Increase in players' salaries may affect IPL revenues or State bodies' share

The Supreme Court appointed Committee of Administrators (CoA) announced the central contracts for the Indian cricketers on the behalf of the Indian boards recently. The players were awarded the significant pay hikes compared to their previous payments as the Indian skipper Virat Kohli had raised concerns over the same. However, CoA head Vinod Rai believes that these increased salaries of players might eat either into IPL revenues or the share of State Associations.

The new contracts saw the introduction of A+ pay grade who will be paid a whopping amount of Rs. 7 Crores. The likes of Virat Kohli, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jasprit Bumrah, Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma are included in the newly introduced grade who play across all formats for the country. MS Dhoni stayed in A grade list and will also earn Rs 5 Crores which is also a huge amount.

Rai explains

The head of CoA Vinod Rai explained the reason for introducing the new grade. “In any corporate structure, the pyramid is sharp at the top with only a handful getting huge money. But what we wanted was that the pyramid should be flat at the top with as many players. So, now we have two top grades – A+ and A, with both including 12 players together,” he was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.

He also added the State associations corner around 70 percent of the revenues and it was the time that the top players deserved their fair share who are the real stakeholders. The board is also thinking of creating a Players’ Payment Fund which would be Rs. 122 Crore corpus from out of IPL revenues. “This is one of the models that was discussed but ideally we wouldn’t want to touch IPL revenues,” Rai added.

Interestingly, the retainership amount has been increased significantly from Rs.31 crore in last contract to Rs.98 crore this time around.