Four WPL auctions in numbers: ₹122 crore, 203 players, and a record that never moved

The Women's Premier League has held four auctions so far: the inaugural one in 2023, small ones in 2024 and 2025, and a full rebuild in 2026. Together they sold 203 players for about ₹122 crore. That total is a small number next to the IPL's, where a single auction can cost five times as much as all four of these put together, but the shape of how that money moved is more interesting than its size. The four auctions look nothing alike, and the differences say a lot about how a young league learns to spend.

This article goes through the four auctions in order, using CricOptics's own records of every sale: what was spent, how many players were bought, who went for the most, how the clubs behaved, and how the shape of the price list changed. It then looks across the four at the five clubs, and at what the numbers can and cannot tell us. All figures are nominal rupees. Where the data has limits, they are stated.

2023: the inaugural auction

The first auction in 2023 was the biggest event in the league's short history in terms of players moved: 87 players bought for ₹59.5 crore, an average of ₹0.68 crore each. Five clubs were building squads from nothing, so there was nobody to retain and nothing to carry over.

The headline was Smriti Mandhana, bought by Royal Challengers Bangalore for ₹3.4 crore, which remains the highest auction price in the league. Ashleigh Gardner went to Gujarat Giants and Nat Sciver-Brunt to Mumbai Indians, both for ₹3.2 crore. Deepti Sharma went to UP Warriorz for ₹2.6 crore and Jemimah Rodrigues to Delhi Capitals for ₹2.2 crore. Those five players accounted for 24.5 per cent of the total, and the top ten for 40.7 per cent.

What is striking about 2023 is how evenly the clubs spent. Mumbai Indians and UP Warriorz each spent ₹12.0 crore. Gujarat Giants and Royal Challengers Bangalore each spent ₹11.9 crore. Delhi Capitals spent ₹11.7 crore. Five clubs, five budgets within three-tenths of a crore of each other. The number of players each bought also fell in a narrow band, 16 to 18. That uniformity is what you would expect from five clubs working to the same kind of constraint, a purse that all of them used nearly in full, and it is the only one of the four auctions in which the clubs look alike.

The price list was typical of the league. The median price was ₹0.35 crore, which means half the players bought went for less than thirty-five lakh. Of the 87 players, 69 went for ₹1 crore or less. So even at the biggest auction the league has held, four in five players cost a crore or under, and the money at the top was a handful of cheques of ₹2 to 3.4 crore. In the data, no role is recorded for any of the 87 sales, so this auction can be described in money but not by who was a batter or a bowler.

2024: the first small auction

In 2024 the clubs came back with squads. They kept 53 players on contracts worth ₹48.1 crore, which is covered in more detail in another article in this series, and then went to the auction to buy 30 players for ₹12.75 crore. That is a fifth of the first auction's spending and about a third of its players.

The price list shrank at every level. The highest price was ₹2.0 crore, paid for two players: Annabel Sutherland to Delhi Capitals and Kashvee Gautam to Gujarat Giants. Vrinda Dinesh went to UP Warriorz for ₹1.3 crore, Shabnim Ismail to Mumbai Indians for ₹1.2 crore and Phoebe Litchfield to Gujarat Giants for ₹1.0 crore. The median was ₹0.30 crore and the average ₹0.42 crore. Twenty-six of the 30 players, 87 per cent, went for a crore or less.

The money at the top was now far more concentrated. The five most expensive players made up 58.8 per cent of the total, compared with 24.5 per cent the year before, and the top ten made up 73.7 per cent. When only 30 players are sold, a handful of cheques is most of the auction.

The clubs were no longer alike. Gujarat Giants spent ₹4.5 crore on ten players, more than a third of the whole auction. Royal Challengers Bangalore spent ₹2.3 crore on seven, Delhi Capitals ₹2.2 crore on three, UP Warriorz ₹2.1 crore on five and Mumbai Indians ₹1.6 crore on five. Delhi bought only three players but spent about as much as Bangalore, which bought seven, a reminder that the number of players says little about the money.

