Where the IPL's Money Went Research
On 24 November 2024, in a ballroom in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the paddle went up for Rishabh Pant and did not come down until the Lucknow Super Giants had bid 27 crore rupees. A crore is ten million rupees, so read that as 270 million: the most expensive hammer fall in the history of the Indian Premier League. Minutes earlier, Punjab Kings had paid 26.75 crore for Shreyas Iyer. Across the two days of that mega auction, the ten franchises spent a combined 639.15 crore on 182 players. That is the IPL auction at full volume: a fortnight's wages for a small company, moved in an afternoon, one raised paddle at a time.
This article follows that money. Not the broadcast deals or the sponsorships, but the cash that actually changed hands at the auction table, season by season, from the first auction in February 2008 to the most recent one. Two questions drive it. First, did the money follow the players, or did it leak away somewhere between the announced purse and the hammer? Second, when the lot lists stopped being dominated by overseas players, did the money stop following them too? The answers are in nineteen auctions' worth of winning bids.
One clarification before the numbers begin, because everything else in this article depends on it: these are hammer prices only. When a franchise retains a player, his salary is agreed privately and never goes through the auction; retention takes a separate deduction from the purse. So the totals below are the money that moved at auction, not total squad payroll. Total payroll is strictly larger, and this dataset cannot see it. Say it once and keep it in mind: every figure in this piece is what the hammer decided.
The purse and the hammer
The headline arc of IPL money is the purse: 20 crore per franchise in 2008, 125 crore in 2026 (provisional), a 6.3-fold rise. The auctions from 2008 to 2013 were conducted in US dollars and converted to rupees by the sources, which is why the early figures look round in hindsight; the rupee values below are the sources' conversions. The purse did not rise smoothly. It dipped from 67.5 crore in 2013 to 60 crore in 2014, the one backward step in the series, then never fell again.
The hammer did not keep up. League-wide auction spending (the purse multiplied by the number of franchises, since the purse is a per-team budget) rose from 152.16 crore in 2008 to 639.15 crore in 2025: a 4.2-fold rise against the purse's 6-fold climb. Looked at as a share of the league-wide purse deployed at the auction, the trend is a steady fall at the mega auctions: 95.1% in 2008, 69.8% in 2011, 55.3% in 2014, 67.5% in 2018, 61.4% in 2022, 53.3% in 2025.
Where did the rest go? The documented mechanism is retention. Before the 2025 mega auction, franchises retained 46 players, and the regulations deduct a fixed amount from the auction purse for every retained player. A retained star is expensive twice over: once in the salary the franchise actually pays him, once in the auction budget he removes. The archive's retention lists name the players but carry no prices, so this article cannot split the unspent purse between retention deductions and budget simply left on the table. But the direction is unambiguous: as the purse grew, a growing share of it stopped reaching the auction room. The rise in the purse went partly to players, and partly to the accounting category that keeps them out of the auction.
The table below puts the purse and the hammer side by side for every season. The purse column is per franchise; the league-wide purse is the purse times the number of teams; the spend column is the sum of winning bids.
| Season | Type | Purse (cr, per team) | Teams | League-wide purse (cr) | Auction spend (cr) | Spend as share of purse | Sold lots | Avg winning bid (cr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | Mega | 20 | 8 | 160.0 | 152.16 | 95.1% | 89 | 1.71 |
