IPL team owners will need big money for star players

Excerpts from Power Breakfast on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » Nifty BSE | NSE 25/05/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

Vijay Mallya, Mukesh Ambhani, Sharukh Khan and other bidders together paid over Rs 6000 crore for their IPL teams. They will now need more money for the big players. CNBC-TV18's Roma Khanna and Neha Bedi tell you how much they need to shell out if they want Tendulkar.

 

The tournament runs for a month and a half and CNN-IBN has learnt that the teams will have to fork out quite a handy sum to get these big name players. Iconic players like Sachin Tendulkar , Rahuld Dravid , Yuvraj Singh, Sourav Ganguly will cost at least USD 400,000 each, that's about Rs 1.6 crore for each year. MS Dhoni will also cost about the same.

 

Anil Kumble may not play the shorter version of the game for India anymore, but whoever snaps him up, will have to pay a neat USD 250,000. Harbhajan will cost the same. Irfan Pathan, meanwhile, will be cheaper, but only by USD 75,000. Surprisingly, Kumble may be more expensive for a team to acquire than the stars of India's T20 world cup winning team. Robin Uthappa, Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag will cost at least USD 200,000 each, that's about Rs 80 lakh.

 

But that still leaves one question unanswered. While some players like Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and Yuvraj have to play for their home franchises, who wants the others?

 

M S Dhoni, sources say, is being wooed by both, Shah Rukh Khan for his Kolkata team and Mukesh Ambani for his Mumbai team. Robin Uthappa is on the radar of Vijay Mallaya's Bangalore team and Deccan Chronicle's Hyderabad team. Preity Zinta is keen on getting Sreesanth to play for Mohali. Not surprisingly, the franchise owners aren't revealing their plans just yet.

 

Teams will have about USD 3.3 million each to buy these players. The auction will take place sometime in the third week of February.