"IPL Auctions are a fantastic ride down an untamed river": Charu Sharma

The IPL Auctions 2022 were held in Bengaluru earlier this month, with media veteran Charu Sharma having to step in to provide unscripted drama after a the main auctioneer suffered a medical emergency.

In an exclusive and freewheeling phone conversation, Mr. Sharma shared his in-depth thoughts on the continued relevance of IPL auctions, the possibility of a longer-duration IPL season, advice to young sportscasters, and the ongoing pro league developments in Indian volleyball.

1) Your first thoughts on the IPL auctions?

A lot of people initially misunderstood [the purpose of IPL auctions] and [wondered] how people can be auctioned like cattle. But [the auction] is just a reasonably intelligent way of spreading players between teams with equal purses. It doesn’t exist in too many leagues, but in India, it has become a bit of a norm, and it is not such a bad thing either.

Normally, when a league matures, there is no more auction.

The IPL is still, in a sense, immature… It is still adding teams. It was because of the fact that two new teams were added that an auction was necessary.

[IPL Auctions] become a ‘wild river’ because you never know who goes to whom, who is fighting hard for whom, and who ignores whom. It’s a fantastic ride down an untamed river… And that’s the fun of it!

2) So are you predicting that the IPL auctions will eventually be discontinued?

Already, the contracts are offered for three years. It would seem to me that they will go in for a hybrid model of collecting players for each team until they are mature. Now maturity means: do you have as many teams as you can possibly have? Full stop!

Will the IPL ever go the EPL way? Will it go for 9-10 months of the year? Probably not.

I think they have already hit the ceiling in terms of their window. They’ve expanded their rubber band to the maximum of 2-2.5 months. After that, the cricketers are so busy, there’s so much bilateral play, there are World Cups, all sorts of tournaments… There is so much else going on in the world of cricket that you can’t have an expanded IPL for four, five, six, seven, eight, nine months, can you?

Because of the timeframe remaining limited, it is entirely possible that the IPL may, at best, go to 12 teams.

That one threshold [in terms of number of teams] is still needed to be crossed. Will it be crossed in another two years or 10 years, we don’t know… [It’ll be] whenever the IPL thinks so. Of course, they’ll have to change the format as well, because you can’t have every team competing against everybody else. They’ll probably go to groups and shorten the whole thing and yet have the same amount of competition.

So if they mature at 10 [teams]…if they don’t want any more teams ever, then I think this whole IPL auction business will gradually go away. As the League gets mature, they will take players on long-term contracts, they will trade players… They will do exactly what other mature leagues do. And if they need to take new players, the younger players, maybe there’ll be a draft system.

It’s an amalgamation of [the approach of] all the mature leagues around the world… The NFL, the NBA has drafts. They have long-term contracts and they have drafts for the new players. The drafts are there primarily to benefit the teams that are not doing too well. So [these teams] have the first picks in the draft to be able to get some really good, new players.

None of the other mature international leagues have an auction because that is only necessary when you need to spread the players evenly at the beginning of a process. And with two new teams coming in [in the IPL] it was sort of like the beginning of a new process.

3) As the key promoter of the Pro Kabaddi League, what are your takeaways from the IPL auctions, and lessons/learnings for promoters in other sports leagues in India?

All the processes are similar. Players are collected. Players are offered. Teams have the same amount of money and they bid for one player or the other depending on their needs. In many of these team sports, there are positions, and you seek position-wise players.

Remember, Star (TV Network) was also involved with PKL, so they made sure that we always did have a very sophisticated environment and it’s been televised as well. In a sense, there were no differences except for the number of zeros!

4) You’ve answered this question already, but considering the skyrocketing IPL salaries, from a financial standpoint, won’t a longer duration league give more value for money to the franchise – to have players available for 6-9 months a year?

Well, the teams would love to have a 19-month-year! (laughs)

But [a longer duration league] is not going to happen, because cricket will have to change MASSIVELY. All these bilateral tours will have to end. All the many World Cups, the T20s, the T15s, Test Championships and Test Matches… All of that will have to end if the IPL and IPL only is going to go on for 9-10 months.

