Crores at the Auction, the National Shirt, and a Slice of Silence

Crores at the Auction, the National Shirt, and a Slice of Silence

On 24 November last year, when the auctioneer at the Lucknow stage read out the words 'twenty-seven crore' beside Rishabh Pant's name, the hall erupted. It remains the highest price ever paid in the history of the Indian Premier League—a wicketkeeper-batter for Lucknow Super Giants who would also carry the weight of captaincy. Stage lights, sponsor logos, the flash of cameras: cricket seemed to have repriced itself in a single night.

But in that same week, nearly four thousand kilometres away, a different sum was being worked out in a small meeting room in Dhaka. On the table lay the national team's calendar for the next two seasons; in the chair sat a board treasurer. The question was simple and the answer was not: if the leading fast bowler is allowed to play abroad all year, how much money will come into the board's account, and how much emptiness will accumulate in the national dressing room?

I have sat beside this game for thirty-three years—first in the Dhaka press box, now from Manchester. In that time I have learned that cricket's real chemistry is not made on the stage; it is made in the quiet rooms behind the curtain. The louder the crores at the auction speak, the louder the silence answers—the silence in which a treasurer and a coach decide how much a body will bill them next season.

Once, a cricket calendar meant a few series, two World Cups, and rest in between. Today it is a dense web. The IPL, the Big Bash, the PSL, the Caribbean Premier League, the Bangladesh Premier League, the Lanka Premier League—and on top of them, three new-generation leagues that all began in 2026: the ILT20 in the United Arab Emirates, the SA20 in South Africa, and Major League Cricket in the United States. So many leagues, so many matches, and yet the year still has only twenty-four hours a day.

It is exactly here that cricket's economy and cricket's body have begun to walk in different directions. In the auction hall, where money has touched the sky—the IPL's broadcast rights for 2026 to 2027 are worth roughly 48,390 crore rupees, more than six billion dollars—nobody in the dressing room is calculating the knee of the man sitting on the bench. The gap between market value and body value is the deepest inequality in the game today.

To understand it, I have to go back to the 2026 T20 World Cup. That night at Kensington Oval in Barbados, India beat South Africa by seven runs to lift their first ICC trophy in years—under Rohit Sharma, on 29 June, when the whole of India seemed to exhale at once. But the thing that stuck in my eye was not a six. It was the face of a fast bowler before he walked into the dressing room—a body that had sent down more than six hundred overs across franchise leagues all year, now being asked to become suddenly 'fresh' for his country's biggest match.

This is where the real story hides. We stare at the auction because the number is visible. But an auction is a market, and a market means price-setting. The question is who is setting the price—and who is paying the bill.

The auction does not merely price a player; it prices the national shirt itself.

Put simply. A thirty-year-old fast bowler who has just signed a twenty-crore IPL deal now keeps two ledgers open. One is the franchise ledger—where two months of work brings twenty crore. The other is the country ledger—where a full year of work brings the board's central contract, often less than seven or eight months of franchise income. The difference between those two numbers is not a moral question; it is a professional calculation. And in a system where a player must choose between his country and his livelihood, the fault lies not with the player—it lies with the system.

That system has a name I keep returning to: the ledger of debt. Small boards have effectively become training academies for a larger enterprise. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the West Indies, Afghanistan—these boards spend years building a cricketer, carrying him from school cricket to Test cricket. Then, once he is mature, a big league buys him in a single auction. The small board gets a No-Objection Certificate fee—and loses its greatest asset: time.

Here I want to be precise about where blame lies. Blaming the owners of the IPL or the SA20 would be wrong; they are running a business, within the law. The blame belongs to a governance that arranges the international calendar around franchise breaks rather than the other way round. It belongs to contracts that force a player towards a league instead of releasing him for his country—and boards stay silent, because the boards need money too.

For me the strongest evidence comes from an empty ground, from the day when, because of the pandemic, a 76,000-seat stadium held no spectators. That day I understood that the crowd had been my instrument—and when the crowd leaves, you hear every breath, every instruction, every sigh of a player. When the ground goes quiet, you hear most loudly of all whose body is tired, whose knee is broken, whose mind has run dry.

And that tiredness is no imagination. In recent years, two things have grown fastest in world cricket: the number of matches and the rate of soft-tissue injuries. Hamstrings, lower-back stress fractures, rotator-cuff tears—these words now appear in cricket coverage as routinely as over rates. The reason is no mystery. If a fast bowler spends a year across Tests, ODIs, T20Is and three separate franchise leagues, his body is being used like a car run for two hundred kilometres at full speed with no servicing.

Take Bangladesh. In our cricket culture the national shirt holds a sacred place—something far larger than cloth. Yet many of our cricketers now fund their lives through foreign leagues, because the figure on a domestic central contract is nearly negligible beside a big league's pay. So the boy who once chanted his country's name in gully cricket now, ten years later, weighs which month of national duty will strain his family's finances.

This is a story of two homes. In one home: country, roots, parents, old friends. In the other: profession, ambition, the global market. And between those two homes stands a generation—some of whom now accept the game's harshest insult: 'he plays for the club, not the country.' That label is not theirs; it is pinned on them by a system they never designed.

Now the question: is franchise cricket therefore bad? The honest answer is not a simple 'no.' Franchise cricket has given players unprecedented financial security, access to the world's best coaches, and a stage on which a cricketer from a small nation can prove himself. But in offering the good, the system is also taking a price—and nobody is writing that price down.