| 2009 | Mini | 26 | 8 | 208.0 | 36.72 | 17.7% | 17 | 2.16 |
| 2010 | Mini | 32 | 8 | 256.0 | 16.79 | 6.6% | 11 | 1.53 |
| 2011 | Mega | 40.5 | 10 | 405.0 | 282.49 | 69.8% | 127 | 2.22 |
| 2012 | Mini | 50 | 9 | 450.0 | 54.98 | 12.2% | 25 | 2.20 |
| 2013 | Mini | 67.5 | 9 | 607.5 | 64.18 | 10.6% | 37 | 1.73 |
| 2014 | Mega | 60 | 8 | 480.0 | 265.60 | 55.3% | 154 | 1.72 |
| 2015 | Mini | 63 | 8 | 504.0 | 87.30 | 17.3% | 66 | 1.32 |
| 2016 | Mini | 66 | 8 | 528.0 | 135.80 | 25.7% | 94 | 1.44 |
| 2017 | Mini | 66 | 8 | 528.0 | 91.15 | 17.3% | 66 | 1.38 |
| 2018 | Mega | 80 | 8 | 640.0 | 431.70 | 67.5% | 169 | 2.55 |
| 2019 | Mini | 82 | 8 | 656.0 | 106.80 | 16.3% | 60 | 1.78 |
| 2020 | Mini | 85 | 8 | 680.0 | 140.30 | 20.6% | 62 | 2.26 |
| 2021 | Mini | 85 | 8 | 680.0 | 145.30 | 21.4% | 57 | 2.55 |
| 2022 | Mega | 90 | 10 | 900.0 | 552.45 | 61.4% | 204 | 2.71 |
| 2023 | Mini | 95 | 10 | 950.0 | 167.80 | 17.7% | 80 | 2.10 |
| 2024 | Mini | 100 | 10 | 1000.0 | 234.85 | 23.5% | 72 | 3.26 |
| 2025 | Mega | 120 | 10 | 1200.0 | 639.15 | 53.3% | 182 | 3.51 |
| 2026 | Mini (provisional) | 125 | 10 | 1250.0 | 215.45 | 17.2% | 77 | 2.80 |
Two things stand out. First, the mini auctions are a different economy: no mini ever deployed more than 25.7% of the league-wide purse. Minis exist to plug holes, not to build squads. Second, the average winning bid has roughly doubled since 2008, from 1.71 crore to 3.51 crore at the 2025 mega, with the 2024 mini's 3.26 crore showing how a single record bid (Mitchell Starc, 24.75 crore) can drag a small auction's average upward.
Megas move the money
Six mega auctions and thirteen minis make the concentration easy to measure. The megas moved 2,323.55 crore across 925 sold lots: 60.8% of all auction money ever spent, in less than a third of the auctions. The average mega moved 387.26 crore; the average mini moved 115.19 crore. A mega sells about 154 lots on average; a mini sells about 56.
The minis also concentrate differently within themselves. At the 2010 mini, the five most expensive lots accounted for 84.4% of everything spent; at the 2023 mini, the top five took 48.6%. At the megas, the top five rarely break 20%: 11.5% in 2022, 12.9% in 2018, 17.8% in 2025. That is the structural difference between the two auction types. A mini is a handful of teams bidding for a handful of specific players, so a few paddles dominate. A mega rebuilds ten squads at once, so the money spreads across two hundred winning bids.
The overseas question
Here is the dynamic this article was built to test. The overseas share of the lot list collapsed over the life of the league: 75.7% of lots in 2008, 72.5% in 2011, 43.3% in 2014, 40.0% in 2018, 37.3% in 2022, 36.2% in 2025, 32.0% in 2026 (provisional). Three in four lots overseas became one in three. The cause is the flood of uncapped Indian names into the later lists, not a shrinking overseas pool: 224 overseas lots in 2022 is the largest absolute number in the series.
Did the money follow the lots? No. Across all nineteen auctions, overseas players took 51.7% of the 3,820.96 crore ever spent at the hammer: more than half the money, from barely more than a third of recent lot lists. At the six megas, the overseas spend share reads 61.5% (2008), 47.4% (2011), 44.9% (2014), 41.6% (2018), 43.0% (2022), 40.0% (2025). From 2014 onward it has sat stubbornly near 40-44% while the lot-list share kept falling from 43.3% to 36.2%. The share of lots collapsed; the share of money did not.
The minis tell the other half. Mini auctions are where franchises shop for specific overseas stars, and the overseas spend share there runs far hotter: 100% in 2009, 93.2% in 2010, 80.2% in 2013, 76.3% in 2020, 76.6% in 2021, 74.3% in 2023, and 59.4% in 2026 (provisional), against a lot-list share of just 32.0%. Across all thirteen minis, 63.7% of the money went overseas, versus 43.9% at the megas. The pattern is consistent: the fewer the slots to fill, the more of the money goes abroad.
