The Auction Hand and the NOC Paper: Who Franchise Cricket Pays, and Who Sets the Price

One

At last November's IPL mega auction in Jeddah, the final bid on Rishabh Pant landed after sundown local time. In London it was already dawn. The figure settled at ₹27 crore — Lucknow Super Giants. The highest price ever paid for a cricketer in IPL history. Minutes later, Shreyas Iyer went to Punjab Kings for ₹26.75 crore.

As the morning light came up I closed the laptop and thought about how an auction has one quality no other market has: it cannot keep a secret. Who bid, who stopped, where each hand fell — it all lies open on the table in the end. Everywhere else in professional sport, prices are agreed in closed rooms, on an agent's phone, in the unread clause of a contract.

That same week in Dhaka a different kind of arithmetic was being assembled. Franchises in the domestic T20 league were writing down overseas names, and the board was sorting its permission list — who plays where, for how many days, on whose authority, inside whose contract window.

Put the two lists side by side and you can read cricket's most unequal sentence. In one room a twenty-one-year-old's price is fixed by ten raised hands. In the other, that same young man sits at a table waiting for a signature on a piece of paper. I have sat between those two tables for four decades. And every time I see the same thing: people talk about the numbers on the auction floor, and never about the numbers on the paper.

Two

The context is not small. December and January are no longer quiet in the modern cricket calendar. January and February bring the ILT20 in the UAE, the SA20 in South Africa, and the Bangladesh Premier League in the same window. February and March bring the Pakistan Super League. March to May belongs to the IPL — ten teams, a purse of ₹120 crore each. June carries the shadow of a T20 World Cup, July brings Major League Cricket in the United States, August the Hundred in England, April to September the County Championship, September and October the Lanka Premier League, and the Caribbean Premier League keeps going all year.

Two things have come out of this calendar that did not exist twenty years ago.

First, cricket is now a labour market, not just a sport. A franchise means a salary cap, a retention rule, a Right to Match card, a quota — a maximum of eight overseas players in a squad, a minimum of four domestic players in the XI, which is to say a maximum of four overseas. Lay those numbers out and it becomes obvious that the number of overseas players in a team is decided not by talent but by regulation.

Second, a national board is now at once employer, regulator and middleman. It employs the player. It issues the permission that lets him leave. It also has commercial investment in the very leagues it sends him to. When those three roles sit at one table, the question of transparency stops being simple.

Bangladesh has a particular shape of this structure. The Dhaka Premier League is club-based, the spine of the domestic season, but its economy is small and centralised. The ladder into overseas franchise leagues is three or four times taller. And the permit to climb it is singular — the board's NOC. Bangladesh in this structure is simultaneously an exporter of talent, a source of raw material, and the primary employer of its own four or five best players. For years I have written a budget column before I write the match report, because a team plays the way it was assembled. Nothing else explains the cricket as neatly.

The pipeline is as straightforward as water: age-group sides, Under-19, the academy, first-class debut, six weeks of the Dhaka Premier League, the BPL, the national team, then leagues abroad. At every step of the ladder a person drops out, and the reason is almost never talent. The reason is a contract, an age, an injury, or simply that nobody looked. I will come back to that 'nobody looked.'

Three

There are three distinct methods of price-setting, and we have started treating them as one.

The open auction sets a price to the rhythm of a fever. Pant's ₹27 crore is the product of ten owners' collective nervous condition — one needs glamour, one needs footfall, one needs to plug a quota gap. No one sets the price; the price assembles itself. This is the most honest of the three markets, because the mistakes are left open too.

The administered draft sets the price by rule. In the Hundred and in parts of the emerging leagues, category-based pay is fixed in advance. A player can choose a franchise but not a price. It is the most transparent and the most rigid system — no windfall, and therefore no way for a small market to leap.

The third is retention and private negotiation. IPL retention and the Right to Match card are nominally transparent, but in practice only a sliver of what is bargained in the agent's room ever reaches daylight. This is where football's oldest disease has entered cricket: two players on the same fee, one with a signing-on payment, the other with only security.

