How IPL Auctions Work Guide
A purse, not a draft
Every franchise starts an auction with a fixed budget, a purse, and every player up for auction goes to whichever team bids the most for them, no snake order, no guaranteed pick. Run out of purse before you've filled a squad and you're stuck with whoever's still on the table at a price you can afford. Spend early and big on stars and you may not have enough left for the depth a full season needs.
Retention
A franchise doesn't start from zero every season. Before the auction opens, each team can retain a handful of players from their existing squad, at a price that rises steeply for each one kept, keeping a core group together costs real purse, and paying for it eats into what's left to spend on everyone else. It's the central tension of franchise cricket: continuity versus a fresh squad built at full value.
Squad rules
A squad has hard limits: how many players total, how many can be from outside the league's home country, and how many of those overseas players can actually take the field in any given XI. In T20 Franchise Manager that's an 18-man squad, up to 6 overseas players in it, and no more than 4 of them in your starting XI for any one match, the same shape of constraint every real T20 league auction runs under, even where the exact numbers differ league to league.
Mega and mini auctions
In real cricket, the IPL runs two kinds of auction. A mega auction resets the league: franchises keep only a few players and everyone else goes back into the pool. There have been six, in 2008, 2011, 2014, 2018, 2022 and 2025. In between come mini auctions, where teams keep most of their squads and use what is left of the purse to fill gaps. Mega auctions often arrive with new franchises: Kochi Tuskers Kerala and Pune Warriors India joined in 2011, and Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants in 2022, and a full reset is the fairest way to give a new team a squad without leaving the established sides untouched.
The difference shows in the money. In the auction archive, the 2025 mega auction sold 182 players for ₹639.15 crore, while the mini auction a year later sold 77. The purse has grown with the league: each franchise had US$5 million, about ₹20 crore, to spend in 2008, and ₹120 crore in 2025. The first six auctions were run in US dollars, and the rupee has been the currency since 2014.
Retention rules change with each cycle, and the Right to Match card, used in the 2018 and 2025 mega auctions, let a franchise buy back a released player by matching the winning bid. Each of these rules shifts the balance between keeping a core together and starting fresh.
What the record prices say
The most expensive player at the very first auction was MS Dhoni, bought by Chennai Super Kings for US$1.5 million. The record has been broken many times since, and a pattern shows in the archive: some of the biggest prices come at mini auctions, not mega ones. Yuvraj Singh went for ₹16 crore in 2015, Chris Morris for ₹16.25 crore in 2021, Sam Curran for ₹18.5 crore in 2023 and Mitchell Starc for ₹24.75 crore in 2024, all in mini years.
The reason is scarcity. At a mini auction, every franchise is chasing the same few players who fill a specific need, often an overseas fast bowler or all-rounder, and some teams arrive with a lot of unspent purse. Two teams that both need the same player can push the price far past what a mega auction, with hundreds of alternatives, would allow. The biggest mega-auction price so far is Rishabh Pant's ₹27 crore in 2025, when several franchises needed a captain and wicketkeeper at the same time.
The unsold list
Going unsold is not a verdict on a player's quality. In the 2011 auction, Chris Gayle drew no bid, joined Royal Challengers Bangalore as an injury replacement weeks later, and became the outstanding batter of the season. Since 2022 the lists have grown much longer, with more than 300 players going unsold at several auctions, because far more players register than there are places in ten squads: at the 2022 mega auction, 396 of the 600 players who went under the hammer were not sold.
For a franchise, the lesson is that price and value are different things. The expensive buy fills an obvious need; the bargain late in the day, or the replacement signed after the auction, can decide a season. Each season page in the archive lists the unsold players and compares what the big buys went on to do.
Playing it out
In the game, that auction isn't a cutscene, you make every pick against a live purse, same as a real franchise's recruitment team. Retain a core into next season, or blow it up and rebuild. Then you're not done: in-season tactical calls like the Power Surge, and a mid-season transfer window, mean the squad you auctioned isn't the squad you finish the year with.
Play the IPL auction game free in T20 Franchise Manager, across the IPL, BBL and other global T20 leagues.