While researching a post for my company web site today I noticed that the folks at Frontier Economics had published an analysis of the prices paid for players in the Indian Premier League. This, I thought, might be interesting in view of the “accepted wisdom” of English (and Kiwi) cricket commentators. And so it proved.

Some of the most common complaints (made by people outside India) about the IPL are that the Twenty20 game puts a premium on “sloggers” – batsmen who do nothing but hit big – while denigrating the role of bowlers, and that huge sums of money were spent on foreign stars to the detriment of local talent. Neither of these charges are upheld by the facts.

The Frontier analysis looked at the career statistics of the players and the amount of money paid for them, and used regression analysis to try to understand what the team owners were thinking when they decided how much a player was worth. The results were very interesting.

Far from putting a premium on “sloggers”, the team owners were most interested in signing “all-rounders” – players who can bat and bowl well. That’s entirely understandable. The next highest premium was paid for bowlers who are effective at taking wickets quickly – not bowlers who can “contain’ batsmen by preventing them from scoring, a defensive style that has been the accepted wisdom in limited overs cricket in England pretty much since such games started, but attacking bowlers who can actually get batsmen out. The lowest premiums were paid for players whose only skill was batting.

Furthermore, the analysis showed that substantial premiums were paid for young Indian players. The report states:

On average, an Indian player aged over 22 attracted bids $270,000 higher than for overseas players whose experience and performance were – from the data we have – broadly similar.

So far from destroying the careers of young Indian cricketers, as English commentators like to claim, the IPL was actually giving them an opportunity to earn very good money.

There were, of course, substantial premiums paid for star players such as Shane Warne, MS Dhoni and Andrew Symonds, but those can probably be justified in terms of their ability to draw crowds and, in the cases of Warne and Dhoni, their leadership potential (they were the captains of the two teams in the final).

What I’d now like to see is an analysis of how the players performed in the competition as compared to the money paid for them.