145 Strike Rate, Two Prices: The Format Confusion Inside Asia's Franchise Market

One sheet of paper, three columns for the same batter — Test, ODI, T20. Placed side by side, the numbers stop recognising each other. An average of 38 in Tests, a strike rate of 145 in ODIs, and that same strike rate sliding into the 130s in T20. At a January retention meeting or a February draft table, those three columns routinely collapse into one, and the price is set from the collapsed column.

From the Sharjah and Dubai stands, where I have spent years covering franchise cricket, the shortage is not talent. The shortage sits elsewhere. Asia's franchise market does not suffer from an information deficit; it suffers from a format-discipline deficit — the discipline of remembering which number belongs to which format. Who ends up paying for that lost discipline is the accounting question here.

The first ledger I built at eighteen taught me that every fee has a deadline. The size of the fee changes; the deadline does not. In franchise cricket, that deadline is called January.

Context: January to May, one continuous knife

The ILT20 runs through January and February with six teams in the United Arab Emirates, under the Emirates Cricket Board. SA20 runs in South Africa at the same time, the BPL in Bangladesh. The PSL takes February and March, the IPL runs from March into May. The LPL sits in December and January, the Abu Dhabi T10 in November and December, and the Nepal Premier League has joined the queue in recent years. For the first five months of the year, the Asian market is under one continuous knife, and every league door opens for the same finite pool of players.

That calendar has a geographic centre, and it is Dubai. From here, the South Asian, Middle Eastern and African time zones are all reachable in one working day; a large share of the agents, scouts and league officials run their busiest stretch of the year out of this city. The UAE is not merely a league host. It is the brokerage desk of the market.

That finite pool is the real market. The NOC system is decisive here. A centrally contracted player needs permission from his home board, and boards generally do not grant it during their domestic first-class season. The choice in front of the player is rarely simple: six weeks abroad in January, or the red-ball domestic season that keeps the national team door open.

Squad construction is the least discussed part of the equation. A franchise carries sixteen to twenty players inside a salary cap. A death-overs bowler, a left-arm wrist spinner, a wicketkeeper who opens — supply in these three roles has been thin for years. Demand is fixed, supply is not. Price is built in that gap, not in form.

The local quota sharpens the shortage further. Every league reserves a fixed number of places for domestic or associate-nation players, and the franchise sample on those players is even smaller — sometimes one season, sometimes a handful of matches. Demand for the reserved seats is fixed; the eligible list is short. The price is set on fear of scarcity, not on evidence.

Core analysis: one number, three meanings

Take a batter with an ODI strike rate of 145. In fifty-over cricket that is top tier. The same 145 in T20 is good, not top tier — the queue of openers striking above 150 in modern franchise cricket keeps getting longer. Take a bowler with an economy of 8.5. At the T20 death that is acceptable, through an ODI middle phase it is expensive, and in Test cricket the figure carries no meaning at all. An average of 38 is a solid Test foundation and close to irrelevant in T20.

Without separating formats, the entire pricing exercise answers the wrong question — and the answer to the wrong question always sounds confident.

Where that error concentrates can be mapped. Nobody pays Rashid Khan for his reputation as a spinner; the price attaches to a specific role — leg-spin in the powerplay and middle overs, plus the ability to bat at eight. The number of bowlers in Asia who can do all three at once is countable on two hands. The argument that has followed Mohammad Rizwan for years is not a form argument but a format argument — his value as a wicketkeeper-opener sits in one place in Tests and ODIs, and runs on a different ledger in T20. Sunil Narine's choice to step away from international cricket and specialise is another example of the same logic: his market value is a T20-specific value, not an all-format one.

The age curve behaves differently by format too. A Test batter's most valuable years run from 27 to 34; in T20 franchise cricket the richest window is 28 to 33, because experience and the absence of national-team workload arrive together. After 35 the price falls sharply, and it falls because of fielding cost and workload, not because of strike rate.

Cap arithmetic decides the rest. A simple illustration: if a quarter of a franchise budget goes to one player, the remaining three quarters must buy four bowlers and three finishers. Follow the amortization, not the headline fee — the annual cost of a three-year deal fights the cap, not the total figure in the headline. The franchise that does this sum first is the one standing at the end of the window with a spare bowler while everyone else is short.

The IPL's Impact Player rule added a new layer. The second skill of an all-rounder became more valuable because he no longer has to bowl. The reverse is equally true: a player with two middling skills has lost ground. Change the rule and the price of a role changes; most auction lists, however, are still built on pre-rule prices.

Contrarian angle: the blind spot of the 'data-driven' market

The official narrative is simple: the auction is now data-driven, therefore efficient. The problem is that the data itself is format-blended. Seventy off forty balls in a tournament final gets priced without comparison against three different benchmarks in three different formats. Sample size is small as well — across a league season a middle-order batter may play twelve to fourteen innings, three of them good. Those three grow largest in the scout's notebook.

In football, xG is now used to explain decisions it cannot explain. In cricket, strike rate without a format tag has taken exactly that seat. The number is precise; the question is wrong.

The sentence the commercial side of this market would hate to read needs writing anyway: a large share of the auction premium in these leagues is not a talent premium, it is a liquidity premium. The player who is available now, whose NOC exists now, who will move into a hotel and be match-ready in two weeks, gets bid up. Form is the second question. Availability is the first.

The least valued variable in this market is not financial. Relocating a family for six weeks, moving hotel to hotel, losing the preparation block for a Test series — none of that appears on a ledger. If a fast bowler throws down forty overs across two leagues in six weeks in January, his body presents the invoice in April. For a player without the security of a central contract, that risk is large relative to his income. I list this separately in every valuation as a non-financial variable, because leaving it out leaves the sum incomplete.

Next move

If, in the next January retention cycle, at least one franchise does not publish a squad built on format-split benchmarks — T20-only sample strike rates, role-specific benchmarks — then the market is still pricing reputation, not performance. The verification condition is simple: if the middle-order batters that franchise buys fall below league-average strike rate across the first three months after the auction or draft, the error was not in the format. It was in the scouting.

After Russia 2026, I stopped trusting tournament highlights and started pricing context. In Asia's franchise market that lesson applies more harshly, because the product here is not one asset but three — the same player is three separate assets in three formats. The franchise that can tell those three apart before January is the one ahead of the rest of the market by the following May.