The 8th season of the Indian Premier League concluded just a few days back, with Mumbai Indians emerging as the champions for the second time after defeating the perennial title contenders Chennai Super Kings.
The eight teams participating in the tournament had spent millions of dollars in this year’s player auction to fill their team rosters. By our estimate, all the teams together spent a total of $62.5 million dollars on player salaries in this season alone, which comes out to an average of $480K per player. This is a significant financial outlay for each team, and therefore it is important to measure how much each player was actually worth in this tournament.
You can find our ranking of the IPL players and their dollar value on the IPL player ranking page. The value of each player is estimated by calculating how much above average that player contributed as a batsman or a bowler. Both the batting and bowling scores are combined into a single score called Runs Above Average, or RAA. An RAA score of 0 implies an average performance. A positive RAA means that the player was above average, and conversely a player with negative RAA means his performance was below average. More details about the calculation of the RAA score can be found in an earlier article.
The value of a player is the overall average salary ($480K), plus a value that is proportional to the total RAA score of the player. Basically, our player valuation methodology re-distributes the total spend of the teams to the players based on their performance.
Based on this methodology, AB de Villiers of Royal Challengers Bangalore comes out on the top, with a net value of $1.6MM, followed by Ajinkhya Rahane ($1.5MM) of Rajasthan Royals and Dwayne Bravo of Chennai Super Kings ($1.4MM). Interestingly, the champions Mumbai Indians have only one player in the top 10 – Lendl Simmons ($1.3MM) at the 10th position..
There are 10 players who actually ended up with a negative value, the worst offenders being James Faulkner (-$535K) of Rajasthan Royals and R Vinay Kumar (-$282K) of Mumbai Indians. Kings XI Punjab had the maximum number of such culprits, with a total of 3 players making it to the list of negative value.
Which player provided the best return on investment? That will have to be Yuzvendra Chahal of Royal Challengers Bangalore, whose salary is just $16K, but provided a net value of $1.32MM, or almost 83 times his salary. The biggest disappointment of this season was Yuvraj Singh, who was expected to lift Delhi Daredevils’ fortunes after being purchased for $2.67MM in the player auction, but provided a total value of -$47K.