IPL 2025 Auction - Player Values
Detailed analysis of player pricing & chances of being sold
I’m excited to introduce my player valuation tool for the upcoming IPL 2025 Auction - a unique approach to solving several questions:
What is a player’s market value?
What are a player’s chances of being sold?
How volatile will a player's price be?
As far as I am aware, this information is not available in the public domain (or even inside teams). I wanted to change that.
For obvious reasons, I can’t say too much about my methodology but generally speaking, it is informed by something more powerful than many people appreciate - wisdom of the crowd.
By sourcing player values from numerous sources, such as forums and mock auctions, and using a process to weight the value of these, the information becomes much more useful than (for example) a single mock auction.
A single mock auction is pretty irrelevant in terms of comparing it to reality and even a mock auction created by an IPL franchise is unlikely to bear much relationship to reality either. However, when using numerous mock auctions and websites from various sources, weighted for quality, the collective information from them becomes much more valuable than an individual source.
I used a version of this approach ahead of the 2022 Mega Auction when I was with PBKS, with some fascinating results. Out of the players expected to sell, 88.4% of players actually did sell. Almost all of the 11.6% of players who were predicted to sell but eventually went unsold having very low expected price figures (Suresh Raina, 3.21Cr expected price, was the highest value unsold player who was expected to sell).
In addition, 71.1% of players which my approach expected to be sold actually sold for a price within 2 Cr of their modelled expected price. Only David Warner (6.25Cr) and Jonny Bairstow (6.75Cr) sold for 4Cr less than their expected sale price. Prasidh Krishna (10Cr), Romario Shepherd (7.75Cr), Rahul Tewatia (9Cr), Deepak Chahar (14Cr) and Jofra Archer (8.75Cr despite already being ruled out for the tournament) were the players who cost significantly more than the model predicted.
At this point I want to stress that my IPL player valuations have absolutely nothing to do with how good or bad I think a player is, or what I think a player will or won’t sell for, or what I think their fair market value is. It is simply ‘wisdom of the crowd’.
These valuations should provide a pretty useful sanity check in terms of understanding how much a player is worth, and whether a team is overpaying or underpaying independently sourced market prices. At the moment, they are early valuations, and I’m going to update them throughout the week as more and more information is sourced.
Today’s valuations (which can be downloaded below) will not be my final pre-auction valuation on Sunday, but they’re likely to be close. Each player has a predicted low price (worst case scenario price for them, which can include being unsold) and a predicted high price - the best case scenario price for them. Also included is the modelled current expected sale price for each player, the likely volatility of each player’s price and the percentage chance that a player will be sold.
Here is a screenshot of the 16 players who have expected valuations in excess of 10 Cr:
As the week moves forward, I’ll use this data to give some insight on predictions for the week ahead, such as expected spend per set, player price volatility and deviation, some lower profile players which multiple teams could fight for at auction and which players I think represent good or bad value.
Any organisation who would like to discuss usage of these valuations should get in touch via email at sportsanalyticsadvantage@gmail.com.