Good evening!

Welcome to The Playbook, a weekly newsletter on the business of sports and gaming. If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, please hit the subscribe button below — it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Records broken

This was a pretty great week for Indian cricket. The women in blue recorded the biggest margin of victory in a women’s Test match. Deepti Sharma joined the elite club of players in women’s cricket to score a 50 in an innings and take a minimum of nine wickets in a match. On the men’s side, youngsters like Arshdeep Singh are proving their mettle in South Africa.

However, the most exciting thing in Indian cricket happened off the pitch. It was the week of the IPL mini auction, with a couple of firsts added to its name. For the first time, the auction was held overseas (Dubai) and also saw its first woman auctioneer (Mallika Sagar) in 16 years of the tournament. Of course, none of these firsts captured public attention. What did catch their attention was the eye-popping money shelled out on players. So naturally, we’re going to dissect those numbers for this week. But before we do that, it’s important to detail the whole process of buying/selling/trading IPL players, for those who are unaware. Folks who do understand it, jump straight to the next section.

How it works

There are three avenues for buying players in the IPL: mega auction, mini auction, and trade-offs. These avenues help decide the cost value of a player. All teams must buy players from the allotted budget of ₹100 crores ($12 million)—with ₹95 crores ($11.5 million) reserved for mega and ₹5 crores ($600,000) for mini auctions.

• Mega auction: This is organised every three years. Each team gets to retain 3-5 players (the number has varied over the years), and the rest join the auction pool. For example, if Team A retains three players worth ₹30 crores (around $4 million), determined by what Team A paid for them last time, that leaves them with ₹65 crores (around $8 million) to build the rest of their squad. The squad strength must be between 18-25 players, with a maximum of eight overseas players.

• Mini auction: These happen annually between two mega auctions. Unused funds from mega auctions roll over into the budget of mini auctions. Meaning, if Team A only spent ₹55 crores (around $7 million) out of their budget of ₹65 crore in the mega auction, then their budget for the mini auction becomes ₹15 crores in total (₹10 crore rolled over from mega and ₹5 crores reserved for mini). Yet again, unused funds roll into next year’s mini auction.

• Trade-offs: Players can be traded between two teams in a trading window. The window opens a month after an IPL season ends and stays open till a week before the auction date. It opens again after the auction and is on till a month before the start of the new season. During this period, teams can either swap players or buy players outright for their auction price.

Auctionomics of IPL

Okay, now that everyone’s on the same page, it’s time to dive into the auction. This time around we saw two of the highest bids in IPL history. Mitchell Starc was bought for ₹24.75 crore by Kolkata Knight Riders, making him the most expensive player in the league. His compatriot Pat Cummins saw the second-highest bid in IPL history: ₹20.5 crore. Much of this is due to recency bias. Both were part of the Australia squad that won the World Cup in India this year. Only natural to get these crazy high numbers, right? Well, sort of. Recency bias is one factor but if you look at the history of the most expensive buys in the league, a pattern starts to emerge.  

Barring Ishan Kishan, everyone else on the above list was bought in the mini auction. And yes, the list is dominated by overseas players. These two insights have given rise to a conspiracy theory that agents and players, especially the overseas ones, are gaming the system by opting out of mega auctions and then churning the maximum out of teams in the mini auctions. The logic is simple. In mega auctions, teams are essentially rebuilding their squad. So, going all out for one player is not exactly possible, which is not the case in mini auctions. 

Now, I don’t know if this is true. So, I turned to Joy Bhattacharya, former team director of the Kolkata Knight Riders, to share some of his wisdom on the matter. Bhattacharya pointed out to me that cricket isn’t a simple equation without variables; your form may dip and you’re always one injury away from ending your career. With no guarantees, what makes anyone think that players can ‘choose’ to sit out one year and come back with ever greater bids in the next year?

Those who choose to not be a part of the auction almost always have legitimate reasons, like prioritising the Ashes, the World Cup, or family. Reasons that are built on the realities of today, and not some fanciful imaginings of tomorrow. 

The actual reason that mini auctions tend to go overboard is because every team is settled and is now just looking for players that can ‘fix’ some of its issues from the last season. Since most teams have a decent corpus left, they go all out on available players. Here's Harsha Bhogle summing this up:

Another interesting event to come out of this year’s IPL was Hardik Pandya’s trade to Mumbai Indians. While many derided the move for moral reasons, some couldn’t help but talk about a reported ‘transfer fee’ involved in the trade-off. If the reported transfer fee is indeed true, then it raises questions about the need for auctions. 