And the premium is visible in the averages, not just the totals. At the early megas, Indian players averaged higher winning bids than overseas players (2.34 vs 1.46 crore in 2008; 3.30 vs 1.63 in 2011). From 2014 that flipped and never flipped back: overseas lots averaged 2.38 vs 1.41 for Indian lots in 2014, 3.21 vs 2.23 in 2018, 3.54 vs 2.30 in 2022, 4.12 vs 3.19 in 2025. As overseas lots became scarcer on the lists, each one cost more on average. Scarcity, at least at the auction table, has a price.
| Season | Type | Overseas lots (share of list) | Overseas spend (cr) | Overseas spend share | Avg winning bid: overseas (cr) | Avg winning bid: Indian (cr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | Mega | 78 (75.7%) | 93.58 | 61.5% | 1.46 | 2.34 |
| 2009 | Mini | 49 (100.0%) | 36.72 | 100.0% | 2.16 | - |
| 2010 | Mini | 66 (98.5%) | 15.64 | 93.2% | 1.56 | 1.15 |
| 2011 | Mega | 121 (72.5%) | 133.81 | 47.4% | 1.63 | 3.30 |
| 2012 | Mini | 48 (87.3%) | 30.93 | 56.3% | 1.63 | 4.01 |
| 2013 | Mini | 59 (90.8%) | 51.49 | 80.2% | 1.66 | 2.11 |
| 2014 | Mega | 84 (43.3%) | 119.25 | 44.9% | 2.38 | 1.41 |
| 2015 | Mini | 49 (51.0%) | 34.45 | 39.5% | 1.50 | 1.23 |
| 2016 | Mini | 53 (42.7%) | 53.75 | 39.6% | 1.92 | 1.24 |
| 2017 | Mini | 43 (46.2%) | 66.40 | 72.8% | 2.46 | 0.63 |
| 2018 | Mega | 86 (40.0%) | 179.70 | 41.6% | 3.21 | 2.23 |
| 2019 | Mini | 38 (39.6%) | 42.60 | 39.9% | 2.13 | 1.60 |
| 2020 | Mini | 56 (51.4%) | 107.00 | 76.3% | 3.69 | 1.01 |
| 2021 | Mini | 62 (48.4%) | 111.30 | 76.6% | 5.06 | 0.97 |
| 2022 | Mega | 224 (37.3%) | 237.50 | 43.0% | 3.54 | 2.30 |
| 2023 | Mini | 132 (32.5%) | 124.75 | 74.3% | 4.30 | 0.84 |
| 2024 | Mini | 119 (35.7%) | 151.00 | 64.3% | 5.03 | 2.00 |
| 2025 | Mega | 209 (36.2%) | 255.75 | 40.0% | 4.12 | 3.19 |
| 2026 | Mini (provisional) | 115 (32.0%) | 128.05 | 59.4% | 4.42 | 1.82 |
What the market pays for
The archive records four roles: batter, bowler, all-rounder, wicket-keeper. The market prices them differently. Across all nineteen auctions, wicket-keepers commanded the highest average winning bid at 2.54 crore, ahead of all-rounders (2.37), bowlers (2.32) and batters (2.13). But bowlers took the largest total pot, 1,489.09 crore across 641 sold lots, because squads need so many of them. All-rounders took 1,131.83 crore, batters 760.93 crore, wicket-keepers 439.11 crore.
The role premium moves with the era. All-rounders topped the average winning bid in five of the nine auctions from 2008 to 2016 (2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016), the classic T20 logic that a player who fills two slots is worth a premium. Then the market's taste shifted toward specialists at the top end. At the 2025 mega, wicket-keepers averaged 5.30 crore and bowlers 4.14 crore, the two highest role averages at any mega, the keepers' figure driven by the biggest bid of the auction. The record-bid ladder tells the same story in names: MS Dhoni (wicket-keeper, 6.0 crore, 2008), Andrew Flintoff (all-rounder) and Kevin Pietersen (batter), tied at 7.44 crore in 2009, Gautam Gambhir (batter, 10.8 crore, 2011), Yuvraj Singh (all-rounder, 14.0 crore in 2014 and 16.0 crore in 2015), Chris Morris (all-rounder, 16.25 crore, 2021), Sam Curran (all-rounder, 18.5 crore, 2023), Pat Cummins (bowler, 20.5 crore) and then Mitchell Starc (bowler, 24.75 crore) in 2024, Rishabh Pant (wicket-keeper, 27.0 crore, 2025). Seven of the ten record bids went to all-rounders or wicket-keepers; the last three records, Cummins, Starc and Pant, went to two fast bowlers and a keeper-batter. The 2026 top bid, Cameron Green at 25.2 crore (provisional), did not break the record.
