PKL Auction: Expensive Raiders, Cheap Defenders — and the Mistake Every Franchise Keeps Repeating

The evening the paddles went up and a raider's price crossed ₹2.26 crore, I had three columns open on my laptop — last season's total raid points, raid success percentage, and success rate on do-or-die raids. The number on the television screen and the number in the third column did not belong to the same player. That night I added a fourth column to my file: price per successful raid. The most expensive man in the hall was outside the top ten on it.

This was not one bad buy. This was a market designed to produce exactly that result. The PKL auction hall is Indian sport's most transparent transfer window — every bid on camera, every price public, every franchise working inside a fixed purse. With that much information in the open, the same error still gets repeated every season: money goes to the number that is easy to count, not to the number that wins matches.

I picked up that habit in 2026. Across a fortnight at the Under-17 World Cup final at Kolkata's Salt Lake Stadium, I counted school buses instead of goals. I counted all 66,684 seats before I watched a single minute of football. That exercise taught me the one thing that runs through every kabaddi piece I file — behind every announced figure there is a receipt, and nobody is going to hand you that receipt. Since that fortnight, every claim in my folder has a screenshot, a sheet, and a date under it.

In kabaddi the habit matters more, because the sport has an abundance of data and almost no cleaning. Television graphics will show you raid points, tackle points, Super 10s. They will not show you at what score those raid points were scored, against which defender, and whether the team was chasing a deficit or cruising. After hand-coding five seasons of broadcast footage, I have exactly one conclusion, and it is uncomfortable.

First, the context that every auction preview skips. The PKL has no football-style transfer market — no club fees, no loans, no agent-driven back channels. Everything is settled on one day, on one stage. Franchises have retention options, player cards, and the most powerful instrument of all: the Final Bid Match card, which lets a player's original team match the highest bid on a released player.

That card bends the entire economics of the auction, and it is my first hard finding. Because the Final Bid Match card makes bidding free for the team holding the right to match, that team deliberately pushes prices up — if the hammer falls on its own player it gets him back, and if a rival buys him, the rival's purse has been hollowed out. Across the last three auctions, a large share of the players who attracted the most bidding had a Final Bid Match team sitting in the war until the end, with the player eventually going elsewhere. That was not bidding. That was a tax.

The structural consequence is direct: at auction, price stops being a measure of a player's value and becomes a measure of how much damage one franchise can do to another's purse. When you see ₹1.45 crore or ₹1.15 crore on the screen, you are not looking at a player's worth. You are looking at the strategy between two franchises.

Now the data that actually stings. From five seasons of broadcast, I hand-coded every raid by 58 raiders — more than 11,000 raids, three tags on each: score situation, number of defenders on court, and outcome. Three things fell out of that sheet.

One: auction price is strongly associated with last season's total raid points and almost unrelated to raid success percentage. The market buys what is easily counted. A raider on 42 per cent success will still reach 300 points if he is his team's first option and gets the most raids. Total points measure opportunity, not ability. The Super 10 is the most expensive statistic in kabaddi and the least informative.

Two: success rate on do-or-die raids predicts playoff wins better than total raid points. In my sheet, raiders above 55 per cent on do-or-die raids had teams with visibly better playoff records, even where their totals were modest. The man who racks up 320 points but collapses to 48 per cent on the third empty raid looks like a golden egg at auction and like an ordinary player in a knockout. Franchise scouting departments look at totals because totals are easy. Nobody pins a do-or-die column on the board.

Three, and the one that surprised me: on price per successful raid, the cheapest buy in the room is always a defender. When I hand-coded 63 per cent of Iranian tackles as ankle holds and dashes rather than the chain tackles Indian coaches drill, I thought I was explaining a defeat. I later realised I was also looking at kabaddi's largest pricing gap. A corner defender who produces 70 tackle points in a season goes for a quarter of the price of a raider who produces 200 raid points. A tackle point stops the opposition's raid — it creates one point and denies another, working on both sides of the ledger. A raid point works on one side only.

There is a further layer that gets skipped. The bonus line and the running hand touch rewrote raiding, and auction valuation has not caught up. When a raider adds points off the bonus line, he is scoring at low risk — and those points make him expensive, even if he does nothing in the last five seconds of the thirty-second clock. In my sheet, raiders whose bonus points exceeded 20 per cent of their total had a far higher price per raid point than average and a below-average playoff contribution. The market pays a premium for low-risk points. Titles are won with high-risk ones.

I know exactly where my file is blind, and hiding it would be dishonest. My entire dataset is built from PKL broadcast. It contains none of the players who play circle-style kabaddi, none of the men whose fields are village akhadas and who have no camera footage. The biggest absence is women's kabaddi — four Asian Games golds, no franchise league, and therefore not one row in my sheet. On a sport where half the body sits outside the spreadsheet, I repeat one line every week: the argument was never about the seats. It was about who gets to count.

Now the part where I could be wrong, which I am writing as a hypothesis rather than a weakness.

My entire case rests on the assumption that the auction is a performance market — that teams buy players to win. That may be false. A PKL franchise's real product is not a trophy; it is a full stand in Patna or Jaipur. If that is the case, the ₹2 crore raider is worth his price, because he pulls eight thousand people through the gate and his name has been on the graphics for eight years. My price-per-successful-raid metric cannot see any of that value, because I do not hold the ticket-sales or jersey-sales data. If the market is buying a brand and I am appraising it as a player, my entire complaint is a category error.

The stronger counterargument is this: defenders are cheap because defence is a system, not an individual. You cannot buy a tackle system at auction — cover, assist, corner partnerships, all of it is built in coaching camps and months of playing together. So my advice to spend big on defenders may invert on contact, because the system that defender fits into is never for sale. A raider, by contrast, can play alone. A good raid is individual skill, less dependent on structure. Perhaps that is precisely why the market puts its money on raiders, and perhaps the market is wiser than I am.

The third doubt is mine. Every season I find one statistic that proves my old argument, and then I make that statistic the whole case. I have a sheet of 11,000 raids and for this piece I selected perhaps twelve rows from it. That selection is as much a part of my bias as any number in it.

Even so, I am registering the prediction, because a prediction is the only thing that can be checked later.

At the next auction, the three most expensive players will be raiders. At least two of them will fail to produce the raid points their price implies — and their teams will blame the defence, when the cause was a decision taken on auction day. The first franchise to spend its two highest bids on defenders and all-rounders will reach the final twice in three seasons. My defeat has exactly one condition: the day a defender tops an auction, this whole thesis dies. I will write that correction myself, without waiting to be asked.

The channel died, and that is a separate story. But those 214 calls and this sheet are still the best thing I ever did — because when nobody hands you the data, you count. The next PKL auction camera will show what it always shows: a finger, a paddle, a price. The question is whether any franchise this time will measure that price in tackles instead of raid points.

On the day that happens, kabaddi's market will move closer to the actual sport for the first time. Until then, ask one question of every bid: which list is this money following — and where does a defender sit on that list?