2025: smaller again

The 2025 auction was smaller still: 19 players for ₹9.05 crore, an average of ₹0.48 crore. Clubs retained 62 players that year, for ₹54.8 crore, so the auction accounted for about 14 per cent of the money committed in the window.

The highest price was ₹1.9 crore, for Simran Shaikh, bought by Gujarat Giants. Deandra Dottin, also to Gujarat Giants, went for ₹1.7 crore, G Kamalini to Mumbai Indians for ₹1.6 crore, and Prema Rawat to Royal Challengers Bengaluru for ₹1.2 crore. After those four the next price was ₹0.55 crore, Shree Charani to Delhi Capitals, and everything below that is a very small cheque. The median price was ₹0.1 crore, ten lakh, the lowest of the four auctions by a long way. Fifteen of the 19 players went for ₹1 crore or less.

Concentration reached its peak. The top five took 76.8 per cent of the money, and the top ten 90.1 per cent. Put differently, four players accounted for more than ₹6 crore of ₹9.05 crore, and the other fifteen players cost about ₹2.65 crore between them.

The clubs' behaviour was now plainly different. Gujarat Giants spent ₹4.0 crore, almost half of all the money spent at the auction, on four players. Mumbai Indians spent ₹2.2 crore, Royal Challengers ₹1.5 crore, Delhi Capitals ₹0.8 crore and UP Warriorz ₹0.5 crore on three. Each club bought three or four players. At this scale an auction is less a market than a series of individual decisions about specific gaps.

2026: the rebuild

The 2026 auction was a full rebuild. Only 16 players were retained, for ₹32.9 crore, and the clubs bought 67 players for ₹40.8 crore, the largest auction since the inaugural one and the first since to give a proper picture of the league's market.

Deepti Sharma returned to UP Warriorz at ₹3.2 crore, level with the second-highest auction price in the league's history and up from the ₹2.6 crore she cost in 2023. Amelia Kerr went to Mumbai Indians for ₹3.0 crore, a very large step from the ₹1.0 crore she had been on in earlier years. Shikha Pandey, also to UP Warriorz, cost ₹2.4 crore, Sophie Devine of Gujarat Giants ₹2.0 crore and Meg Lanning of UP Warriorz ₹1.9 crore. Among those five, UP Warriorz bought three.

The price list recovered some breadth. The median was ₹0.45 crore, the highest since 2023, and the average ₹0.61 crore. The top five took 30.6 per cent of the money and the top ten 45.3 per cent, much closer to the inaugural auction's concentration than to the small auctions that followed. Of the 67 players, 57 went for ₹1 crore or less, 85 per cent.

The clubs were wildly uneven. UP Warriorz spent ₹14.3 crore on 17 players, more than a third of the whole auction and about 1.6 times the next club. Gujarat Giants spent ₹8.85 crore on 16. Royal Challengers Bengaluru spent ₹6.15 crore on 12, Mumbai Indians ₹5.75 crore on 11 and Delhi Capitals ₹5.7 crore on 11. UP Warriorz's lead reflects how few players they kept: one retained player, on ₹0.5 crore, against two to five for the other clubs.

Reading the four together

Set the four auctions in a table in your head and four patterns appear.

The first is the sheer scale. Players bought: 87, 30, 19, 67. Money spent: ₹59.5 crore, ₹12.75 crore, ₹9.05 crore, ₹40.8 crore. The league has had two large auctions and two small ones, and the large ones are the ones where nobody had a squad. Across the four, the average price paid was about ₹0.60 crore, which is about what you get if you divide ₹122 crore by 203 players.

The second is that the price at the top has not moved. The highest price was ₹3.4 crore in 2023, ₹2.0 crore in 2024, ₹1.9 crore in 2025 and ₹3.2 crore in 2026. There has been no new record in the league's history after the very first auction. For a league that has grown quickly in other respects, the top of the auction price list has been remarkably flat. That could be a product of the rules the clubs work under, of the small pools of available players in the small auctions, or of how the clubs value the players on offer; the data does not say which, and this article does not claim to know.

