WPL 2023 auction today: All you need to know about first such bidding ever

The auctions for the players of the first edition of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) will take place in Mumbai today at 2:30 PM. A total of 409 cricketers will go under the hammer at the Jio World Convention Centre. Initially, 1,525 players had registered for the auction. In the final list, 246 players are Indians, and 163 are from overseas.

Players are divided into five slabs of base prices for the auction: Rs 50 lakh, Rs 40 lakh, Rs 30 lakh, Rs 20 lakh and Rs 10 lakh.

Twenty-four players like Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, Alyssa Healy and Sophie Ecclestone have been put in the Rs 50 lakh base price category. This bracket also includes the captain of the U-19 World Cup, winning captain Shafali Verma.

The second category, with a base price of Rs 40 lakh, has players like Yastika Bhatia, Harleen Deol and England’s Heather Knight. At the same time, players like Anjali Sarvani and Poonam Yadav have a base price of Rs 30 lakh.

India’s U-19 stars, who won the World Cup in South Africa, like Parshavi Chopra, Archana Devi, Titas Sadhu, Shweta Sehrawat and Mannat Kashyap, have a base price of Rs 10 lakh.

BCCI has also informed the five teams that they must bring in a minimum of 15 players in the squad, while the minimum squad spend should be Rs 9 crore. They will have a purse of Rs 12 crore, with each side allowed to buy only six foreign players.

The BCCI will also provide strategy breaks of ten minutes after every hour during the auction. “Following the conclusion of each set, there may (at the auctioneer’s discretion) be a short break to allow the franchise time to re-evaluate tactics. The length of each break will be announced by the auctioneer at the conclusion of the relevant set,” IANS had earlier reported.

“A warning bell will ring two minutes before the resumption of the player auction after each break. The player auction will restart promptly after each break. It is anticipated that these short breaks will total a minimum of 10 minutes in every hour of the player auction proceedings,” the BCCI note was quoted as saying in the report.

Cricbuzz had also reported that Mallika Sagar, a Mumbai-based art collector consultant for Modern and Contemporary Indian art and partner in Art India Consultants firm, will conduct the auctions. She had earlier conducted the auctions of the 2021 Pro Kabaddi League.

With the five teams sold for Rs 4669.99 crore and the BCCI selling the media rights for Rs 951 crore, the WPL is the second biggest T20 League behind the Indian Premier League.

Apart from three IPL team owners, Mumbai Indians, Royal Challengers Bangalore and Delhi Capitals, Capri Global Holdings (Lucknow), and the Adani Sportsline have bought the five franchises.