WPL 2027 Auction in Kochi: 150 Names, 27 Chairs and the Real Arithmetic of Purse Per Slot

At 2:40 a.m. on Tuesday, a printer was running in the corridor outside the auction hall in Kochi. Name cards were coming out, and the woman counting them is called Sheela. She has done this job for nine years, from the IPL through to the Women's Premier League. On the phone she told me this year's cards have been printed in two colours: one stack for capped players, one for uncapped. "The uncapped pile is heavier," she said, and then went quiet, the way people do when they have read out a calculation they did not mean to share.

When the WPL 2027 auction opens in Kochi on Wednesday, 28 October, there will be 150 names on the table. On the other side of that table sit five franchises with a combined 27 empty slots. One hundred and fifty names, twenty-seven chairs. The remaining 123 people will go into Wednesday evening without a team — the least-printed number in any preview, and the truest one.

The four names added to the list arrived between Monday and Tuesday. Bree Illing, the New Zealand left-arm medium pacer, is the only overseas name in that group; the other three are uncapped Indians — Delhi legspinners Medhavi Bidhuri and Samaira Raghav, and Uttar Pradesh left-arm medium pacer Avanya Jain. Raghav also bats in the lower order, which puts her in the category coaches like to call "two jobs, one slot".

The original shortlist ran to 146. It is now 150. A name added forty hours before an auction sits outside the scouting cycle that produced the rest of the list. That gap looks small, and that is precisely why it gets ignored. The whole route of the evening runs through it, and that route goes through purse arithmetic.

Here is where the five franchises stand. UP Warriorz hold the largest remaining purse — INR 3.75 crore, with eight slots to fill, three of them overseas. Gujarat Giants have INR 1.25 crore and three slots. Royal Challengers Bengaluru have INR 1.15 crore and five slots. Delhi Capitals have INR 1.10 crore and five slots, one of them an overseas bench vacancy. And Mumbai Indians hold the smallest purse of all — INR 90 lakh, six slots, all for Indian players.

Add it up and the five squads have INR 8.15 crore between them for 27 slots, a little over INR 30 lakh per slot on average. That average will help nobody, because money at an auction is not divided between teams; it is divided inside slots.

Divide the purse by the slots and the picture turns over. UP Warriorz: INR 46.9 lakh per slot. Gujarat Giants: INR 41.7 lakh. RCB: INR 23 lakh. Delhi Capitals: INR 22 lakh. Mumbai Indians: INR 15 lakh. Those five numbers tell the story of the evening, and they do not arrive in the order the purse table does. The richest team is not the richest buyer; the poorest team is not the weakest. The question is how many times each of them can raise a hand in three hours.

INR 3.75 crore sounds like UP Warriorz will set the market. Eight slots. Three overseas slots. Suppose they spend INR 1.2 crore on three good overseas players — not an unusual outlay for three overseas slots in the current market. That leaves INR 2.55 crore for five Indian slots, an average of INR 51 lakh per Indian player.

The trouble is not the average, it is the sequence. One INR 1.5 crore bid for a senior India player leaves roughly INR 1 crore for four slots, and at that point the team starts looking at the uncapped names in the heaviest pile on the table. The biggest purse does not buy the most freedom; it buys the most obligation, because all eight slots must be filled.

Gujarat Giants are in a different position, and arguably the most interesting one. INR 1.25 crore, only three slots. INR 41.7 lakh per slot — nearly level with UPW — but the slot count is three, not eight. That gives Gujarat a luxury nobody else has: it can take a large position on a single player and still complete its squad.

The team that takes large positions is the team that sets prices. If an uncapped legspinner climbs to INR 40 lakh on Wednesday, look first at Gujarat. Three slots, three chances to buy quality, and a budget that makes every other team's fourth-choice purchase expensive.

Then there is Mumbai Indians. INR 90 lakh, six slots, all Indian. INR 15 lakh per slot. This is the hardest number in the auction. An uncapped Indian player's base price in this league sits around INR 10 lakh; a capped Indian's ranges between INR 30 and 50 lakh. Filling six slots with INR 90 lakh means Mumbai cannot win a single bidding war. It needs the player nobody else raised a hand for.

It looks like weakness, and every year teams treat it as weakness and walk past it. The other reading of keeping only INR 90 lakh for six Indian slots is that the overseas quota is already full and the Indian core is locked into retention. The team with the least money left is often the team that finished its work first. That is the inverted arithmetic of an auction, and it is read by very few people each year.

RCB have INR 1.15 crore for five slots — INR 23 lakh per slot, better placed than Mumbai but not by much. Delhi Capitals have INR 1.10 crore, five slots and one overseas vacancy — INR 22 lakh per slot. Delhi's position reads like RCB's on paper, but its history is not written on paper.

Delhi Capitals have been runners-up in all four editions. Four finals, four silver medals, no title. It is a record that feels oddly comfortable — the team never fell away, it always reached the last day. I collect the minutes after defeat, because that is where character speaks without a script — and those minutes show that finals are not won by average teams, and not by average players either. They are won by the one player who comes on in the eighth over and takes two wickets, or who hits a six in the nineteenth.

Delhi have five slots this time, including one overseas vacancy. One overseas slot means Delhi need a player who walks straight into the XI, not one who sits on the bench and learns. That is the single place where the largest sum of the evening will be spent and the least attention paid.

