🏏 Liam Livingstone: The UK's Newest Millionaire
The newest edition of the IPL is back and several English cricketers made a healthy amount. This week, we unpack who received bids!
The Indian Premier League makes international cricketers millionaires.
This year is no different!
For those unaware, the IPL is the biggest Twenty20 cricket tournament in the world.
It is hosted in India every April for 6 weeks and is viewed by hundreds of millions of people across the world.
The following tweet gives you a flavour of how big the competition is:
With this viewership comes big broadcasting deals and that means, big purses for players.
As a player, the process for getting to play in the IPL is a fascinating one.
You submit your name to play with a base price attached
The owners of the “franchises” then bid to have you on their team in a live, publicised auction on National Television
If unsold, you get nothing. If bought, you go to a team and get paid in cash!
This year, the tournament expanded. Two extra teams were created which grew the league from 8 teams to 10 teams.
More teams means more matches. More matches means more advertising revenues and even more cash to be thrown around to the talent pool.
The 2021 edition of the IPL was heavily impacted by COVID and was moved from April to September. This schedule allowed the IPL to “miss” the usual summer-based British cricket schedule and therefore led to a record 13 English players being bought at last years auction.
That number dropped this year, but still proved to be very lucrative to a number of players.
Below, I unpack each player and how a whirlwind 12 months for Liam Livingstone in particular means he is now the newest British sporting millionaire.
Liam Livingstone 2021 IPL: £74,000 - Rajasthan Royals
Liam Livingstone 2022 IPL: £1,135,000 - Punjab Kings
Liam Livingstone has had a wild 12 months. He was purchased for his base price last summer and since then it’s been nothing but 📈.
He left the IPL last summer with “Bubble fatigue” and a year later he makes over £1m after a stellar year for England.
This is the 4th biggest purchase for an Englishman ever and the biggest 1-year rise in English history.
These next few players saw a healthy year-on-year rise also:
Jos Buttler 2021 IPL: £431,000 - Rajasthan Royals
Jos Buttler 2022 IPL: £987,407 - Chennai Super Kings
Mark Wood 2021 IPL: £0 - n/a
Mark Wood 2022 IPL: £740,741 - Lucknow Super Giants
Chris Jordan 2021 IPL: £250,000 - n/a
Chris Jordan 2021 IPL: £480,000 - Chennai Super Kings
Jos Buttler is an IPL staple and a great player for any team. Mark Wood has remained injury free for some time and as such, became handsomely rewarded.
Chris Jordan, the best fielder in the world went unsold in the initial auction. After the main draw is completed, a list of unsold players go back in the hat for a secondary action, where CJ was picked up - almost doubling his purse from last year.
Some other players who picked up cheques.
Tymal Mills 2022 IPL: £148,00 - Mumbai Indians
Jofra Archer 2022 IPL: £789,000 - Mumbai Indians
Jason Roy 2022 IPL: £192,000 - Gujarat Titans
David Willey 2022 IPL: £266,000 - Royal Challengers Bangalore
Sam Billings 2022 IPL: £266,000 - Kolkata Knight Riders
Alex Hales 2022 IPL: £200,000 - Royal Challengers Bangalore
Jof is injured and won’t play this year. Such is the depth of his skills, Mumbai spent over three-quarters of a million Pounds to have first dibs on him NEXT year!
Big commitment.
Unsold Players
Eoin Morgan, had an interesting year last year. He played AWFUL with the bat, averaging only 11 runs across 17 matches. Despite this, he captained his Kolkata Knight Riders team to the final.
Unfortunately his batting form proved to hurt him as he was unsold this year despite making over £500,000 last year.
Sam and Tom Curran, the brothers who collected more than £800,000 accumulatively last year, also go unsold.
Dawid Malan, the #2 T20 batsman in the world was unsold also.
You may be wondering about Ben Stokes. He has made over £1m in each of the last two editions and is one of the most sought after names in the entire world.
Ben is missing this years tournament to spend time with his family after three gruelling years of elite-level cricket.
The auction is not completely over yet. There are further rounds of auction to come meaning some English players may get picked up.
I will bring any noteworthy news to you next week as always.
Stay safe.