Decoding the economics of IPL freelancers| Number Theory

In the Indian Premier League player auctions, held earlier this month, 34-year-old Jason Holder was the 10th most expensive buy

In the Indian Premier League player auctions, held earlier this month, 34-year-old Jason Holder was the 10th most expensive buy. The Gujarat Titans paid ₹7 crore to acquire the services of the West Indian all-rounder for IPL 2026. For Holder, the Gujarat Titans will be his sixth IPL team over a span of 13 years. He’s not the only one. The operating dynamics of the IPL, underpinned by limited retentions and periodic player auctions, mean that there are several players like Holder who are deemed to be first-choice picks in an IPL side, and who revolve between teams while commanding a good price.

In the Indian Premier League player auctions, held earlier this month, 34-year-old Jason Holder was the 10th most expensive buy

• Team turnover

  Holder is one of the 13 players who has featured in six IPL teams. And he’s not even at the top of the pile. Ishant Sharma, Manish Pandey and Shardul Thakur have shuttled across seven IPL teams. Jayadev Unadkat across eight teams. And then, there’s Australian opener Aaron Finch who has turned up for nine IPL teams across an IPL career that spanned a lengthy 12 seasons. In the way that IPL teams saw such players, they were not quite mainstays to be the nucleus and be retained. At the same time, they were seen as having high potential to be first-choice picks, or nearby, when constructing a playing eleven. They are all players who have represented their country across formats, most of them fairly prolifically. Yet, in the league that offers space to prime cricketers but is also demanding, not fulfilling their full potential also made them candidates to be cast away.
• Finch, with a pinch

  Take the case of Aaron Finch, who has played across the maximum number of teams. His reputation had always been of an attacking opener and a power hitter—a model T20 player. He played 92 IPL matches over 11 seasons between 2010 and 2022, across nine teams. In all, he scored 2,091 runs at an average of 25 and a strike rate of 128. He had 6 seasons where he played more than 10 matches. But there were only three seasons in which he scored more than 300 runs—2013, 2014 and 2016. In 2013, with 456 runs, he was 11th among the top run-getters for the season. What teams expected of him was to go a step further, and be the batting mainstay. What they got was a player who shone in patches but who never quite stitched together a season the way, say, Shaun Marsh did in 2008 (616 runs) or Shubman Gill did in 2023 (890 runs).
• Overseas turnover

  The IPL format allows a team to field a maximum of four overseas players in the playing eleven. This norm puts a certain cost premium on Indian players who make a strong case for selection in the playing eleven. In the auctions, which is the platform for team switches, the battle for Indian players is usually not of the tier-I Indian players but of tier-II and below. As a result, teams look at prime overseas players to plug their essential gaps, and put another kind of cost premium on them. The players who have moved the most across IPL teams represent this split. Of the 94 players who have played for four IPL teams or more, there are 35 overseas players, or a little over one-third. The remaining are Indian, and once again, a majority of them are those who have either played for India at some time or have been contenders for selection.
• Cost and turnover

  The most-expensive player in this year’s auction was Australian all-rounder Cameroon Green, who is already in his third IPL team in four years. The Kolkata Knight Riders bought him for ₹25.2 crore for IPL 2026. His first IPL season was 2023, when the Mumbai Indians bought him for ₹17 crore. Mumbai traded him in 2024 to Royal Challengers Bengaluru, which released him for 2025. Green is the third most-expensive player in this year’s IPL. The top 10 most-expensive players for this year occupy both ends of the spectrum in terms of team turnover. On the one hand, there are uncapped Prashant Veer and Kartik Sharma. Then, there are several players who have shuffled between IPL teams, notably Jason Holder and Mustafizur Rahman (6 teams each). And, it may not even be their last.