Measuring the Value of Cricket Players

Journal: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics

Sports franchises that participate in team sports can make better decisions regarding their players’ financial compensation, renewal of the contracts, etc. if they can adequately assess

the value or worth of their players. Evaluating the value of a player in a team sport is difficult because various members of the team play different roles.

In this study, the researchers resolve this by measuring the value of a player in terms of how his inclusion in the team affects the team’s probability of winning. With this notion of the value, they develop a technique to measure the worth of a cricket player for his franchise. A player is perceived to be valuable if his performance is critical for the team’s victory. In other words, the exclusion or inclusion of a highly valuable player in the team substantially reduces or improves the probability of the team’s success. Also, a good player is much more valuable to the franchise if he cannot be substituted by another nearly good player. Thus, the value of a player is intrinsically defined in the context of the team or squad he belongs to. In their study, they propose a methodology to quantify the value of a cricket player for his team when the value is perceived in this manner.

To illustrate this technique, they evaluate the value of cricket players who play in the Indian Premier League (IPL). They also study the relationship between players’ values and their salaries. They find that a few popular players earn disproportionately more than others. This disproportionality in the income of popular players cannot be justified by their performance alone as adjudged by their value in this work. They attribute the disproportionality in the income to possible leadership and/or brand-value.