Players, especially the big ones, could join any team irrespective of what happens in the auction. More importantly, the involvement and acceptance of transfer fees give way to an economic ‘might is right’ approach. Equal budgets for every team would make no difference in that scenario.

Bhattacharya also gave another insight about the potential ramifications of this deal. Today, the IPL attracts the attention of some of the world’s wealthiest individuals, private equity firms, and sovereign national funds. This is because the league is extremely profitable, which is ensured by capping players' salaries through an auction. So the acceptance of transfer fees is detrimental to not just the IPL but the BCCI as well. In the words of Bhattacharya, “Stupid money makes no sense.”

All this hoopla around the auction and trade-offs has led to calls for reforms in the IPL auctions, and I agree with that. The IPL needs to sort out the transfer fee angle and counter any conspiracy theory by coming clean on transactions. I also think the IPL should consider whether dismantling teams every three years is prudent. Then there are questions about academy players and so on and on. 

To fans, I’d suggest that you not get sucked into the vortex of theories about foreign players profiting off of Indian players. There’s more to it than meets the eye. 

⚡️Quick Singles

⚽️🏆🇪🇺: Plans for the European Super League, a proposed breakaway club football league, could be back after the European Court of Justice ruled in its favour. The court said the sport’s governing bodies, UEFA and FIFA, were “abusing a dominant position” by deciding to expel players and clubs participating in the ESL, under Europe’s competition law. The league was briefly proposed in 2021, with 12 top European clubs including the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Juventus. The move collapsed following protests from fans and governments, and nine out of the 12 clubs pulled out within 48 hours. Despite that, Real Madrid and Barcelona have held onto their plans for the Super League.

🆕🏆⚽: Speaking of which, soon after securing the verdict in its favour, A22, the company behind the European Super League, unveiled fresh plans to revive the tournament. The proposed men’s tournament will feature 64 clubs. They include two top tiers—super and gold—of 16 teams each, and a third tier, blue, which will consist of 32 teams based on domestic league performances, with promotion and relegation across the three divisions. The women’s league will consist of 32 clubs across two tiers, super and gold. Manchester United and Bayern Munich have expressed their commitment to UEFA, besides leagues such as Germany’s Bundesliga and the French Ligue 1. 

💰🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿⚽: V Sports, the parent company of the Premier League club Aston Villa, has sold a minority stake to American investment company Atairos. While the terms of the deal were undisclosed, Aston Villa announced that V Sports would continue to own 100% of the club and continue its operations. Similarly, American businesswoman Michele Kang has bought the English women’s football club London City Lionesses. Lionesses operate in the second division of the English women’s football league. Kang also owns Washington Spirit, a women’s football club that plays in the United States, besides being a controlling shareholder in the Olympique Lyonnais Feminin, the storied French women’s football club.

🏀👟🫱🏽‍🫲🏽: Chinese brand 361 Degrees has signed NBA star Nikola Jokic in a multi-year shoe contract. The Serbian Jokic plays for the Denver Nuggets and is the reigning NBA Finals MVP. Until his switch, Jokic was associated with Nike, sporting its GT Jump shoes for the past two seasons, according to Complex. Jokic joins his Nuggets teammate Aaron Gordon, who signed for 361 Degrees in February 2020. 

🏬🇮🇳👟: Japanese sportswear company Asics plans to double down in India after opening its 100th store in the country. It now wants to add 50 more stores by 2025 and open its first “mono-store” in the country by 2026. The company’s 100th store was opened in Ahmedabad and is looking to go deeper into India by tapping Tier 2 and 3 cities, according to Rajat Khurana, its managing director for India and South Asia. Asics, known for its preference among runners, first arrived on Indian shores in 2010 in partnership with Reliance Retail before deciding to go independent in 2015.

📖 Weekend Reading

The backstories of Sameer Rizvi, Robin Minz, Kumar Kushagra, and Shubham Dubey, the four uncapped Indian players who made it big in the recently-held IPL mini auctions. 

Football conspiracy theories: Are we in the ‘golden age’ of fan paranoia? [The Athletic]

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed reading The Playbook, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Please also subscribe to it (for free) if you haven’t already. 

You can reach out to me at adarsh@thesignal.co with any feedback (good, bad, or ugly), tips, and ideas. I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Friday!