Every auction's most expensive lot (or lots, when tied) is listed below. Note how the top price sat between 10 and 16 crore for a decade, then rose from 16.25 to 27 crore between 2021 and 2025.
| Season | Most expensive lot | Role | Team | Price (cr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | MS Dhoni (India) | Wicket-keeper | CSK | 6.00 |
| 2009 | Andrew Flintoff (England) and Kevin Pietersen (England), tied | All-rounder / Batter | CSK / RCB | 7.44 each |
| 2010 | Kieron Pollard (West Indies) and Shane Bond (New Zealand), tied | All-rounder / Bowler | MI / KKR | 3.45 each |
| 2011 | Gautam Gambhir (India) | Batter | KKR | 10.80 |
| 2012 | Ravindra Jadeja (India) | All-rounder | CSK | 10.00 |
| 2013 | Glenn Maxwell (Australia) | All-rounder | MI | 5.40 |
| 2014 | Yuvraj Singh (India) | All-rounder | RCB | 14.00 |
| 2015 | Yuvraj Singh (India) | All-rounder | DC | 16.00 |
| 2016 | Shane Watson (Australia) | All-rounder | RCB | 9.50 |
| 2017 | Ben Stokes (England) | All-rounder | RPS | 14.50 |
| 2018 | Ben Stokes (England) | All-rounder | RR | 12.50 |
| 2019 | Jaydev Unadkat (India) and Varun Chakravarthy (India), tied | Bowler | RR / PBKS | 8.40 each |
| 2020 | Pat Cummins (Australia) | Bowler | KKR | 15.50 |
| 2021 | Chris Morris (South Africa) | All-rounder | RR | 16.25 |
| 2022 | Ishan Kishan (India) | Wicket-keeper | MI | 15.25 |
| 2023 | Sam Curran (England) | All-rounder | PBKS | 18.50 |
| 2024 | Mitchell Starc (Australia) | Bowler | KKR | 24.75 |
| 2025 | Rishabh Pant (India) | Wicket-keeper | LSG | 27.00 |
| 2026 (provisional) | Cameron Green (Australia) | All-rounder | KKR | 25.20 |
Who spent it
Across the six mega auctions, the biggest auction spender is Punjab Kings: 337.23 crore, ahead of Delhi Capitals (274.12) and Royal Challengers Bengaluru (266.28). The two most frugal franchises at the auction table are also the two most successful in the archive's title records: Chennai Super Kings spent 203.12 crore across the megas and won five titles (2010, 2011, 2018, 2021, 2023); Mumbai Indians spent 194.19 crore and won five (2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020). The correlation is not causation, retention and scouting matter more than the hammer total, but it is a striking pattern: the teams that won the most spent the least at auction. Money buys players; it does not buy the judgment to pick them.
The single biggest mega-auction outlay by any franchise is Punjab's 110.15 crore in 2025, followed by Royal Challengers Bengaluru's 82.25 crore at the same auction. At the other end, Rajasthan Royals spent just 12.34 crore at the inaugural 2008 mega and won the tournament that year, the cheapest title of any mega-auction season.
| Franchise | 2008 | 2011 | 2014 | 2018 | 2022 | 2025 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Punjab Kings | 20.48 | 31.25 | 39.40 | 67.40 | 68.55 | 110.15 | 337.23 |
| Delhi Capitals | 19.50 | 29.02 | 60.00 | 45.40 | 47.40 | 72.80 | 274.12 |
| Royal Challengers Bengaluru | 16.30 | 30.78 | 31.85 | 48.85 | 56.25 | 82.25 | 266.28 |
| Kolkata Knight Riders | 20.60 | 38.59 | 37.00 | 59.00 | 47.50 | 50.95 | 253.64 |
| Rajasthan Royals | 12.34 | 13.93 | 16.95 | 65.85 | 61.05 | 40.70 | 210.82 |
| Sunrisers Hyderabad | - | - | 38.65 | 58.35 | 67.90 | 44.80 | 209.70 |
| Chennai Super Kings | 23.30 | 18.52 | 20.80 | 40.50 | 45.05 | 54.95 | 203.12 |
| Mumbai Indians | 16.10 | 18.09 | 20.95 | 46.35 | 47.90 | 44.80 | 194.19 |
| Lucknow Super Giants | - | - | - | - | 59.00 | 68.90 | 127.90 |
| Gujarat Titans | - | - | - | - | 51.85 | 68.85 | 120.70 |
| Deccan Chargers | 23.54 | 30.94 | - | - | - | - | 54.48 |
| Pune Warriors | - | 37.22 | - | - | - | - | 37.22 |
| Kochi Tuskers Kerala | - | 34.16 | - | - | - | - | 34.16 |
(Figures in crore rupees; dashes mark seasons the franchise did not contest. Delhi's figures include its earlier Delhi Daredevils seasons; Punjab's include Kings XI Punjab.)
