The Price of a Passport in Jeddah's Auction Room: The Quiet Ledger of Cricket's Transfer Market

In the last week of November last year, while an auction was underway in a hotel ballroom in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I was sitting in a room in Bangalore, at two in the morning, on the other side of the screen. Cricket's auction room means a silent war of paper and money. A large screen on the stage, ten franchise tables below, and analysts keeping accounts by hand. Names were being read out one after another — some going for crores, some at base price, some at zero; unsold.

Then it happened. A name was called, and the temperature of the room changed. Within a few minutes of bidding, the price climbed to twenty-seven crore rupees — the most expensive buy in the history of India's domestic T20 league. Lucknow Super Giants bought Rishabh Pant, in November 2026. A few minutes later, Shreyas Iyer went to Punjab Kings for twenty-six crore seventy-five lakh. Sitting on this side of the screen, I remembered that many of the Afghan, Bangladeshi, Caribbean and Sri Lankan cricketers sitting in that same auction room would not fetch even a tenth of these two Indian stars. Same field, same ball, same skill — but a different passport.

This is the real story of cricket's transfer market. There is no straightforward price movement here like in football; there is a complex web of paper — NOCs, board permissions, contract clauses, and the self-interest of every country. The market is about money, but the money moves by the rules of paper.

A Market of Paper, a Market of the Field

In football, a player moves from one club to another, and the two clubs exchange money — a transfer fee. In cricket, that barely exists. Here a player is split into two separate identities: one, his central contract with the national board; two, a separate contract with a franchise league. These two worlds sometimes align, sometimes collide.

Standing in between is a single document — the NOC, or No Objection Certificate. Without permission from his own board, no cricketer can play in a foreign league. In bureaucratic language it is an administrative clearance; in reality it is a weapon of power. A board can block it, delay it, attach conditions.

India's board, the BCCI, has for a long time not allowed active Indian cricketers to play in overseas leagues — because the world's richest league is its own. In 2026 it opened the door for retired Indian cricketers, with conditions. The result is a strange situation: Indian cricketers don't go out, but the best stars from the rest of the world come to India. The flow of money is one-directional.

Auction and draft — the two main methods of player selection in franchise cricket. The IPL runs an auction, where a purse limit is fixed and teams bid name by name. Australia's Big Bash, South Africa's SA20, the UAE's ILT20, America's MLC — these rely more on drafts and salary caps. The methods differ, but the principle is the same: the board and the league together decide who plays where, and for how much.

In this structure, the phrase free agent means something different from football. In football, a free agent means the contract is over, there is no club; signing him costs no transfer fee, so he is given a hefty signing-on fee. Cricket's auction is in fact one vast free-agent market — every cricketer is effectively free, because nobody pays a transfer fee for a player. The entire money goes directly into the hands of the player and his agent.

And here lies an uncomfortable truth. In football, huge signing-on fees for free agents raise questions, because they fall outside financial regulation — there is no transfer fee, so there is nothing to audit. Cricket's auction market stands on exactly that same gap, only on a larger scale. Where football at least records a transaction on paper, cricket sends a large share of the money into wage slabs with almost no independent oversight.

Whom Does the Money Follow

Those who sit at the auction table bidding come to buy skill — but what they actually buy is a scarce resource, and that is never skill alone.

The IPL rule says a maximum of four overseas players may feature in the eleven that takes the field. The other seven places are reserved for Indians. The arithmetic of the entire market hides inside that one sentence. Overseas stars come to add weight to a side, but they can never occupy more than a third of its structure. Indian players, meanwhile, have limited supply and enormous demand — so their price inflates on its own.

So the auction does not really set the price of skill; the auction sets the price of nationality. Rishabh Pant's twenty-seven crore is not merely the value of his batting; it is the market value of an Indian passport, the value of the scarcity of a capable Indian wicketkeeper-batter. For comparison, keep in mind that at the auction in Dubai in December 2026, when Mitchell Starc set a record by going for twenty-four crore seventy-five lakh, that too was the price of a rare resource within the overseas quota — a left-arm pacer, in the death overs, indispensable to a side. In just the same way, an Afghan leg-spinner of extraordinary skill is priced far lower, because he occupies an overseas slot — to take him, an Indian must be dropped.

This is where my passport consciousness sits. When I watch an auction from a TV room in Dhaka, I see Bangladeshi cricketers read out at base price, and often nobody raises a hand. Same year, same ball, same format. But when a Caribbean opener plays across four continents in ten years, we call him a mercenary — as if being without a country were his crime. In truth he is the product of exactly the system that will not let anyone stay still in one place without a board's permission.

In a franchise's eyes a player is never just a cricketer, he is also an asset. Wage bill, squad balance, injury risk, the age curve — together they fix a value. An injured star's price falls; a pacer crossing thirty loses value, even though his four overs remain the side's most expensive asset. A ruthless, almost exchange-market calculation operates here.

