IPL 2025 Auction: The RTM twist and its endless possibilities that had teams on tenterhooks

There was a feeling of haste about a lot of things involving the IPL 2025 Auction - except those long, dull waits whenever think-tanks got into a huddle to arrive at a decision.

A little over a month ago, rumors and speculations aplenty over who would be retained by the 10 teams hit a crescendo. Today, the rosters are locked in, bringing an end to days and weeks of number-crunching permutations and combinations.

Player auctions come with numerous uncertainties. Nothing is guaranteed and despite all that teams may try in terms of budgeting and estimating a player's value, the marketplace that is the auction room could throw up something completely different.

Teams always miss out on something or the other, especially in a mega auction where they're looking to build pretty much from the basement - or no more than the first floor in place if you were KKR, MI, or RR. A glance at the 10 squads and you will find certain unticked boxes. It does put teams on an even footing ahead of the new cycle but it's those who ticked off the most boxes who stand a realistic chance of ironing out the flaws as the cycle progresses.

The IPL 2025 Auction was different for a number of reasons. Never before this perhaps have we seen top-tier Indian star quotient of this quantity go under the hammer. Arguably not even in 2008, with the exception of MS Dhoni, for the likes of Yuvraj Singh, Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, and Sourav Ganguly were all pre-retained as icon players.

To top it all, the varying purses, the new RTM (right-to-match) rule, and of course, the commonly used term 'auction dynamics.' There certainly were plenty of talking points and takeaways, with those frenetic couple of days leaving us with the thought of endless possibilities over what could have happened differently even a good five days after the hammer went down one final time in Jeddah, particularly when you look back at the RTM and how it was used.

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How CSK and DC mastered the RTM caveat at IPL 2025 Auction

Intangibles are a big part of the dynamics that shape a player auction. How is the marketplace? What's the demand for a certain player profile? How skewed is that demand-supply curve? And most importantly, which other team would likely pursue a player and how desperate would they be?

Naturally, teams with the fattest purses and the most work to do heading into the auction would have been expected to raise the paddle more than the rest. Ness Wadia, the co-owner of the Punjab Kings (PBKS), was a busy man across these two days (November 24 and 25), with the team hitting the reset button again.

Perhaps the most important factor that influenced pricing points this time was the asterisk against the RTM. Having the opportunity to revise that final bid impacted several decisions, with some teams mastering the caveat to their advantage.

The Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and the Delhi Capitals (DC) were certainly amongst those who understood the risks associated with the rule. For a team that loves to reassemble its old guard, it was no surprise to see CSK go hard for both Devon Conway and Rachin Ravindra.

With Conway coming up for bidding a set earlier than Ravindra, it was largely expected that the Super Kings would use their lone RTM card on the opener. Except, they went all out and bid for him, eventually securing him as their first buy at ₹ 6.25 crore. Why did they do that though when they had the RTM?

A possible reason can be put down to Conway being higher up CSK's priority than Ravindra. But had they exercised the RTM at a lower price, there was a good chance that the team that held the final bid would have spiked up the revised price considerably, forcing the Super Kings to then stretch their purse strings to get him back.

With that RTM still in their hands, they continued to bid for Ravindra too - a psychological play perhaps that they were keen to save that RTM for someone else? Either way, it worked out beautifully as Punjab had the winning bid at ₹3.2 crore before revising it to just ₹4 crore when CSK whipped out the RTM. A successful ploy by the Super Kings as the revised bid fell well within their budget - welcome home again!

They might just thank the Kings for not cracking a similar code. A spike of just ₹80 lakh in the context of the funds that the two teams had was a surprise in Ravindra's case. If that was bemusing, not choosing to exercise their RTM to push CSK into shelling out more for Sam Curran (a former Super King bought at ₹2.4 crore) was even more bizarre.