The shape of the money
Step back and the nineteen auctions describe a market that matured. It began in 2008 with eight teams spending 95% of a 20-crore purse on a list that was three-quarters overseas. It reached 2025 with ten teams deploying barely half of a 120-crore purse at the hammer, on a list that was two-thirds Indian, while overseas players still took 40% of the money. The purse grew 6-fold to 2025; the hammer spend grew 4.2-fold; the gap between them is retention, the quiet mechanism that keeps the best players out of the room where the money moves.
Three findings survive every cut of the data. First, the overseas share of the lot list collapsed from 75.7% to 32.0% (provisional), but the overseas share of the money did not: it has held near 40-44% at every mega since 2014, and more than half of all auction money ever spent, 51.7%, went to overseas players. Second, the premium follows scarcity: since 2014, overseas lots have averaged higher winning bids than Indian lots at every mega auction. Third, spending does not predict winning: the two five-time champions are the two lightest mega-auction spenders among the long-running franchises.
Methodology
Every figure in this article is computed from the project's IPL auction archive (seasons 2008-2026), which records per-season lot lists with winning bids in lakh rupees (100 lakh = 1 crore), converted to crore throughout. "Sold" means the archive records a winning bid for the lot; a missing or null sold value means the lot went unsold as recorded. Four lots are recorded as sold from post-auction signing lists rather than hammer falls (2008: Ashwell Prince; 2013: Jesse Ryder, Fidel Edwards, Ben Laughlin), per the archive's reconciliation note, so totals are auction outcomes as recorded by the sources, not strictly hammer falls. The 2008 auction also excluded 21 non-auction signings (5 icon players and 16 Under-19 draft picks), which are not counted anywhere in this article.
Lot counts are the archive's per-season lists: the sold lots plus the unsold lots named in the per-season sources. They are not the registration longlists, which run much larger (1,574 registered for 2025; the archive's 2025 list has 577 lots, against 574 shortlisted per the published reports). The overseas lot shares cited match the lot-list shares in our overseas-player-rules guide. The 2026 auction figures are provisional and labelled as such wherever they appear.
These are auction hammer prices only. Retained players' salaries never go through the auction, and the archive's retained-player lists carry no prices, so total squad payroll cannot be computed from this data and is not attempted. The purse is the per-franchise auction budget set by the regulations; it is not the salary cap (which also covers retention deductions, performance pay and match fees) and not actual spending. Do not read the purse column as money spent.
Figures computed from CricArcade's match archive with our own analysis scripts. Checked against the scorecards and edited by Vishal Jaiswal. Found a number that looks wrong? Tell us and we will check it against the scorecard.
Sources
- List of 2025 Indian Premier League personnel changes, Wikipedia (cross-checked: 182 players sold; Rishabh Pant 27 crore record bid for Lucknow Super Giants; Shreyas Iyer 26.75 crore; 46 players retained; purse 120 crore per franchise, the highest in IPL history; 1,574 registered, 574 shortlisted; franchises deducted a fixed amount from the auction purse per retained player)
- List of 2026 Indian Premier League personnel changes, Wikipedia (the archive's source for the provisional 2026 figures)
- TATA IPL 2025 auction list with RTM, BCCI official document (the archive's source for the 2025 lot list)
- TATA IPL 2026 auction list, BCCI official document (the archive's source for the provisional 2026 lot list)
- Per-season figures for 2008-2024 are computed from the archive, whose per-season sources are the Wikipedia personnel-changes/auction pages for each season (2008: 'List of 2008 Indian Premier League auctions and personnel signings'; 2011, 2014, 2018, 2022: the season's 'List of Indian Premier League personnel changes' page) plus the official BCCI auction archive.
More research:
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- The Anatomy of a Collapse
- Did IPL Franchises Overpay for Stars?
- Which Partnerships Decide Matches?
- The 10 Greatest Test Partnerships, Ranked
- The 10 Greatest ODI Partnerships, Ranked
- The Highest- and Lowest-Scoring Grounds in Cricket
- The Disappearing Draw