cluster will contain players like Andrew Symonds, Andrew Flintoff, Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Shane Warne (if he plays; he will if RR pay him a million dollars), Shane Bond, Dirk Nannes and perhaps even Sanath Jayasuriya.

Cluster 8: Foreign utility all-rounders. These are players who provide reasonable value, but don’t get too many chances to play IPL matches like Brad Hodge, Angelo Mathews, Michael Lumb, Ryan Harris, A C Voges, Owais Shah, David Hussey, Justin Kemp.

These are the proposed eight clusters with examples of candidate players. Remember that with the T20 World Cup coming up, some exciting new names will pop up, while some reputations may also crumble.

Okay, it is now time to allocate the money to different clusters. Here’s one proposal that seems reasonable.

We are therefore suggesting that the highest price should not exceed $1.2 million and this will of course go to an Indian player (Dhoni and Tendulkar; one wonders if Dhoni was sending a message when he said he had to justify his $1.5 million price!). One also hopes that this will leave a little more money for players in cluster 4 (who probably got a maximum of $30,000 in the first three IPLs).