The decision to hold a public, televised player auction for the fourth season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) was presumably designed to create some positive publicity for a league for whom 2010 was something of an annus horribilis. As in 2008, television news channels fawned over the immense sums spent, while the auction itself contained much more suspense and drama than an IPL match. Yet the auction was profoundly illuminating about the true nature of the IPL as a sports league and as a business. It gave the lie to the claims often made by franchise owners and BCCI alike of the desire to create a world-class sports product in India, and illustrated some much more fundamental truths about the society in which the IPL operates.
In recent decades, the notion that players should be paid according to their abilities or achievements has become an essential characteristic of any self-respecting professional sport. The IPL franchises, however, were above such petty sporting and business logic. Robin Uthappa and Irfan Pathan, no part of India’s plans, sold for a combined $4 million, while the Ashes-winning bowlers Graeme Swann and James Anderson were unsold, as was the destructive West Indian batsman Chris Gayle, who had turned down a central contract precisely so that he could play in the IPL. Gautam Gambhir, not known for his Twenty20 prowess, fetched a scarcely credible $2.4 million. Most absurdly of all, the Royal Challengers Bangalore spent $1.6 million on the young left-hander Saurabh Tiwary: roughly the combined amount the same team paid for A B de Villiers — perhaps the best limited-overs cricketer in the world at present — and New Zealand captain Daniel Vettori. This was the cricketing equivalent of owner Vijay Mallya paying more for a bottle of McDowell’s No. 1 than for a pair of vintage single malts.
This discrimination on the basis of nationality has no parallel in the European and American sports leagues that the IPL allegedly seeks to emulate. The German basketball player Dirk Nowitzki earns just as much in the NBA as his American peer LeBron James. The Argentine Lionel Messi is the best-paid footballer in Spain. Surely it ought to be axiomatic that in professional franchise-based sport, pay should be based on performance, not citizenship? It is so everywhere other than the IPL. When county cricket in England witnessed an invasion of top foreign talent in the 1960s and 1970s, the foreigners were actually better paid than the locals — because they simply played better cricket.
The pay divide between Indians and foreigners, by creating a system of virtual economic apartheid, is certain to be destructive of team unity and morale. There can be no cricketing argument to be made for it. The franchises’ behaviour is reflective of the fact that they do not put winning or the quality of cricket first. I suspect that their rationale is the (misplaced) belief that Indian players, irrespective of quality, are more popular with fans, and that the best way to enhance the brand value of a franchise is to make “superstars” out of young Indian cricketers. But sports fans respond to genuine ability and to star quality; Indian fans have often reserved genuine affection for foreign cricketers who possessed these traits, such as the West Indians of the 1980s. Moreover, the idea that the IPL would transform young Indians into superstars ought to have been exploded by past experience.
The notable cautionary tale is that of Ishant Sharma, who showed promise on tour in Australia three years ago and was then subject to a frenzied IPL bidding war. Far from capitalising on that promise, the IPL is widely blamed for the subsequent decline in his performances. Ishant, who was paid $114,000 for every wicket he took in the IPL’s first three seasons, fetched only half his original price this time. Yet IPL franchises failed to apply the lessons they ought to have learned from his case.
By explicitly indicating to the likes of Robin Uthappa and Rohit Sharma that they are worth far more as cricketers than Jacques Kallis or Dale Steyn, the IPL auction will have an utterly pernicious impact on many of India’s young cricketers. The fact that batsmen, on average, went for substantially higher prices than bowlers speaks of a lack of understanding of the game (the best bowlers are far more valuable in winning matches, even in Twenty20) and may well influence the playing choices of the next generation. But the impact of the franchises’ spending patterns goes well beyond cricket. The economist Raghuram Rajan has observed that Indians celebrate the wealth of billionaires even when this wealth is the result of crony capitalism. The response to the vast sums paid for young Indian players is representative of an obsession with wealth that has lost any connection to merit. Nobody appears to be concerned with whether the prices are deserved, as to whether they were earned.
A society that does not care whether success was earned is incapable of greatness. A player like Sachin Tendulkar is above all a product of immense hard work; by placing rewards before performance, and often divorcing the relationship between the two, the IPL will never produce a Tendulkar. Moreover, the auction often spat in the face of real achievement. The entire event was an expression of our societal concerns with youth and money: thus the humiliating ageism that led to the non-selection of Sourav Ganguly and Brian Lara. Hopefully Ganguly and Lara — not to mention de Villiers, Anderson, or Kevin Pietersen — will recognise that a jury of Siddharth Mallya, Shilpa Shetty and Nita Ambani is ill-placed to evaluate their cricketing worth. But by investing in fleeting talent rather than real quality, the IPL franchises have not only exposed their ignorance of the sport, but also hurt the long-term value of their brands.
The author is a student at Harvard University
