IPL Player Auction – Dhoni ‘worth’ US $1.5 million
Evidently, this caused a bit of a stir around the world, but that media excitement didn’t really get as far as England. Sure, there was a bit of coverage about it and some stuff in yesterday’s papers, but not to the extent where you actually knew what was going on without having to read a few different sources. So I went to Live Cricket Updates which gave me a few sites which actually listed what was going on so I could get my head around it.
From what I understand, players were “auctioned” (by someone who didn’t even own them), to the various teams in the Indian Premier League. This is the ICC ratified version (I think!) of the Twenty20 competition going on in India this spring. Teams with lots of money could afford the best players, or those which will get them back the most amount of money in terms of marketing exposure! Now I think I heard that players would get the amount they went for as a salary, but this could be wrong. MS Dhoni was the most ‘expensive’ player, going for something like £750k, which isn’t all that surprising when you consider that he is India’s captain (read ‘highly marketable’), and a hell of a player with the bat and gloves. However, even decent players who won’t be playing this year went for a fair old whack. Justin Langer, who will be playing for Somerset this season whilst the IPL is going on, went for just over £100k!
I think this shows the huge amount of money in the game in India, which appears to be blowing any other country out of the water, England and Australia included. There is such a huge following in India and clearly some very rich individuals / companies are starting to see some potential lucrative revenue streams. I guess we won’t know the impact of this for a year or so, but buckle up, as it looks like this Twenty20 game, started to fill a couple of weeks in an English summer will very probably take over the cricket world in the next few years.
Lastly – I didn’t see the England highlights the other night as I was too busy swearing at my broken laptop. Damn computers when they break are useless – now I have to go searching for another one. That is unless some kind soul out there has a brand new laptop they want to pass my way……. thought not!
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