Lights, camera8230; auction

The regal ballroom at Hilton Oberoi in South Mumbai could easily...

The regal ballroom at Hilton Oberoi in South Mumbai could easily be mistaken for Sotheby8217;s or Christie8217;s tomorrow. There will be celebrities, tycoons, lawyers and some of India8217;s finest marketing brains walking into the place. They8217;ll all be shopping for manpower, collectively worth US40m, to be auctioned through the day.

Manpower, or cricketers to be precise, will be sold worth the price of a Van Gogh once renowned auctioneer Richard Madley 8212; the master of ceremonies 8212; will begin the show.

In the middle of the ballroom, where the eight franchise team representatives will have settled down on a round-table, there will be a public screen which will begin displaying the names of cricketers who8217;ve signed up for the auction, starting with the costliest. The screen will display the cricketer8217;s profile, his background, his overall statistics, his specific Twenty20 figures, age, past cricketing records and most important of all, his base price.

The player8217;s nationality, specialty and the expected 8220;availability percentage8221; for the upcoming season will also be displayed.

Leg-spinner Shane Warne, for example, is among the costliest. The bidding may, therefore, begin with Warne and go up to the last count of the 80-odd cricketers who have signed up.

The process will begin with increments of US5000 for bids up to US100,000, US10,000 for bids from US100,000 and so on. In bids that exceed US500,000, the increments will be at the auctioneer8217;s discretion. The minimum a team can spend on a team is US3m and maximum is US5m. Players of a similar nature 8211; for example wicket-keeper batsmen, openers or fast bowlers 8211; will also be displayed in sets from where the franchise team owners can pick.

Players who have appeared on the public screen but have not been successfully bid for will be brought out in another round of auctions, once the first round is over.

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The representatives from the eight franchise teams 8212;where neither icon players nor the media will be given entry 8212; will have individual franchise screens in front of them, from where they can bid for a player. The teams have been provided with the list of players in advance and composition of the sets and the order in which the sets will be auctioned. Between each set a total of 12, the team representatives will be given time to rethink their strategy or plan new ones in case the bidding until then hasn8217;t gone well for them. Within these sets, the order that players will be presented for auction will be determined by a random draw.

On the touch-screen machines available to them, the team representatives will be able to conduct their business by bidding for the players. Once a player is bought and the hammer brought down, the price of that cricketer will be deducted automatically from the franchise8217;s overall purse of US5m.

Once bought, the player cannot be rejected and the franchise will be required to sign a form confirming the terms of agreement right at that moment. The icon players, who won8217;t be on the auction window, will earn 15 percent more than the highest player fee in that squad, which also has to be within the purse of US5m. There8217;ll be only one official bidder per franchise and each contract will be fixed for a term of three years.