The third is how much of the league's money does not go through the auction at all. In the two small years, retained contracts were four to six times the size of the auction spending. Only in 2023, with nothing to retain, and 2026, with a rebuild, did the room carry most of the money.

The fourth is that the middle of the price list is very cheap and very stable. The share of players going for ₹1 crore or less was 79 per cent, 87 per cent, 79 per cent and 85 per cent across the four auctions. Whatever happens at the top, about four players in five cost a crore or less.

The five clubs across four auctions

Add each club's spending across the four auctions and you get a different view of the league.

Gujarat Giants spent the most in total, about ₹29.3 crore, with the biggest single-year totals in 2024 and 2025 when most other clubs had almost nothing to buy. UP Warriorz are close behind at about ₹28.9 crore, but their total is built from two very different years: ₹12.0 crore at the inaugural auction and ₹14.3 crore at the rebuild, with just ₹2.6 crore across the two small ones. Royal Challengers Bangalore spent about ₹21.9 crore, Mumbai Indians about ₹21.6 crore and Delhi Capitals about ₹20.4 crore.

Those differences are modest. The five clubs are within about ₹9 crore of each other across four years, a narrow gap against a total of about ₹122 crore. It is a young league in which the five franchises still look broadly alike in what they have spent. What differs is when. The numbers show Gujarat Giants spending more than anyone in the small auctions and UP Warriorz spending most in the big ones; they do not show why, and the pattern could easily be a matter of which squads had holes in which years.

It is also worth noting how little the money tells you about success on the field. This article has no basis to link spending to results and does not try. It is worth saying plainly because the temptation is strong: a club that spent a great deal in a year is not shown here to have done anything other than spend.

Some individual stories

Several players appear more than once in the records, and their sequences are instructive.

Deepti Sharma was bought by UP Warriorz for ₹2.6 crore in 2023 and again for ₹3.2 crore in 2026, with retention at the earlier price in between. Her price rose by about 23 per cent over three years in a league whose top price was almost unchanged.

Kashvee Gautam went to Gujarat Giants for ₹2.0 crore in 2024 and, per the contracts the data holds, is on ₹0.65 crore after the 2026 auction. Simran Shaikh cost ₹1.9 crore in 2025 and is on ₹0.1 crore now. Prema Rawat, ₹1.2 crore in 2025, is on ₹0.2 crore. Those are the sharpest falls in the data, and they show that a price in a small auction is not a floor. A player sold in a year when two clubs both wanted her can be re-contracted far lower the next time the market is reset.

At the other end, Amelia Kerr moved from ₹1.0 crore to ₹3.0 crore, Shikha Pandey from ₹0.6 crore to ₹2.4 crore and Sophie Devine from ₹0.5 crore to ₹2.0 crore. The rebuild did not just redistribute the same money. It reordered it, with the middle of the list moving up and down by a lot.

What the numbers cannot tell us

There are real limits. The data covers only players who were sold, so we do not know how many entered an auction and were not bought, and every average here is an average of players who found a buyer. Roles are not recorded for most of the early sales, and nationality is not recorded for about half the league, so this article says nothing about overseas players, the balance of the squads or the types of players clubs chose. The 2023 retention count is zero because there was nothing to retain, and the retention figures in later years cover the players the data could match to a record, so each total is a floor and not an exact figure.

Prices are nominal and the sample is small. Four auctions is not a long enough series to separate a trend from a coincidence, and anything that looks like a pattern, such as the flat top of the price list, deserves a second look after the next auction.

Within those limits, the main lesson is that a league's money does not move the way its headline suggests. The record has not been broken in three years, the typical player costs about a third of a crore, and in two years out of four the clubs committed most of their money before the auction began. What changes from year to year is not the price of the best player. It is how many players are in the room, how many clubs have holes to fill, and how much of the league's money is still left to decide.