What the Kings did not use well enough, the Super Kings certainly did when they doubled the Noor Ahmad bid from ₹5 crore after Gujarat Titans (GT) used an RTM. Quite clearly, he was the one big target that they had and the only way they could avoid him going back to the Titans - who had a comparable purse at the time - was to put the final amount beyond their reach.

Unlike PBKS though, the Capitals certainly knew the tricks of the trade in this regard. Memes of the Capitals' owners inflating the price of players and burning their counterparts' purses are mainstream occurrences during the time of the IPL auction. But it was on display at its very best when the hammer came down for Rishabh Pant at ₹20.75 crore.

The desperation was unmissable as Dr. Sanjiv Goenka, owner of the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG), did not back out of bidding for the maverick Indian wicket-keeper, having placed the opening bid himself. Staving off competition from Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) and SunRisers Hyderabad (SRH), he had the final bid, only for DC to shrewdly use the RTM.

A desperate Super Giants table then hiked it to a whopping ₹27 crore. They had their man but having entered the auction with a purse of ₹69 crore and five retentions, it took a serious hit.

DC co-owner Parth Jindal did go on to suggest to various portals that he did want Pant back when they used the first RTM despite realistically knowing that they'd lost him the moment they failed to retain him. Whether it was a manner of speaking or not, we don't know. The Capitals surely didn't want him to go but who's to say that they did not play the RTM caveat to their advantage, having witnessed just how desperately Lucknow pursued Pant.

Ironically though, LSG failed to return the favor when DC had the winning bid for KL Rahul at ₹14 crore. Both teams had clearly moved on from their respective 2024 skippers but while one team cheekily made life a little tougher for the other, LSG did not gamble with that ploy.

Another team that didn't use this rule as well as they could have was RCB, whose only usage of the RTM came for the uncapped Swapnil Singh. Of course, DC raised the bid again. While their decision to not RTM Will Jacks baffled many, that was at least at a stage in the auction where they had to focus on plugging specific gaps in their roster with a minimal purse.

Mohammed Siraj (₹ 12.25 Cr. to SRH) and Glenn Maxwell (₹4.2 Cr. to PBKS) both went at what you'd reckon were a cut price at those specific timings of the auction. Yet, RCB did not use the RTM for either of the two players - not even to potentially escalate the eventual price. It may have stemmed from a safety-first approach to stack up enough dough for their premier targets. Yet DC and PBKS sure didn't do RCB any such favors with the bids of Rasikh Salam (₹2 crore to ₹6 crore) and Jitesh Sharma (₹7 crore to ₹11 crore), respectively.

While it can be argued that CSK and DC read the room pretty well, the new RTM twist was met with different approaches. So much so that six out of the 14 RTMs available across the 10 teams ahead of the IPL 2025 Auction went unused.

This was in stark contrast to the 2014 mega auction where teams used every RTM at their disposal, and 2018 where only one RTM was unused, although the team in question, Rajasthan Royals, had very few choices in the first place, having made their return to the league post a two-year suspension.

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Did the RTM twist decide the fate of the overseas players?

There's reason to think that the RTM had a cascading impact elsewhere too. With each squad strength capped between 18 and 25 and a maximum of eight reserved for overseas players, exorbitant bids coupled with a thin purse meant that only CSK, GT, and PBKS filled all 25 slots.

That's not all - as many as six teams did not even fill their overseas roster cap of eight. With teams going all out for specific first-choice Indian targets and their Plan B options, this left them severely short on funds with capped players - Indian and overseas - listing themselves at ₹75 lakh at least.

It told on certain star players in the ₹2 crore price bracket, Indian and overseas, failing to fetch a bid. David Warner, Shardul Thakur, Kane Williamson, and Mustafizur Rahman were amongst those but the likes of Tanush Kotian, Ricky Bhui, Yash Dhull, Kartik Tyagi, and Urvil Patel, the last of whom smashed the fastest T20 ton by an Indian two days after the auction, all failed to get a bid too. And mind you, these are amongst the best domestic players in the country today.

