The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has instituted new retention criteria that attempt to strike a balance between different interests.

However, the BCCI has made decisions that ultimately represent its priority: preserving the IPL auction’s high visibility and competitiveness.

These regulations, which go into effect on a Saturday, incentivize teams to carefully consider player retention strategies while simultaneously attempting to maintain an entertaining auction.

The co-owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders, Shah Rukh Khan, has advocated for the right to keep up to eight players.

With the Right To Match (RTM) option, which enables a club to match the highest bid for one of their former players, the BCCI partially complied with this proposal, permitting teams to keep six players.

However, the owner of Sunrisers Hyderabad, Kavya Maran, had advocated for removing the cap on the number of international or domestic players who may be retained.

With the BCCI’s approval, franchises can keep foreign players on their roster. Teams with talented international players like Pat Cummins or Heinrich Klaasen profit from this strategy.

The BCCI’s reasoning for these choices is evident: franchisees can pay a premium to keep essential players on staff.

Keeping more players in prior seasons was less expensive because retention costs were based on a decreasing scale.

The new regulations, however, have leveled the playing field, with Player 4 and Player 5 costing teams INR 18 crore and INR 14 crore, respectively, the same as Player 1 and Player 2.

Teams are now forced to allocate large quantities of money to a select group of players, which significantly influences the franchise budget.

For instance, teams would require INR 79 crore of their available INR 120 crore budget to retain six players if they have INR 75 crore set aside for five capped retentions and INR 4 crore set aside for one uncapped player.

There is now just INR 41 crore left over to complete the squad, which may need at least 14 more players.

The BCCI’s message is unmistakable: although you can keep players on the team, doing so will make it more challenging to assemble elite talent for the remaining players.

Maintaining elite players in the auction pool is one of the BCCI’s objectives to keep the auction exciting.

There would be 60 players eliminated from the auction, which would lessen its appeal if all ten clubs kept six players apiece.

The BCCI incentivizes teams to release more players into the auction pool by increasing the monetary prizes for retention.

For franchises, the new RTM provision makes things even more difficult. This regulation states that the team holding the RTM card has one last chance to raise their bid before using their right to match after the highest bidder for a player is identified.

This clause makes it more difficult for teams to retain players at a low cost by adding another level of competition and expense.

The new regulations present a problem for successful clubs that wish to hold onto their core players, even though their goal is to refrain from excessive retentions.

It might be necessary to forgo 65–66% of their budget to keep a successful team, which would leave little money for recruiting new players. This puts financial freedom and success preservation at odds.

The rules are pretty advantageous for players, even with the difficulties for franchises. Thanks to the revised match fee structure, players from India and other countries can now make more money every match than in many international tournaments, including The Hundred, PSL, BBL, CPL, and PSL. 

Players will probably gain from the updated RTM provision because it will also raise their market worth at auctions.

The BCCI’s decision to regard retiring players as uncapped would benefit teams like Chennai Super Kings, who might wish to keep MS Dhoni on staff. Dhoni’s IPL future is still up in the air, though.

Teams have around one month to negotiate and plan after submitting their retention lists by October 31 at 5 PM IST. Franchises must make these critical decisions soon because the auction is coming up.