Indian Premiere League : How Valuable Auctioned Players Are, Mathematically!

WHAT IS THIS ARTICLE ABOUT? IPL is one of the most watched sports league in the world consisting of eight teams named after Indian cities, who participate in players’ auction every year. Selected players are paid a humongous amount of money to play for the season. Virat Kohli was the highest paid cricketer in 2016 season, bought for ~2.3mn USD. While reading about this kind of crazy money being paid for just one season, I was wondering,

Do these expensive players actually provide the value in return to the team?

That’s when I thought to mathematically calculate the value of the players in IPL.

HOW TO JUDGE THE VALUE OF A PLAYER? There are several ways like Advertisements, Face Value, Brand Endorsement etc. in which a player can return value to the team owner. But my focus is primarily on his Cricketing performance on the field.

One more point I would like to mention is that Cricket statistics are generally measured only in terms of batting and bowling performance, while totally ignoring the fielding statistics.

Suppose a player did not get the chance to bat or bowl in a match, but he took 3 catches and saved 7 boundaries, should not that contribution be quantified too? So in order to calculate overall value, his fielding contribution should be taken into account too, which could be

• Catches taken
• Boundaries successfully saved
• Successful balls passed/throws

It is difficult to quantify last two because that data is not aggregated by scoreboards currently. I would need to watch all 500 IPL matches to collect that data, I obviously don’t have that kind of free time, so for now I am ignoring last two. Detail of catches is however displayed in scoreboards, so it is easier to take into account.

SOME MATHEMATICS NOW? A player’s value is sum of his Batting Value, Bowling Value and Fielding Value. I have tried defining formulae for all three, let’s see each of them,

Batting Value of a player is the sum of three factors.

• Factor 1 : Number of runs this batsman scored more than the team’s average runs. If batsman scored less than team’s average, his Factor-1 goes negative because he performed below team’s average.
• Factor 2 : Boundaries play a critical role in 20 over matches. This factor is relative boundaries count of the player compared to his team’s boundaries.
• Factor 3 : It is Strike Rate, just divided by 1000.

Bowling Value of a player is also the sum of three factors.

• Factor 1 : It calculates the run given by player for the wickets he took, compared to the team’s average. For example, if team gave 50 runs and took 10 wickets, out of which this player took 3 wickets. So team overall gave 5 runs per wicket, so for 3 wickets team gave 15 runs. If this player gave 10 runs to take 3 wickets, he performed better than team average by 5 but if he gave 25 runs to take 3 wickets, he performed worse by 10 runs compared to team average.
• Factor 2 : This is the Bowling Average of player
• Factor 3 : This is the Bowling Economy of player

Fielding Value is just the number of catches taken by player.

HOW DID I FIND THESE NUMBERS? Python and PHP scripts, lots of them. These scripts parsed the scorecards of all IPL matches, season by season, to calculate batting, bowling & fielding value of each player in each match. The collective overall value of a cricketer in an IPL season is the sum of his values in all matches he played in that season.

This was by far one of my most tedious projects. The data available on Cricket websites is easy for humans to understand but not uniform enough for computer scripts to parse. For example,

• A match’s scoreboard would show Rahul as batsman and K.L. Rahul as fielder, representing same cricketer.
• A match’s scoreboard would show ‘Pathan’ in both teams, but one is Yusuf and other is Irfan. You know which Pathan plays for which team but computer scripts don’t.

It required lots of manual changes and quick correction scripts.

RESULT ? I compiled the complete analysis and created a web dashboard for easy visualization, check it here.

It has Player-wise analysis to show how a player has performed in all seasons. It has Season-wise analysis of top valuable players. It has an Overall analysis to show who have been the most valuable IPL players ever.

CONCLUSION? This calculation says that Virat Kohli, Chris Gayle and David Warner are the three most valuable IPL players. Using this calculation, I also tried predicting which teams might qualify for Playoff Stage in 2016 and 2017 seasons based on the values of players they have in their teams.