Kochi Auction: 150 Names, 27 Seats, and a Ledger of INR 8.15 Crore

On Tuesday night there were five columns on my desk and not one of them carried a player's name. Team. Purse remaining. Slots open. How many of those are overseas. And the fifth, the one I build myself before every auction: the average price per seat. Those five columns are my entire map for the Women's Premier League 2027 auction in Kochi on Wednesday, October 28, and the most surprising fact in them is not about a cricketer. It is that only 27 seats will be filled in the whole room. The shortlist has grown from 146 to 150 with the addition of New Zealand left-arm medium pacer Bree Illing and three uncapped Indians: Delhi legspinners Medhavi Bidhuri and Samaira Raghav, who also bats in the lower order, and Uttar Pradesh left-arm medium pacer Avanya Jain. One hundred and fifty names, twenty-seven seats. Five and a half names for every seat. I have been reading scorecards for fifty years, and a scorecard habit follows me to auction desks: add the totals first, then read the margins. 150 is a round number. Round numbers come from an edit, not from a discovery. 27 is not round, which is why I treat it as the truth. The purse lines are where the imbalance sits. UP Warriorz hold INR 3.75 crore for eight slots, three of them overseas, an average of about 46.9 lakh per seat. Gujarat Giants hold INR 1.25 crore for three slots, roughly 41.7 lakh each. Royal Challengers Bengaluru hold INR 1.15 crore for five slots, 23 lakh each. Delhi Capitals hold INR 1.10 crore for five slots including one overseas vacancy, 22 lakh each. Mumbai Indians hold the smallest purse in the room, INR 90 lakh, for six slots, all Indian, at 15 lakh each. Add the column: INR 8.15 crore across 27 seats, or 30.19 lakh per seat if every rupee is spent. Averages lie in this room, because 46 per cent of all the money sits with one franchise. The other four hold INR 4.40 crore between them for 19 seats, an average of 23.16 lakh. UP Warriorz have the highest average and the hardest job. Three overseas vacancies plus eight seats means one wrong bid can break the whole sheet. I learned that at the 2026 mega auction, sitting as Royal Challengers Bangalore's first full-time analyst with a valuation sheet that ranked a lesser-known overseas all-rounder above the marquee name the franchise bought for USD 1.6 million. That team reached the final and lost by 58 runs. Mumbai Indians look like the weakest position and are, on my sheet, the easiest brief. The uncapped Indian pool is the deepest part of any WPL shortlist; MI are shopping only there. At 15 lakh a seat they are buying at replacement level, and replacement level is where supply is thickest. Gujarat Giants sit at the other end: 41.7 lakh a seat but only three seats. Three signings repair a squad, they do not rebuild one. Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Delhi Capitals are nearly identical at 23 and 22 lakh per seat, five slots each, with Delhi holding one overseas vacancy. Twenty-seven seats against 150 names means 123 players, 82 per cent of the pool, likely go unsold. That is the number the headlines are missing. Bree Illing's addition does not move the auction; a single name neither creates nor relieves a scarcity. The overseas arithmetic is more interesting and the brief is silent on part of it: only four overseas vacancies are explicitly declared — three at UP Warriorz, one at Delhi Capitals — with 15 Indian slots confirmed and eight slots, at Gujarat Giants and Royal Challengers Bengaluru, unspecified. I log that silence as an entry, not an absence. Anyone claiming overseas demand is low is reading eight unexplained slots as a demand figure. Delhi Capitals have finished runners-up in all four editions and hold INR 1.10 crore. The tempting story is that a small purse explains four lost finals. A purse is the residue of retention, not a measure of squad strength; it proves a team has already spent, not that it has nothing worth spending on. The finals were decided on the field. What this data cannot show: base prices, which turn every per-seat average into a ceiling rather than a floor; domestic season numbers for the three uncapped Indians; the overseas composition at Gujarat Giants and Royal Challengers Bengaluru; and injury status, without which no valuation is complete. On Wednesday I will log three things. Which category UP Warriorz bid on first — if they spend big on three names, the 46.9 lakh average becomes an illusion. Whether Mumbai Indians buy six with 90 lakh or four. And when the first overseas pace option goes under the hammer, because that hour will set Bree Illing's price, and that price will be the five franchises' honest opinion, not hers.