Teams were down to their very last set of bills. With a purse of ₹85 lakh remaining, LSG spent ₹75 lakh on the highly-rated-yet-untested Matthew Breetzke of South Africa - their sixth overseas signing and last of the IPL 2025 Auction. SRH had ₹50 lakh in their kitty when they tried to spend it all on Delhi's Vansh Bedi, only for the Super Kings to thwart those plans. They settled for the more experienced Sachin Baby as their 20th and final signing.

Had the Super Giants capped the bid on Pant at ₹23 crore and succeeded, for instance, the balance would have come in handy for another first-choice target. Likewise with CSK and the Noor Ahmad bid. It's all wonderful in hindsight considering it could have been a different story altogether had the teams not succeeded in acquiring the players in question.

The auction dynamics in all its glory. A lot of ifs and buts, questions and answers, and not one team that is wholly satiated. The retention rules left a major role in the pockets of a few teams who were willing to take the plunge. It meant that the bench strength of those teams - SRH and Rajasthan Royals (RR) - has left plenty to be desired. But it is a chance they've chosen to take for the upcoming season with wafer-thin squads (20 players each) and pinned hopes on their first XII to get through the season unscathed.

As for the others, a more aggressive approach with the RTM by certain teams (RCB and PBKS) may have given them the possibility to look at other first-choice preferences had they bought some of the players they eventually did buy, at a lower price. But that too, is down to a lot of 'what ifs'.

With squad sizes considerably being trimmed down though, it meant that Indian backups had to take foremost priority. A lower base price for the uncapped Indian players - a lot of them having listed themselves at ₹30 lakh) certainly helped too. Only 15 overseas players were available in the ₹50 lakh category or lower. Two of them landed deals as the little-known Eshan Malinga and Bevon John Jacobs were acquired by SRH and MI respectively.

Just maybe, a direct RTM without the provision for revising the bid could have seen teams have a little more to spend on their primary targets and fill up their overseas rosters. But it's just a presumption at this point even as it can be safely said that the rule did throw teams off guard and forced them to strategize accordingly.

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Should unsold players be allowed to reduce their base price?

The IPL 2025 Auction wasn't the first where high-profile names failed to attract takers and it won't be the last either. Let's get that out of the way.

Yet, the thought of Shardul Thakur going unsold is a shocker, to put it mildly. A multi-utility cricketer, a World Cup squad member from 12 months ago, and a starter in his IPL teams for the last seven seasons were reasons enough for him to list himself at the highest base price category of ₹2 crore. Such is the uncertainty in an auction though that even a player of his stature met with a cruel fate.

An India regular last year, Shardul Thakur was shockingly unsold at the IPL 2025 Auction (Picture Credits: Getty).

Former cricketer and IPL stalwart Robin Uthappa, who was a panelist for the broadcasters Star and JioCinema, was of the suggestion that unsold players must be given the option of reducing their base price. A statement with a lot of merit in it, you'd think, for it gives those players a lease of life to get into a squad.

But again, it comes with another asterisk. What if teams decide to stack up on just enough funds and play the waiting game longer than usual to pick up two for the price of one after the base prices are reduced? It simply has to come with a rule then - a team picks no more than one player who has had his base price reduced and the revised base prices are applicable for the very last round of auction alone.

It gives teams another option to base their strategies around. But more importantly, it is still player-friendly since they get that last lease of life to be drafted into a roster which is precisely the objective they wish to tick. And if a particular player is of interest to a lot of franchises, chances are that he will get picked up earlier anyway.

The IPL 2025 Auction was no less of a spectacle. That's precisely why we see a mega auction every three or four years - it's hard to think of any other league carrying the kind of buzz and nervous uncertainty that the IPL does whenever the auctions swing by.

As mentioned earlier, auctions come with a lot of talking points. At the end of this one, we've only been left with greater food for thought. Teams deserve a greater incentive for continuity but considering that even that stance could conveniently change based on how they perform over the course of the three-year cycle, expect more mind-boggling possibilities in the auctions to come.