Go back now to the four names that joined the list last. Medhavi Bidhuri and Samaira Raghav are both Delhi legspinners. The value of wrist spin on the domestic circuit has climbed sharply over three years, because wickets in the middle overs of this league fall to legspin more than to anything else. Raghav's lower-order batting puts her in the "two jobs" bracket — and at auction a two-job player always costs more than a one-job player, even when both jobs are ordinary.

Avanya Jain is a left-arm medium pacer from Uttar Pradesh. One thing deserves attention here: this shortlist is thin on left-arm pace, and scarcity is what moves a price at auction. Avanya is uncapped, so the base price is low, but if two teams want her at once the number can go three or four times higher.

Bree Illing is the only overseas name in the late group and perhaps the cleanest story in it. A New Zealand left-arm medium pacer, which is the profile that creates angle with the new ball in the powerplay and still works in the middle overs. Her market is narrow — overseas slots are few. Three at UPW, one at Delhi, and the overseas split at the other franchises has not been made public in the same detail.

A narrow market is bad news for Illing and good news for the team that wants her. When buyers are few and the goods are good, the price settles below the value. That is the biggest opportunity at any auction, and the least exploited.

One hard technical point belongs here, because everything else is inference. Left-arm pace in T20 is priced on three things: the swing angle with the new ball, the ball that travels into a right-hander's pads, and the yorker angle at the death. Pitches in this league have generally been slow and slightly low, where swing does less and angle does more. That is why a left-arm medium pacer has commanded more here than a right-arm bowler of the same pace. Avanya Jain and Bree Illing belong to that same category, and both go under the hammer on the same day. That is the market working, not a coincidence.

Now the number that unlocks the whole evening. Of the 27 slots, perhaps twenty will be filled without a serious contest — at base price, or a notch above it. Only six or seven names will attract a genuine bidding war. The real fight at an auction is not over those seven names; it is over the twenty nobody is watching. That is where Mumbai's INR 90 lakh and Uttar Pradesh's INR 3.75 crore sit at the same table — one is choosing, the other is filling.

I think of the 2026 Lord's final, when India lost by nine runs and I was sitting in a studio in Chennai. Twelve years earlier, at 3 a.m., four hundred strangers had taught me what a crowd remembers, and since then I have never opened a report with the score. After that Lord's night I wrote more on women's cricket than on any other subject. But the line that travelled furthest in that studio was that half the players in that XI had no contract for the following month.

The WPL began in 2026, and the auction for its fifth season is here. The money came, the broadcast came, the crowds came. Money does not distribute itself the way progress is said to. Every auction is a small migration, with a mother somewhere waiting by the phone — and this time the phone will ring in the 123 homes where no news arrives on Wednesday evening.

The first page of my notebook carries a list: who does this hurt. In this auction the first name on that list is the uncapped legspinner who has taken forty wickets on the domestic circuit and does not appear in any franchise scout's file. The second is the 28-year-old quick who was given one match last season and then dropped, because her slot had been reserved for someone else. The third is the scorer who will stand in Kochi holding a basket of papers and whose work ends at six in the evening. That list stays in the notebook as it does every day, and its arithmetic is plain — in a league with 27 slots, 123 people must absorb one day a year on which their name is not called.

Now the point that changes how the whole list should be read. The largest purse is often evidence not of the best team but of the team that has made the most mistakes. UP Warriorz have INR 3.75 crore left because the players they bought across four seasons were not judged worth retaining, or left of their own accord. The size of a purse is the bill for earlier decisions, and this year the bill is the biggest in the room.

At the other end, Mumbai's INR 90 lakh says the core is intact and valued as such. The team arriving with the least money is often the one that got retention most right. The rule does not hold every year, but in the years it does, the commentary box is the last to notice.

The second counter-intuitive angle concerns the four late additions. The easy assumption is that the journey from 146 to 150 is a formality — four names, no consequence. But if twenty of the 27 slots are to be filled at base price, then the real market of the evening is the market where base-price players sell. In that market, adding an uncapped legspinner is as consequential a decision as spending a crore on an overseas quick. The four names at the bottom of the list are not at the margins of this auction; they are at its centre, because the largest volume of business on the night will happen at the margins.

The shape of Wednesday evening can be inferred from the arithmetic. The early rounds go to the big names, with UPW, Gujarat and Delhi all raising hands. In the middle rounds UPW remembers its eight slots and stops suddenly. In the closing rounds, when base-price names remain, Mumbai Indians appear active at the table for the first time. Nobody is being clever at an auction; whoever has the most left simply moves the most.

Among the things worth watching on Wednesday, Delhi's single overseas slot sits at the top. If a team that has lost four finals buys a player at that slot who can hold the ball in the nineteenth over of a final, INR 1.10 crore can prove to be a large sum. The second is Gujarat's three-slot gamble. The third is UPW's first purchase — if they spend more than INR 1.5 crore on their first two names, the remaining six slots will be filled at base price and the richest squad in the room will walk out with the thinnest depth.

When Sheela finished counting the stack in the Kochi corridor on Tuesday night, 150 cards were ready. An auction hall is also a poem that finishes only when the last spectator leaves — and in that hall the spectators are the people whose names are printed on the cards. Twenty-seven of them will be picked up by Wednesday evening. The other 123 will stay on the table and go into a box the next morning.

This time next year, when the WPL 2028 list is printed, the interesting question will be how many of these 150 names have returned and how many have gone for good. An auction's real result is not known on Wednesday evening; it is known in next year's list. No camera will be needed to read it. Only a printer, and a woman who can count cards.