Former COO of IPL Sundar Raman revealed how a tea conversation gave birth to the amazing concept of player auction. He gave a detail insight to the ‘bts’ of the planning in a conversation with Gaurav Kapur.
Sundar Raman recalled the beginning
The Indian Premier League is undoubtedly the most-watched and most rich T20 league in the world. It also played pivotal role in spreading the T20 league across the globe. The way high profile cricketers are bought by franchises for huge money is a crazy affair. The IPL auction is also followed by one all over the cricket world. The cricketers who have sent their names in the auction pool stick to the broadcasting to see what destiny is in store for them. Former Indian Premier League Chief Operating Officer Sundar Raman recently spoke to Gaurav Kapur of Oaktree Sports on their YouTube channel and gave an idea of how it was initially planned.
Raman disclosed, “The player auction almost came as a part of an evening tea conversation while we were doing a thousand other things. We had sold the franchises, we had the venues confirmed, now it was left to on how do we get the players rostered into different teams.”
During the show 22 Yarns Raman recalled that marquee players were only the certain factor of the auction with Dhoni having no home at the beginning. “The only thing sure was the marquee players, who were assigned to a set of franchises. There was Sachin Tendulkar for Mumbai, Virender Sehwag for Delhi, Yuvraj Singh for Punjab, Sourav Ganguly for Kolkata. But MS Dhoni was without a home.”
Auction was the answer
Raman remembered how one of the franchises came up with the idea of an auction. “The challenge was one of those conversations where the question was how do we make the franchises take on the players? One of the franchises, I don’t remember who it was, said ‘why don’t we auction them?’”
After having a discussion for a couple of minutes, Raman zeroed on the idea and opined that it would generate customer interest. “After two minutes of deliberation I said ‘good idea, it will generate a lot of consumer interest’. And that decided that”.
Stay updated with all the cricketing action, follow Cricadium on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