Remember, there are many other country leagues as well, the BBL, CPL, PSL, etc. How will they get time to play? Where will the players come from?

Cricket, in a sense, is in a different situation from many of the mature leagues around the world, which are very extendable.

IPL will have to stick to this window (of 2-2.5 months) because even this window is not sacrosanct. The ICC gives it a fair amount of importance because of the BCCI’s importance. But many other countries don’t. They organize tours during the IPL.

5) So you don’t foresee a longer-duration IPL even thirty years down the line?

No. Thirty years [from now], maybe there’ll be no Test matches. But there will still be a lot of inter-country cricket, because even that has to grow a lot. Only 10, 12, 14 countries play [cricket at a high level]. If the sport has to grow, there needs to be at least 50 countries playing amongst each other. If everybody has to play against each other, how can you play only one league where only a certain set of players are involved?

6) Returning to the IPL auctions itself, as a media veteran, are you pleasantly surprised at the way the auction itself has developed into a standalone media property?

I’m nonplussed. I’m shocked… Pleasantly so for the IPL and everybody concerned with cricket.

By the way, let’s also be aware that a very large number of very developed countries don’t even know that there is something called IPL. So we see it [the IPL auction viewership numbers] in our own limited fashion of cricket-playing countries, and we see it primarily in India and maybe a little bit in Australia, England and 3-4 other countries.

But the numbers are still, with all humility, very small.

We are dependent [for viewership] on the very small number of countries that play cricket, who have players in the IPL and are looking forward to seeing whether their players make it to the IPL or not.

Of course, India is a very large country in itself. So yes, there is a very large viewership for the IPL auctions, which to my fabulously pleasant surprise, I found out. (smiles)

IPL Auctions' unexpected savior

7) The IPL auctions also provided unscripted drama, where you stepped up in a big way after the medical emergency of the auctioneer. How did that work out?

It was a little wild, wasn’t it? I was at home having lunch… I could have been anywhere because I do travel a lot. I would have been playing golf on a Saturday afternoon had it not been for my torn shoulder, and my phone would have been in the bag [on] silent and I never would have picked it up!

It was a series of very fortunate kinds of events: where I was home, I was free, I wasn’t playing anything else, the phone rang, Brijesh [Patel], (Chairman-IPL) called, he said, ‘can you come to the ITC Gardenia?’ I said ‘what for?’ He said, ‘we had a little incident with the IPL auctions’.

Brijesh, of course, is not only a friend, but he has seen me do plenty of auctions in the Karnataka Premier League, which I’d kind of designed and started. I’ve done a lot of functions at the KSCA (Karnataka State Cricket Association). [So] I am glad that he remembered, because can you imagine the panic at that time… The thought process, and everybody panicking saying ‘what’s going on’? He and even Santosh Menon my good friend from the KSCA, must have consulted and said ‘why don’t we get him, if he is available?’

So I ditched my lunch, went up, put a suit on and ran, ya!

8) The situation highlighted the need for emcees and hosts to make adjustments on their feet and think on the fly. Did your decades of experience give you the confidence to pull it off?

Not only sports and cricket but I am also a regular auctioneer for a company in Bangalore called Din & Hammer. I’ve done many auctions for them in the past for art, rare books and whatever else auctions are held for. The last few years, auction houses have stepped back a bit because it’s all on the internet now, largely, so I haven’t done much. But I am with them, and I have done a fair number of auctions which are live in front of a small, select audience, as you can imagine. It’s not televised or not in front of millions [like the IPL auctions], but the concept is the same.

"Auctioneer" is one of the many things I am.

9) That brings me to my next question. This ability of yours to step into different roles and execute as if you have been doing it for years (which you have): what’s your advice to young professional sportscasters today?

Opportunities are so few in our country that my heart breaks for so many people who want to be a sportscaster.

Of course, [there are] many more opportunities now than say 10 years ago, and certainly 20 or 30 years ago. So they [opportunities] are improving, but they are still very, very limited here.