What is that price? First, time. If a national side gets its best eleven together for only three or four series a year, then 'team-building' survives only in books. Second, memory. A generation's cricket memory is built from big matches, and when big matches thin out, the density of that memory thins too. Third, and most dangerous, tactical identity. A side returns from franchise leagues with different strategies, different roles and different confidence; welding those players into a single national identity has become almost impossible.

From my thirty-three years beside the game, I can say that a team's greatest strength is not the sum of its stars; it is a shared habit—knowing, without thinking, who will stand beside whom. That habit is now eroding fastest, because habit is built by spending long days together, and our players now spend those days in league dressing rooms, not national ones.

One number is worth holding onto here. At the IPL auction in December 2026, Mitchell Starc was bought by Kolkata Knight Riders for 24.75 crore rupees—then a record. In the same auction, Pat Cummins went to Sunrisers Hyderabad for 20.5 crore. A year later, Pant's twenty-seven crore broke that record. Put the three figures side by side and one thing is clear—the IPL market rises every year, and with it every player's sense of an 'alternative income.' For a young cricketer the question is no longer 'can I play in the IPL?' It is 'how much time can I spare for my country?'

The No-Objection Certificate—those three letters—is today the most powerful document in international cricket. It decides which month a player turns out for his country and which month for his franchise. In a small board's hands it is a bargaining weapon—but often an unusable one, because if a board blocks a player, he rebels, and the board's own revenue falls. So the NOC becomes a document of compromise, and the heaviest loss falls on the player's body.

I know some will say, 'the player plays by his own will; nobody forces him.' That is true, but only half true. A professional's career lasts ten or twelve years; in that window he must make a decision for a lifetime. When he makes it under the pressure of the market, the demands of his country and the needs of his family all at once, it is no longer free will—it is a calculation for survival.

Now I come to the place where I disagree with the popular narrative.

Collective memory says that in big finals Bangladesh and other smaller sides lose because they 'cannot handle pressure'—that is, from mental weakness. To me that explanation is comfortable, and wrong.

In November 2026 I sat in the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad as India lost the World Cup final to Australia by six wickets—and a ground of nearly a hundred thousand people fell so silent it was as if a whole city had stopped breathing. In that silence I did not find the word 'choker.' I found a tired team that had played at the highest level for a month and a half on end, its body and mind spent together.

This is my counter-intuitive claim: defeats in big matches usually come not from a lack of talent but from a lack of reserves. A side that plays together all year builds a reserve of 'handling pressure,' because shared habit teaches the body to decide automatically in the crucial moment. A side that gathers only twice a year treats every big match as a fresh exam. The franchise economy is slowly draining that reserve—and we pin the blame for the resulting emptiness on a player's mentality.

There is another blind spot almost nobody sees. We assume that franchise money means the advancement of world cricket. But follow where the money flows and the picture changes. The bulk of IPL revenue circulates within India's economy; small boards receive only an NOC fee and a few player salaries. The flow is one-directional—not top-down, but small-to-large. A system advertised as 'lifting everyone' is in effect turning the smaller cricket nations into raw-material suppliers.

Now the question I think about most—who really gains from this system? If I place a board's balance sheet on one side and the face of a ten-year-old boy on the other, a boy watching his favourite player in a league shirt with another country's name on the back, it is not hard to see that the heaviest loss is borne by the fan's memory.

For a team's true capital is not its bank balance but its memory—the memory that carries one generation's stories to the next. The boy who watched a World Cup final beside his father is the one who will make the next generation love the game. But as finals thin out, as the national side plays together less, the density of that memory fades—and when memory erodes, the market erodes too. The boards will understand this, perhaps too late.

I am not here to preach a moral. I am here to show a calculation nobody is writing down: franchise cricket gives small boards money, but takes away their greatest asset—the time to build their own star on their own soil across a whole year. In this transaction the money is visible; the time is not. And what is invisible, we learn to pay for far too late.

So what is the solution? I know franchise cricket will not stop—nor should it. But balance is needed, and for me it rests on three pillars.

The first pillar is the architecture of the calendar. Within the international Future Tours Programme there should be a fixed window in which no franchise league runs—and that window must be set by the player's need for rest, not the broadcaster's need for content. Any league that ignores this window must face a real sanction from the ICC, not merely a statement of principle.

The second pillar is the structure of board contracts. Central-contract figures cannot now match franchise income—true—but a board can compensate in other ways. For instance, a player who turns out for his country beyond a set number of matches could receive a supplementary incentive, offsetting some of the financial loss of missing a league. In other words, a board must learn to speak the language of a player's opportunity cost, not merely the language of patriotism.

The third pillar is data and transparency. Today nobody truly knows how many overs a fast bowler sends down in a year, how much he travels, how much he sleeps. A central 'workload database' would let boards, leagues and players see the same number. Once that number is public, the bargaining will at least be honest.

I know some will call these proposals 'unrealistic.' But I have watched for thirty-three years, and cricket's biggest changes have come precisely when someone stood outside the market's arithmetic and started counting the human one.

So this time, in the franchise age, I did not go looking for the auction's numbers—I went looking for a crore-sized calculation, and found instead the silence of a tired dressing room. That silence tells us cricket's deepest crisis is not in the boardroom but on the dressing-room bench—where a player sits working out the arithmetic of his own body, and nobody looks his way.

The next T20 World Cup is coming to the soil of India and Sri Lanka, in February and March, and there every board will again face the same question—do we release our best player, or hold on to the franchise window? I do not know who wins that calculation in the end. But one thing I do know: when the ground goes quiet again, those who fall silent will no longer be players—they will become witnesses to a memory that franchise cricket can never give back. And there is only one way to restore that memory: to return the national shirt to the place where it is not merely a number on a ledger of debt, but the breath of a country.