The height of inequality

Our expert looks at the monetary values of cricketers in the Indian Premier League and finds an interesting disparity therein.

As the Battle of Britain raged in 1940, Winston Churchill was supposed to have said: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few”.

He was talking of the brave World War II English soldiers … but you could twist the expression to mean other things; e.g., the kind of money that IPL franchise owners pay some of their top players.

On Thursday night, after some elementary arithmetic, I wrote on my Twitter page: With Jayasuriya and Duminy ‘on the bench’, there may be more Ambani money in the dugout than in the playing field.

I see that this tweet has been retweeted around quite a bit, suggesting that some people find this sort of arithmetic quite interesting.

So the next morning I decided to complete the exercise. We looked at all the 8 teams playing in IPL3, and decided to arrange the player prices in descending order.

For example, for Mumbai Indians (MI) we have: Tendulkar (US$1,121,250), Jayasuriya ($975,000), Duminy ($950,000), Harbhajan ($850,000), Pollard ($750,000) … and so on.

How much does the MI total add up to? $6,446,250.

And how much do these top five players add up to? $4,646,250.

So that’s almost 72%—or three-fourths of the total money!

Was this just a MI aberration, or did this percentage appear with other franchises too? And instead of looking at the top 5 expensive players, why not look at the ‘top 4’, ‘top 5’, ‘top 6’ and ‘top 7’? The table below shows the percentages.

This table leads to the following conclusions:

# Every franchise pays half its money to only the top four players
# Every franchise pays three fourths of its money to the top 6-7 players.

This distribution appears extremely skewed. As a franchise owner, I would feel uncomfortable with these numbers and seek to correct them at the earliest with something more equitable; especially given that cricket is a team game.

There’s another interesting sub-story that we’ll take up next time. Rajasthan Royals spend half, or less than half, the money that other franchises spend and still achieve comparable results. No RR player even receives $500,000 now! Their two highest paid players are Shane Warne ($450,000) and Yusuf Pathan ($475,000), and they cleverly let Mohammed Kaif go because he cost $650,000 and offered no returns.