If there is one aspect of the IPL that requires immediate change, it is the IPL’s much-maligned player auction. a system designed to select players on the basis of market forces, the auction is conceivably meant to determine the players’ value, along the lines of a player draft like the NFL, the MLB or any other league…

Even in 2015, the auction remained an economic anomaly, yet for reasons best known to its officials, it remained a mainstay, and an apparently unavoidable necessity. The 2015 auction was a perfect example of how things went wrong because of this outdated and impractical player selection mechanism.

If the auction was intended to level IPL 8’s playing field, it failed. The auction spurs deviations that increase the dichotomy between teams entirely reliant on the auction for strengthening their squads, and those who were well set, given that their squads were already almost at full strength due to player retentions from the previous season.

Player retentions, of course, is one of the primary reasons why there is so little parity in the IPL, which favours the haves and sinks the have-nots.

There is no point whatsoever in having an auction, and at the same time allowing teams to retain a number of their best players year after year, outside of the auction. Take the example of the CSK, arguably the most successful IPL franchise. Of course, the franchise’s current status leads one to believe that a lot more was at play, but from the perspective of performance, the CSK’s core team had remained unchanged from the first couple of seasons onwards. Without primary dependence on the auction, it has been far easier for teams like the CSK to field great teams built around its core.

Teams that have retained players for eight seasons and counting simply have an advantage over those that are dependent on the auction. The Delhi team is the perfect example of a team that has consistently been dependent on the auction, and has consequently suffered because of it.

The retention right has been inefficient since its inception and continues to be so because it can artificially inflate the wages owed to the retained players, as it is also outside the purview of the salary cap. It is a right which takes several coveted players outside the economic marketplace of competitive demand and supply, and reduces the probability of there being a level-playing field.

Already good teams could become great because they retained the core of their team at fixed wages from a salary cap standpoint, but could negotiate individual salaries with each retained player at a rate that fell outside the salary cap parameters.

So for the auction prior to IPL VII in 2014, for teams such as Delhi Daredevils or Kings XI Punjab, it served merely as a qualified fresh start, since twenty-four players had already been taken out of the auction through retention, and another nine to ten players were effectively out of reach if the right to match option was exercised.

The right to match option was given to a franchise which had the option to bid for a player who had represented the franchise the previous season but had not been retained by it. During the auction, if another franchise made a bid for the player, then the franchise with the right to match card could use the card to retain the player at the same amount as the highest bid the player had received during the auction.

So for 2014, not only was it an extremely limited auction, it also lent a feel of preferential treatment being given to the traditional powerhouse franchises, in a setting where transparency had been compromised. It was a familiar theme and was repeated the following season. In the real world, this is untenable as an economics model, and unviable from an accountability parameter.

In the past as well, player retentions have raised question marks when it came to creative methods employed by franchises who would provide supplementary income opportunities for players outside the realm of the IPL wages so as to ensure the salary cap isn’t breached, yet the players remain contracted to the team that covet them.

A prime example was the two-pronged engagement that the RCB had with Chris Gayle in 2012. Gayle is, along with AB deVilliers, the most valuable international cricketer in the IPL. Gayle has scored 3199 runs in just eighty-two matches in the IPL at an average of over 46 and a strike rate of 153. He has five centuries, eighteen fifties and 230 sixes in his IPL career. He even has sixteen wickets from his part-time off-spin bowling.

He won the Orange Cap in successive seasons – 2011 and 2012 – for being the leading run scorer. Having been passed over during the 2011 auction, he was signed as a replacement for Dirk Nannes who withdrew, at the same wages as Nannes had been signed for, $650,000 on a one-year contract.

It was widely assumed that Gayle would be the highest priced player in the 2012 auction, with estimates hovering in the $2-million range, which was the total salary purse that teams had for the supplementary auction. On 20 January 2012 however, it was announced that Gayle would be the brand ambassador for the UB group’s UK arm, as the endorser for Whyte & Mackay, UB’s flagship whiskey.

It was rumoured that the deal was for $2 million, and shortly thereafter, the RCB announced that they had retained Gayle for two more seasons for an undisclosed amount. Other teams were aggrieved at this sweetening of the salary pie through supplemental sponsorship deals, and once again it highlighted the challenge of creating a level-playing field primarily on the basis of a salary cap that had so many loopholes.

The entire concept of player retention has singlehandedly led to lopsided team structures, and finally the newly-formed governing council in 2015 announced a modification to the retention policy from 2017 onwards, limiting the number of Indian capped players to two, and overseas players too to two per team.

Although a small step, it certainly indicates how the skewed retention policy has favoured teams like the CSK, and perhaps it is because of the CSK’s falling out of favour that this reworking of the retention policy has been implemented. Is it a case of too little too late? Time will tell…

In the meantime, let’s look at the 2015 auction to see how dependent teams like Daredevils were impacted.

The two biggest and most controversial acquisitions, Yuvraj Singh and Dinesh Karthik, came at exorbitant cost. Yuvraj cost Rs 16 crore and Karthik cost Rs 10.5 crore.

The cost was imposed due to artificial price floors caused by squad retentions and consequently, scarcity of talent supply. It was clearly not because of the players’ performances for the national team, or for their IPL teams the previous years. Yuvraj, for someone of his calibre and ability, has had a middling IPL career, with seven seasons and ninety-eight matches yielding 2099 runs at a an average of 25.28, and strike rate of 129. His bowling has produced thirty-five wickets at an economy of 7.27 runs per over, and an average of 28. His bowling in 2015 was a vanishing aspect of his game, and his fielding too wasn’t nearly as sharp as it was at his peak.

Compare his IPL career to an Indian player in the CSK – Suresh Raina. Raina is admittedly one of the best T20 players India has ever produced, and has been with the CSK since 2008. He has played in 132 matches in the IPL, amassing 3699 runs at an average of 34.25 and a strike rate of over 139. He also has twenty-four wickets at an average of 39 and an economy of 7.24.

His performance is stellar, yet because of his being retained by the CSK each year, he earns much less than those who are in the auction. That’s hardly a performance-driven model.

The market dynamics were thus voided and led to the inability of the acquiring teams to assess the correct permutation and combination to put together their squads prior to the actual auction. Like every other year, the 2015 auction had turned into a game of chance rather than strategy.

Of the Rs 87.6 crore spent in total at the auction, approximately 30 per cent, or Rs 26.5 crore, was spent on Yuvraj and Karthik. This in an auction that featured the following players, all of whom were among the 282 unsold players who did not even get a single bid:

Hashim Amla, Cameron White, Tillakaratne Dilshan, Marlon Samuels, Kumar Sangakkara, Mahela Jayawardene, Brad Hodge, Cheteshwar Pujara and Ross Taylor. Not a single bid for any of these players. It is virtually impossible to justify this flawed mechanism any longer.

Excerpted with permission from Not Out: The Incredible Story of the Indian Premier League, Desh Gaurav Sekhri, Penguin Books.