Together the three methods manufacture an artificial ceiling. A ₹120 crore purse means no franchise can spend ₹60 crore on one man, because it would have no eleven left. Which means the record price in franchise cricket is never the market rate. It is an administered price whose ceiling was fixed by regulation and whose mood was fixed by demand.

That distinction matters. In an administered market we think we are measuring talent; we are in fact measuring an owner's impatience. I once wrote that no number speaks alone — you have to sit a person down beside it. Beside the ₹27 crore you must sit the thirty-year-old in the Lucknow dressing room who will be told the next morning, without appeal, that he bats at six.

Now to the real document. The NOC — the No Objection Certificate. In international cricket this is the closest thing to football's release clause, with one enormous difference. In football the release clause is written by the player or his agent: a figure, a condition, pay it and he leaves. In cricket that clause sits in the board's hand. For Bangladeshi players, the BCB decides — which league, which month, how many at once, under what conditions.

Consider where that power resides. A player cannot sell his own labour. National duty first, domestic league second, overseas league last — that is board policy, not market preference. I will not call it a bad system. But it is not a market-rate system either, and that has to be admitted openly.

Here is the awkward reality. Bangladeshi cricketers have reached the biggest stage of the IPL, but by the measure of the crore that arrival is small. Shakib Al Hasan's record, Mustafizur Rahman's 2026 debut season for Sunrisers Hyderabad, complete with the Emerging Player award — those are part of cricket history. But between 2026 and 2026, how the overseas-league price of Bangladeshi players actually moved is a conversation almost nobody has. To have it you would need to read the NOC paper alongside its hidden clauses. Nobody does.

The quota is the second fence. Eight overseas players in a squad, four in the XI — which means every franchise first hunts its best three overseas players, then fits one or two into the remaining slot. Into that remaining slot goes, first, a New Zealand finisher; then a Sri Lankan spinner; then a Bangladeshi all-rounder. That is not a talent standard, it is an arithmetic standard. A team looks cheapest for the thing it needs least.

Now think about base price. The most honest information in any auction sits there, because buying at base price does not require an owner to sell glamour. It requires only that a job get done. Buy a man for ₹27 crore and you must put him on a billboard. Buy a man for ₹30 lakh and you merely have to bowl him. That is why, to me, the most valuable data in an auction is the cheapest names on the sheet — who, which team, in what role, and why.

I went to the auction room in Dhaka chasing a bargain and found a boy carrying a city on his shoulders. I do not hesitate to write that sentence, because I have seen it: behind a name that goes at base price sits an entire small town, a family, a school ground, a wet tea stall, and a letter he cannot write because English has not reached him. I have three such stories in my notebook. Add the tax deduction and the agent's commission to that fee a fortnight later and what reaches the boy's hand is substantially less. None of that gets written down.

Bangladesh's position in this labour market is also ambiguous. We export talent but do not take part in pricing it. Our own league arranges to buy overseas stars, but our own stars are priced lower at home than in the world market. A simple question follows: how much of our talent is valued in our league, and how much abroad? The first calculation is open. The second is closed.

There is a third category we routinely forget — the eligibility line. Diaspora players now wear England, Australia, the United States and Canada, and do not always turn back when a Bangladesh shirt is offered. The reason is complicated. A boy is born in London, has grandparents in Dhaka, learns his cricket in Surrey, is called up by England Under-19. Then Bangladesh calls, and the decision is no longer about talent but about a whole career. Who offers more fixtures, who offers more money, and who speaks the same language as his mother — that question sits there too. I cannot adjudicate those choices from a desk. I can only record that the convenient explanation is the one that gets printed.

A fourth matter never reaches any table: workload. Count January to January — franchise, national duty, domestic league — and the world's leading twenty to thirty over bowlers send down international-standard overs on 110 to 130 days a year, travel days excluded. For twenty-five years I have watched fast bowlers walk at grounds in Bangladesh and at Glamorgan, and I have noticed one thing. In the last week of December, almost everyone's run-up is different. The body speaks. The numbers do not.

Fifth, the middlemen. The number of agents in Bangladesh has grown sharply in a decade, with commissions averaging five to ten per cent. But an agent's real work is not the contract — it is the narration. He persuades an owner that this boy will sell for double next season. If the agent's report is on the auction sheet and the scout's notes are not, the price rises on the noise in the room rather than on the talent.

