Two new IPL teams to be from Chennai and Rajasthan, ten players will be signed up directly

Two new IPL teams to be from Chennai and Rajasthan, ten players will be signed up directly: The Board of Control for Cricket in Indian (BCCI) meeting with Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise owners started on a note where there were lots of questions glooming around. Will the IPL be an 8-team league? Will they introduce two new teams? What will be the future of the players? Will they be put in the pool for an open auction? Will the IPL be a 10-team league after CSK and RR are back?

If a report by the ESPNcricinfo is to be believed, the league is going to have 8 teams in the coming two years and the structure will be the same at least until 2017. The BCCI officials Rajiv Shukla (IPL chairman), Anurag Thakur (BCCI secretary) and Sundar Raman (IPL COO) who conducted the meeting also told the franchises that ten players from the two suspended teams will be available to be picked by the two new teams for the coming two years and rest of the 40 players can be picked up at the auction. At the same time, the original rule of allowing only 4 capped Indian players to be drafted in a team will continue to hold for the new teams as well.

BCCI in its meeting on October 16 had decided to take bids for the two new teams which can be from any Indian city apart from the six that already exist. The Board is expected to finalize the bid formalities and procedures by November 9 and the allotment decision will be taken in the Annual General Meeting on that day.

A franchise official who attended the meeting told ESPNcricinfo, that there is a heavy chance that the two new teams will be from Chennai and Jaipur since that is an already established fan base and the freshly drafted teams would want to enjoy the existing hype of both the teams. “It is logical [to include Chennai and Jaipur] because this arrangement is only for two years. It is a bit of the incentive for the two new temporary teams because the fan base is already established in these two cities.”

Since there were reports that the IPL will have ten teams once the two teams come back, it had given rise to some distress among the existing franchises and they pointed it out to the Board that he change in structure will impact their team valuation. A franchise official said, “If somebody buys the new team for $100 million then that becomes the benchmark. In IPL there has never been a benchmark. So if in 2018 the IPL decides to stick to ten teams, then the new benchmark would be $100 million, around which the rest of us would need to hover,”

Five players each from #CSK & #RR will be allowed to be picked by the two new franchises for the next two seasons of the #IPL. #BCCI

— Freddie Wilde (@fwildecricket) October 29, 2015

The ten players will be picked through a draft system with the remaining players going into the auction. #BCCI #IPL #CSK #RR

— Freddie Wilde (@fwildecricket) October 29, 2015