On Tuesday, an allrounder who averages 16 with the bat and 27 with the ball across his 53 professional T20 matches will be bought by an IPL team for the first time in his young career.
A top-order batter will also be sold, picking up his first contract since 2017 despite a record of a single T20 half-century in the last three years, and a strike rate of 126 in that time.
And a fast bowler who has not played a T20 international for 14 months will spark a bidding war so fierce that he could become the best-paid player in the league’s history.
All of the players in question – Rachin Ravindra, Travis Head and Mitchell Starc – have modest recent T20 records. Yet auction insiders expect them to attract substantial interest between the ten franchises: they could fetch something in the region of Rs 35 crore (US$4.2m approximately) between them. Those involved in the auction in Dubai’s Coca-Cola Arena will not be surprised to see them sell for huge sums.
For the second successive year, this IPL auction takes place immediately after a World Cup: the 2022 T20 World Cup in Australia, and the 2023 ODI World Cup in India. Last year, franchises had to consider how much stock they should put by performances in conditions different to those found in the IPL; this year, they must take the change in format into account.
Recent precedent suggests there will be a premium rate for players who thrived at the World Cup. Last December, Punjab Kings spent Rs 18.5 ($2.2m) crore to secure the services of Sam Curran, hoping he could replicate his Player-of-the-Tournament feats for England when he arrived in India the following year. Curran had a middling IPL record to that point, but starred in the World Cup in Australia – not least in a new role as a death bowler.
In practice, Curran’s performances for Punjab in 2023 were merely an extension of what had come before in the IPL. Perhaps his natural length and his variations were better suited to the bigger grounds in Australia; perhaps he had simply been in better form at the World Cup than he was four months later. Either way, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that Punjab had overpaid.
The phenomenon is not exclusive to cricket: in football, major international tournaments typically take place immediately before a transfer window, with a similar effect. While the dynamics of recruitment are different between club football’s open market and the IPL’s auction, in both cases, performances at a World Cup are often overvalued.
Research by Twenty First Group, a London-based sports consultancy, has found that players who score at least one goal at a football World Cup sell for around 20% more than their expected value in the subsequent transfer window. “Scouts, owners and CEOs at top clubs might not be watching the average game in the Austrian Bundesliga,” says Omar Chaudhuri, the company’s chief intelligence officer. “They’re definitely watching the World Cup.”
In 2014, Colombia’s James Rodríguez was named Player of the Tournament at the World Cup after scoring six times, but struggled to replicate that form in club football after moving from AS Monaco to Real Madrid for €75m (about $81m). Earlier this year, Chelsea spent €121m ($131m) on Argentina’s Enzo Fernández, after his impressive 2022 World Cup performances – a sum estimated to be more than double his market value by the website Transfermarkt, and one he is yet to justify.
“There are market dynamics that sit behind those fees,” Chaudhuri says. “But clearly, playing well on that stage ramps up the price. For most football fans, the World Cup is the pinnacle, but it’s not necessarily the highest-quality competition. Look at some of the teams in the 2022 World Cup – performances against them aren’t necessarily the best basis to make a decision on a player’s ability.
“The single most important concept in recruitment in any sport is the idea that the output that you’ve seen isn’t necessarily true to what is likely to happen in the future: recruitment experts try to establish the mean level of performance that a player will regress towards,” Chaudhuri says. World Cups alone do not provide clubs with sufficient information to do so.
The parallels across sports are obvious, even if a smaller number of teams at cricket’s World Cups means that talent is more concentrated. If anything, Chaudhuri suggests, the premium on World Cup performances might be greater in cricket than in football, given the latter is a team sport that allows individuals great scope to dominate games.
That is not to say that franchises should disregard World Cup performances altogether ahead of Tuesday’s auction. Clearly, Ravindra’s success against some of the world’s best bowlers in Indian conditions points to a young player with immense potential, and one far better than his statistics from New Zealand’s domestic T20 competition might suggest. Recruitment is never as simple as plugging numbers into an algorithm.
But throughout the IPL’s 16-season history, teams have fallen victim to recency bias at the auction table, picking based on what they have seen in the immediate build-up rather than making a holistic assessment of players to predict how they will fare in a specific role in their side. Does Head’s recent success opening for Australia in 50-over cricket make him a viable No. 4 for an IPL franchise?
In fact, Chaudhuri suggests, the smart play for franchises might be to sign a player who underperformed at the World Cup. “Say Jos Buttler was up for auction: his price would probably be depressed because he’s not been playing well recently. But what are the odds of that rut persisting over a 14-game IPL season in the spring? You might take your chances on him coming out of it.”
Ravindra, Head and Starc are all exceptional cricketers, and there is every chance that one of them will prove to be the missing link that a team needs to secure the title in IPL 2024. But franchise owners, beware: the World Cup effect means they will come at a substantial cost.