So many people love sport because it is such a barrier breaker. But in terms of opportunities, (un)like developed countries, we don’t have a big pyramid. There’s a national/international channel, then many other channels below, and then city channels of sport, and little leagues, and what have you...

But in India, we have only at the very top… And then nothing!

Luckily, there’s some language commentary now because of the fact that India is a multilingual country.

But what would be my advice?

One would be [to know] that anything you do which involves communication involves language. I would seriously, as I always do, recommend to those who wish to be in the business of communication, to please pay attention to the language they wish to speak in. It could be anything. It could be Oriya, it could be Rajasthani, Malayalam, English, Hindi… But we really need to understand that that [language] is our biggest tool of the trade.

So all those people who wish to be in a communicational space… I’m not even talking about sports commentary, probably need to pay a lot more attention to the knowledge of the language they wish to speak in. Because language is like an ocean. It is endless.

So if we are going to be limited in that [mindset] that ‘oh yeah, I can speak’, then the improvement levels tend to sometimes stagnate. And as you know, anywhere you stagnate is dangerous for growth.

Just keep making a huge effort to speak better and better and better. Know more… vocabulary, phraseology, whatever… Pay attention to it!

A lot of people think they know the sport and of course, sport is not rocket science. Any sport you play a bit, you know yaar. You don’t have to be… Michael Jordan. That is not the difficult part. Of course, there are certain nuances, and it’s always nice to have played at a certain level, which I was lucky to, for many sports. But thereafter, it’s all language, and that is where a lot of people don’t pay enough attention. Only then, other things in terms of voice and modulation, jokes and sense of humour… All that’s minor [in comparison].

If the language is not there, you are suffering. You are cliché-written all the time, you say the same things all the time.

You have to consciously develop the ability to say [something] in 15-20 distinctly different ways. Then you know you can enter any situation… And because you know that situation somewhat and because you have a reasonable hold on the language… You hold your own, yaar.

10) I guess that’s what gives you the confidence to explore all these different types of roles within communication; it stems from your confidence in language…

Exactly! If you have the words for it, and if you have many words for it, then you are not likely to get stuck. And even if you do get stuck, you have the confidence to swing around it a bit and seek other ways to exit rather than drown in a boat…

11) It almost sounds like a lawyer you know… same sort of wriggle room, or a politician… or a sportscaster, I guess!

(laughs) Oh please..ouch..that hurts!

12) On a final unrelated note: You must be following the developments in Indian volleyball. First, the decision by Baseline to launch a completely private league, followed by the Volleyball Federation now announcing its own league. Your thoughts on this ongoing saga?

The whole earlier part of the Pro Volleyball League was very unfortunate that it had to fold up because of a lack of clarity between the federation and Joy & Co (the organizers from Baseline). Now obviously, somewhere along the way, the relationships were a little awkward and the matter could not be resolved and it had to go to court. That’s just very unfortunate because it cast a very gloomy shadow on the whole sport and everything that surrounds the sport. So I felt very sorry that such a great effort for volleyball was lost in this problem between the federation and Joy & Co.

I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just saying it is very unfortunate.

But for them (Baseline) to come back and rise like a phoenix out of ashes… Brilliant ya! The fact that they got the support of all the players is also very new in our part of the world. Because a lot of players owe a lot to the federation and the local associations. They are loathe to play in any kind of private effort because then there’s revenge saying you can’t play this, we will not take you for that.

I do think professional leagues are the way to go in terms of creating a livelihood for players of a lot of sports in every part of the world. Federations need to give a helping hand. If the federations are not forward looking, if they are loathe to give up the so-called power of being the custodians of that particular sport… Then this partnership will never happen.

We were very fortunate that the Kabaddi Federation trusted me… Knew what we were doing and realized that we were not going against what they were doing. We were just assisting the sport to grow.

13) What Baseline is doing is a very bold experiment. PVL could be the first "private" league in India that succeeds without federation support…

Correct… Which will be a massive game changer in India if there are no repercussions. If all these players who are playing [in PVL] are allowed to play elsewhere…if all the overseas players are allowed in and overseas federations are happy to send their players to an Indian league which is "private"… Then I think the sky is the limit!