And yet, despite the plethora of cricketing talent and vast troves of money available, teams have not had equal success in the IPL.

Here, we seek to address the relationship between money spent at auctions and success in the league in order to understand the most efficient spenders in the IPL.

Background tidbits

There have been several changes through the years to the auction process, as well as the league structure itself. Teams have been added, removed and have changed names. Additionally, some teams were also banned for a few seasons while others changed their names.

In each season of IPL, teams play each other in a round-robin style competition. Each win gives a team 2 points, a loss 0 and all other results (tie, match rained out etc) 1 point. At the end of these ‘group-stages’ team enter a knock-out style tournament. For our analysis, we ignore these ‘knock-out’ stages and instead focus on the ‘group-stages’ with the idea that ‘group-stages’ are a better representative of the solidity of the team and its ability to perform repeatedly.

Quantifying performance and success

Lets analyse team performance in the Indian Premier League.

1. Does money guarantee success?

Not necessarily. To assess this question, we define success to the total points a team earned through seasons 2013 to 2019.

Turns out that while spending more will get you more points it is certainly not the norm. This is proven by the deviation from the regression line and the teams above the line are getting less worth for their buck. They spend a lot more than their peers without seeing equivalent return in terms of points.

Teams like Chennai Super Kings, Rajasthan Royals and Sunrisers Hyderabad seem exceptionally better in getting their money’s worth.

2. Who knows what to buy?

Lets look at a metric to explicitly assess the efficiency of expenditure, crore rupees spent per point since 2013. The lower this metric, the better a team is at converting its money to real world success in the IPL. We plot this metric across different teams, with the size of the scatter point proportional to the total points earned. The higher a team is on the y-axis, the more wasteful they have been with their money.

This visualization clearly answers the question of the most efficient spenders in IPL (CSK, RR, SRH). Delhi and RCB are the most inefficient among the big point earners. Note that the low point earners (small sized circles) are either new teams or old disbanded teams.

3. Do teams consistently perform to their ‘potential’? Is their ‘potential’ good enough?

Often times, we hear commentators refer to the potential of a team. This is another subjective term that we can quantify using data in the following analysis. Furthermore, consistency of performance is an important metric for any sports team.

To understand both these concepts, we evaluated the deviation of every teams efficiency (or inverse of it, i.e. points per crore rupees) from their respective mean across seasons. This ‘mean performance’ of team allows us to quantify their ‘potential’. Thus, by focusing only on each team’s performance, this analysis focuses solely on the consistency of a team compared to themselves and does not care about the performance of their competitors.

We chose three representative teams (MI, KKR and RCB) which have played all seasons of the IPL for the sake of consistency. The numbers next to the plot show the teams eventual ranking in the league tables.

For a successful team (in terms of points earned across seasons)like MI, the data shows whenver they meet or exceed their ‘potential’ they are in top 2! This means their ‘potential’ is high enough to succeed in a competitive league. However, they seem to oscillate between seasons of exceeding the potential and performing below the potential. (Recommendation: Find consistent performers even if it comes at cost of losing a little bit of ‘potential’)

On the flipside, for a less successful team like RCB, they have to exceed their potential by a lot to get to the top of the charts. Most of the times, they languish even below this potential highlighting their inconsistency. (Recommendation: Need a lot of work in both ‘potential’ and consistency)

Somewhere in the middle likes KKR. They are largely consistent performers punching above their weight consistently without finishing in the absolute top 2, highlighting the need to work on increasing their ‘potential’. (Recommendation: A little focus on increasing ‘potential’ can put them in the top of the league)

Conclusion

IPL teams go through changes of fortune, and throwing money blindly is not the answer to their problems. We defined two possible axes for teams to focus on, ‘potential’ and consistency. How these connect to real cricketing players will require an in-depth exploration of player statistics. This analysis will also be critical in building a ‘Moneyball for Indian Premier League’ framework.