IPL 2020 Mini Auction

Cummins sets the mark

Kolkata Knight Riders paid ₹15.5 crore for Pat Cummins, then the world's top-ranked Test bowler and the most expensive overseas player the league had seen. He took 12 wickets. Punjab paid ₹10.75 crore for Glenn Maxwell, who scored 108 runs in 13 matches, one of the most expensive disappointments in the archive.

The bargains

Further down the list were three of the auction's best buys. Kolkata bought Varun Chakravarthy for ₹4 crore, less than half his previous price, and he took 17 wickets. Punjab paid ₹2 crore for the leg spinner Ravi Bishnoi, weeks before he starred at the Under-19 World Cup. Rajasthan paid ₹2.4 crore for Yashasvi Jaiswal, an uncapped teenager who became an India opener.

A season somewhere else

The pandemic delayed the season by six months and moved it to the United Arab Emirates, where Mumbai Indians won their fifth title. Mumbai again spent less than most here; their record across these auctions is on the Mumbai Indians page. The next auctionbroke Cummins's record within fourteen months.

Reading the numbers

Overseas players took three quarters of the money in 2020, one of the highest shares in the archive, led by Cummins, Maxwell, Morris and Sheldon Cottrell. Kolkata and Punjab spent the most. Mumbai, seventh on spend, won the title, and Hyderabad spent the least and still reached the playoffs.

As the tables below show, the cheapest buys again produced some of the best returns, which is the most consistent finding across the mini auctions in this archive: franchises pay a premium for established overseas names, while the uncapped Indian players further down the list are where value is most often found. Chakravarthy, Bishnoi and Jaiswal cost less between them than Cummins alone, and all three went on to play for India. Mumbai, meanwhile, won the title having bought only six players.