Sixth, the money divides unequally even as the game sheds its amateur manners. Television rights pay the board, the board pays the franchise, the franchise pays the star, and last of all comes the fifteenth man in the dressing room. That final step holds the whole system up, because it rests on air.

One more thing I have watched repeatedly from a county ground. A player has a superb IPL, comes home, and for seven weeks bowls exactly where he should have been bowling two months earlier. People call it form. It is really the labour of surviving a different ecosystem. The Hundred and the County Championship sit in the same country under the same board, and still the arithmetic differs. That matters, because the worker has no bargaining position at all — the boundary of his innings is drawn by his employer.

Four

Now to the thing I think about most, and where I part company with many colleagues.

The conventional narrative runs in a pair: cricket's calendar is broken, franchise leagues are eating international cricket, and national boards are behaving like protectionists of an older era. Try to fit evidence to that story and you hit a difficulty — it is not wrong. But it encourages a mistaken assumption, one I watched harden on British sports desks over thirty years and which persists: that the auction is transparent and the NOC is opaque, therefore the auction is good and the NOC is bad.

It is close to the reverse. The benefit of the auction's transparency flows to the owner, not the player. The cost of the NOC's opacity also lands on the player, not the owner. And most importantly, the discretionary space inside the NOC, if it could ever be measured, would dwarf every record on the auction floor.

At this point an old restlessness returns, something I first felt watching football and recognised in cricket afterwards as though it were in the bloodstream. The video assistant referee clause 'clear and obvious error' hides so much discretion in two words that no instrument can measure it. Cricket's older versions of that territory were the soft signal and the third umpire's judgement. The ICC removed the soft signal from international cricket in 2026 — for years I had watched a finger go up and then down over the same catch.

But with the soft signal gone, another discretionary zone stayed intact: umpire's call. When ball-tracking shows the ball hitting the stumps but remaining within the margin of error, the decision returns to the on-field umpire. That is a saving clause, and a reprieve, in every match. Analysts reckon that between two and four deliveries per match fall inside that narrow window. In a Test, that is ten to thirty runs. The window was created because nobody wanted the third umpire to overturn the field call outright.

Now compare. Inside its NOC rules, a board writes phrases like 'exceptional circumstances', 'in the interests of the schedule', 'in consultation with the board'. Whatever remains outside the arithmetic is discretion. And nobody owns that discretion, because nobody wrote it down.

My contrarian point sits here. Franchise cricket's biggest exploitation is not financial. The greatest damage is a belief it has manufactured — that everything can be measured, and that a price is a verdict. Looking at auction numbers, we innocently assume we are measuring players. But where measurement is impossible, the decision is made inside an administrator's head, and that makes him the only true owner. In law, the biggest decision is often the one that looks smallest — a hairline gap in a sentence. The NOC is that gap.

So before we blame franchise cricket, we have to say plainly that the fault lies not in the paper but in the space between the lines. And the uncomfortable truth is that the game's future has repeatedly turned inside those silent corners.

Five

So what do I keep from this? I am watching two things this year.

First, calendar reform. Whether the league windows are separated by 2030 will set the measure of the entire franchise structure. If the ILT20, the SA20 and the BPL never again overlap, Bangladeshi players can sign twice in the same January and their price can become two prices instead of half of one. Then the question becomes who the money serves — the player, the team, or the board.

Second, the paper. The BCB says, repeatedly, that national duty comes first. That is correct. But even correct statements can be measured. What is needed is small: publish NOC decisions in short intervals. Who signed, where, on what terms — a monthly list of that would create a moving map of Bangladeshi players' market value, which does not exist today. The transparency of a single document could make the whole market legible.

One more line I repeat to my own colleagues, without embarrassment, because it is true of me too: cricket is not a religion, but it has better hymns and worse sinners. The auction moves from room to room, evening falls, and a boy walks home with two matches and four nights and a pocketful of affection. Next season the IPL will reach out again. The cycle will not stop. The only question is whether the paper is in his hand, or merely beside the table.

I am watching the boy who went unsold this time, the night after his father says — next time, all right?

The game goes on.