And there is the agent. In football, agent fees are a matter of debate; in cricket they are almost invisible. Who signed what, who took what commission — this is barely discussed. This deficit of information is the market's biggest risk. When you hear that a certain team bought a certain player for X crore, you are seeing a final number; the negotiations behind it, the clauses, the discounts — none of it comes into the open.

The War of the Calendar

As the number of franchise leagues grows, another conflict grows too — between the national team's busy schedule and the leagues' schedule. A year is now so crowded with leagues that a cricketer must choose: rest for the national team, or play in a league. At this moment of choice, the NOC becomes an instrument of moral pressure.

The board's logic is clear: the player is our product, he is on our central contract, so our schedule takes priority. The player's logic is equally clear: a short international career, the risk of injury, and the league money is his family's future. Standing between these two logics, the NOC is a rope of control, with the board at one end and the player at the other.

As a result, many experienced players drift away from red-ball cricket — because the league market values white-ball cricket more, with less risk and more money. This is not merely one player's personal decision; it is the outcome of a system. A system that rewards a star for the moment pushes that same star away from the long game.

The Ledger of What Is Missing

In many years in this profession I have noticed one thing: on auction night everyone talks about how much money was raised, but nobody asks who did not get that money.

How much does it cost to make a player? A childhood coach, a village ground, a district team's pitch curator, a physio, the board's age-group side — this entire chain produces a talent. But when that talent is sold for crores, nobody in that chain gets a single paisa. There is no solidarity payment, no development levy. In football, small clubs get a share of big transfers, because a player they shaped later rises in value; in cricket, that entire accounting is out of sight.

This missing ledger reveals how liquid, how unequal, cricket's market really is. If Bangladesh's domestic league cannot hold on to its best star, if he is carried away to a foreign league, then the very system that produced him grows weaker. The flow of money accumulates in the hands of individuals, not institutions. And it is institutions that produce the next generation.

The lesson of Afghanistan is clearest here. When a leg-spinner rising from a war-ravaged country becomes the most in-demand player in every league in the world, those players' league earnings become the main source of income for that country's board. The board survives by permitting its stars to play abroad. It is an inverted picture of dependence: the players' market is the board's budget.

The picture in the Caribbean islands is its mirror image. There, players spend year after year in leagues, step away from Tests, and their relationship with the board gradually becomes like two parties across a negotiating table. Neither side is the villain here; it is the natural consequence of a structure in which national identity and the professional market pull at the same person from two directions.

Those Who Were Not There on Auction Night

One more thing needs saying here, something the big auction numbers conceal. When India's women's franchise league launched in 2026, the most expensive buy was Smriti Mandhana, at three crore forty lakh rupees. That was a historic moment for women's cricket — but placed alongside, it shows that in the men's league the price that same year reached twenty-four crore, and the next year twenty-seven crore. Same game, same auction room, yet two different meanings for the same word.

Here too the question is not the passport but identity. The market decides who is visible and who is not — and visibility is produced by broadcast, audience and advertising arithmetic. The auction does not merely write prices; it decides who will be at the centre of the conversation and who at the edge.

The Forgotten Names

We love the auction because it tells us a comfortable story: talent finds its own value. To people outside the field this story feels fair — see, if you play well, money will find you.

But the paper accounting says otherwise. What twenty-seven crore proves is not the triumph of talent; it is the triumph of timing and citizenship. A player of equal quality can remain unsold simply because of the wrong passport. Some of those who lie at base price on auction night are no less proven in international cricket than a twenty-seven-crore star. The difference is created at the moment when one is called for and the other is called unsold.

There is another gap. We think of the auction as a neutral measure of merit, yet it is entirely time-bound. If a player is in form in that one particular season, his price touches the sky; the next year, if the same player is injured or out of form, he is not in the market. The market does not give a lasting value, it gives a snapshot of a moment. Football clubs build a player over years and sign long contracts; cricket's auction rewrites the accounting every year. This short-term thinking forces clubs to build star-dependent sides and leaves youth investment behind.

And the biggest misconception — we think the market is free. Yet behind every big transaction stands a board, an NOC, a permission letter. The player is not free; he is free within a system whose door key is in someone else's pocket.

The Spectator's Arithmetic

From my years of watching the game in stadiums and in front of screens, I can say the night of the auction is never only the teams' night. It is the spectator's night too. When a boy sitting in front of a TV sees that his favourite player has found no place in any team, he cannot reconcile the accounting — because to him that player's value cannot be measured.

This is where a gap opens between the market and the field. The market sees numbers, the spectator sees a story. The number changes overnight; the story lasts for years. A league that remembers only numbers forgets its story — and the tickets of a league that forgets its story will one day begin to shrink.

A Closing Word

Cricket's transfer market will change, but where will the change come from? Probably not from spending caps or rules; it will come from transparency. When beside the auction price it is written how much commission someone took, how much money went to the district academy that first put a bat in that player's hands, then the market will become a little fairer to skill.

I first heard the boys sing through a screen, and something in me remembered. The screen one day became a terrace, and the boys taught me to sing again. That song's accounting appears in no auction room — and that is the market's greatest absence.

Until then, let one question hang in the air: what is a cricketer's price — his bat, or his passport?