The Indian Premier League (IPL) Governing Council on Wednesday announced that the IPL franchises will be allowed to retain up to five players, thus confirming MS Dhoni’s return to his favourite franchise Chennai Super Kings (CSK).
This decision was taken during the IPL Governing Council’s meeting with the all-powerful Committee of Administrators (CoA) in Delhi.
Retention Policy
In the meeting, the contentious players’ retention policy was discussed and came to the conclusion that:
a) An IPL franchise is eligible to secure up to five players by virtue of a combination of a player retention (Pre Player Auction) and Right to Match (RTM) (during the player auction).
b) A maximum of either 3 retentions or 3 RTMs at the discretion of the franchises.
b) If there is no retention before player auction then franchises can have up to 3 RTMs.
It’s also finalized that the player pool available for CSK and Rajasthan Royals (RR) for retention/RTM will be the players’ who played for them respectively in IPL 2015 and who were part of Rising Pune Supergiant (RPS) and Gujarat Lions (GL) squads in IPL 2017.
Also out of the five players, three should be Indians. If a franchise opts not to retain any player, then it will get three matching cards at the auction.
Suresh Raina, Ravindra Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin were other Indian stars in the CSK team. Dwayne Bravo, Brendon McCullum and Dwayne Smith were the international stars who have a huge fan following in Chennai.
The meeting was led by IPL chairman Rajeev Shukla.
CSK and RR are returning to the IPL after serving two years of ban following the infamous spot-fixing scandal during the cash-rich league in 2013.
Salary Cap for respective seasons
During the meeting, the IPL Governing Council also released the slab for a salary hike for the next three seasons to INR 80 crores for 2018, INR 82 crore for 2019 and INR 85 crore for 2020, with a minimum spend cap of 75 percent of the salary.
Besides, the IPL Governing Council also increased the ‘Minimum Auction Reserve Price’ for both the uncapped and capped players.
For capped players, the new reserve prices are Rs 50 lakh (previously Rs 30 lakh), Rs 75 lakh (Rs 50 lakh), and Rs 1 crore, Rs 1.5 crore and Rs 2 crore (all unchanged). For uncapped players, they are Rs 20 lakh (Rs 10 lakh), Rs 30 lakh (Rs 20 lakh) and Rs 40 lakh (Rs 30 lakh).
A decision of squad size was also taken during the meeting. Each squad can now have a maximum of 25 players (with up two overseas players) and a minimum of 18 players.
The player auctions for the next edition is tentatively scheduled to be held in February 2018.
