What the 23rd Man Costs: The Silent Auction for Asia's Bench

Hook

In the auction room in Jeddah, Rishabh Pant went for 27 crore rupees — the highest price in the history of Indian franchise cricket. In that same room, on that same afternoon, sat dozens of domestic players: men who had scored runs for seven or eight seasons in domestic leagues, who had taken the new ball, who had bowled the sixteenth over because the team needed it. No hand went up for them. They walked out at the end holding their phones, looking for a flight home.

The number that stayed with me is not 27 crore. It is this: Pant cost more than ninety times the lowest base price in that same auction. The moment a franchise leaps for one man, it has already decided, in silence, what its 12th to 25th men are worth. The real auction in Asian franchise cricket does not happen in that room. It happens at the far end of the squad list, where the camera never goes.

Context: A Market That Runs on Two Currencies

Asian franchise cricket now runs across five major markets — the IPL, the BPL, ILT20, SA20 and the Lanka Premier League. The IPL is a world of its own. At the mega auction in Jeddah last November, Pant went for 27 crore and Shreyas Iyer for 26.75 crore. The BPL does its sums differently. There, a local player's fee is set at a category committee's table, while an overseas player's fee is settled in negotiation. Same team, same dressing room, same training session — two different currencies.

The gap is not new; it has existed since 2026. What is new is the consequence. The last two BPL titles went to Barishal — the first in 2026 under Tamim Iqbal, the second the following season. The teams that won were not the most expensive squads. The expensive squads had their route to the final blocked precisely in the places where the bench sits.

I spent thirty-three years in Barishal's press box and climbed down to the stands in 2026. The press box and the balcony do different arithmetic. The press box counts scores, Player-of-the-Match awards and catches. The balcony counts overs, substitutions and who got paid what. Today I am writing the balcony's arithmetic, because in this transfer window the real story lives there.

Who Sets the Price of the 15th-to-20th-Over Bowler?

All auction attention goes to the top three: an opener, a middle-order batter, a new-ball pacer. But finals are decided between the fifteenth and twentieth overs, and those six overs usually fall to a side's fifth and sixth bowling options. The cheapest men in the squad are the ones bowling them.

Look at the 2026 IPL final in Chennai. Mitchell Starc was Player of the Match with 2/14 — that new-ball spell justified the record fee. But who held overs seven to fourteen? Who came on unexpectedly and took the wicket that kept Starc and the death bowler ready? Two uncapped Kolkata seamers, neither worth a fifteenth of Starc's price. Between them they took close to nineteen wickets across the season. Nobody memorised their names.

Consider Barbados, the 2026 T20 World Cup final. India won by seven runs, and the last four overs were dragged home by Hardik Pandya, 3/20. He is India's fourth or fifth bowler. Jasprit Bumrah's 2/18 was a knife edge, but the seventeenth over turned the match, because Klaasen and Miller both had to go inside it. The bowling option a squad list labels "backup" is where finals are won.

Now do the plain arithmetic. If a franchise spends forty per cent of its purse on two stars, twenty others must share sixty per cent. Among those twenty sit the fifth bowler, the reserve keeper, the third spinner, and a batter who will walk out at number seven. The man bowling the seventeenth over of a final has the least secure contract in the building.

Retention and the Salary Cap: The Sum That Breaks a Bench

Franchise cricket is built to keep stars. Retention, right-to-match, pre-emption — every mechanism is a device for locking a top player to a franchise. That leaves each side with a hard ceiling, and inside that ceiling the bench gets the leftover scraps.

I see one consequence of this with my own eyes. A player who knows he has three matches plays a different game. He takes risks from the first ball, plays the short ball he does not need to play, walks outside off to scoop. Two bad games and he is dropped, replaced next season by another cheap young man. Nobody counts how many careers one franchise burns through in twelve years.

The IPL's Impact Player rule has made the arithmetic messier. The twelfth man now genuinely takes the field, so his market value has risen. But sides have also learned to treat numbers 12 to 15 as interchangeable parts — drop one, play another, no loss. That habit seeps into the internal culture, and an invisible staircase appears in the dressing room: stars above, hired hands below.

The BPL makes the problem sharper. A local player's fee is fixed by a category committee — A, B, C, D. His income ceiling is set not by his performance but by a table. The overseas player in the same XI has his fee settled in negotiation. When a young Bangladeshi all-rounder sees a man twice his age and half his form earning four times his money, what he learns is not cricket. He learns the market. That lesson is what later pulls him to another league, another country.

A Twenty-Lakh Budget, a Twenty-Year Dream

On 9 February 2026, in Potchefstroom, Bangladesh won the Under-19 World Cup, beating India by three wickets in the final. A few of Akbar Ali's squad are in the national frame now — Towhid Hridoy, Shoriful Islam, Tanzid Hasan, Shamim Hossain. And the rest? Some drift between domestic sides, some wait for an international call, some have gone back to their studies.

Last year I spoke to a twenty-one-year-old left-arm spinner. He had worked as a net bowler for a BPL side, been paid match fees, never given a contract. I asked him what the badge meant to him. He laughed. "Apa, the badge doesn't pay my father's hospital bill. I want a two-year contract. The rest can come later." I did not like his answer, because it embarrasses the story I like to write. It is still true, and the truth is bigger than my argument.

I have known the curator at Barishal Divisional Stadium for years. The match ends at ten at night; his shift ends at two in the morning. In 2026, when the stadium stood empty, a few of us ran a twenty-four-hour online marathon and raised 220,000 taka for forty-five stranded ground staff. One day he told me this about my bench stories: "For you it is writing. For me it is mud and cement." I did not stop him. He was right — to the people inside it, this is not romance. It is work.

But I Could Be Wrong

In fairness, here is the mainstream case in full: franchise cricket is not an academy, it is a business. A star sells shirts, fills stands, lifts the broadcast value. If Rishabh Pant pulls twenty or twenty-five crore of broadcast money into a season, paying him twenty-seven is not irrational — it is bookkeeping, and the books balance. Starc's example cuts against me too: the record signing was Player of the Match in the final and delivered the trophy.

Still, I hold my position. Starc's 2/14 was possible only because somebody held the other sixteen overs — and those bowlers were not cheap, they were unpaid. A single Player-of-the-Match award covers eighteen overs of collective labour, and the bench's real value hides inside that cover. A side that destroys its bench's security every season can win one trophy. It cannot win five in a row. And franchise cricket's true examination is not one season. It is five.

The Last Word: A Bet

My prediction for this transfer window: the Asian franchise that spends more than forty per cent of its purse on two players will not win the title. The side that pays its 12th to 25th men above the league median will reach the final. Check the arithmetic at the end of the season. If I am proven wrong, I will leave the balcony and go back up to the press box — though I suspect the staircase only runs one way.