Venkatesh Iyer and the Most Expensive Mistake in the IPL

In the 2025 IPL mega auction, Kolkata Knight Riders paid 23.75 crore for Venkatesh Iyer. It was, at the time, among the largest sums ever spent on a single player in the competition's history, and it was spent on a batting all-rounder who had never made 500 runs in a season, had never been a settled member of India's international side, and whose four previous IPL campaigns ranged from very good to actively poor.

He made 142 runs in eleven matches in the season that followed, at a strike rate of 139.22. Kolkata released him ahead of the 2026 auction, where he was picked up by Royal Challengers Bengaluru for seven crore — a fee that is itself substantial and represents a reduction of roughly seventy per cent on what he had cost a year earlier.

There is a lazy version of this story in which Iyer is the punchline, and it is worth refusing. The interesting subject is not that a player failed to justify a price. It is that an auction system supposedly built on ruthless data-driven valuation produced a number that no reading of his record could support, and that the record itself — a series of good years and bad years in almost perfect alternation — was exactly the sort a franchise should have known how to read.

The record, season by season

The alternation is the whole story, so it is worth laying out plainly.

Season	Approximate output
2021	370 runs at an average around 41, strike rate near 129
2022	182 runs in 12 innings, average 16.54, strike rate 107.69
2023	404 runs in 14 matches, average 28.85, strike rate 145.84, one hundred
2024	370 runs, strike rate 158.80, in a title-winning side
2025	142 runs in 11 matches, strike rate 139.22

Iyer arrived in 2021 as a mid-season replacement and was immediately excellent — a left-handed opener with a compact method and enough power to clear the ropes straight, who played a real part in Kolkata's run to that year's final. He was retained ahead of 2022, which raised his salary roughly fortyfold to eight crore, and then had the worst season of his career: a strike rate of 107 for an opening batter is not a lean patch, it is a structural failure.

He recovered in 2023 with 404 runs and a century, and in 2024 he was a genuine contributor to a title-winning campaign at a strike rate near 159 — the best of his career, and the season that most obviously fed the 2025 valuation.

What the auction was actually valuing

Read that sequence and the pattern is not hard to see: Iyer is a good Twenty20 batter whose output is highly variable, who has never sustained two strong seasons in a row, and whose bowling — nominally the "all-rounder" half of the description — has contributed almost nothing at IPL level. He has taken very few wickets across his career. The medium pace exists as an option a captain rarely uses.

The 23.75 crore figure valued him as though the 2024 season were his baseline. It was in fact his ceiling, reached once, in a side that was winning comfortably around him. And it was reached by a player about whom the most reliable available prediction, based on four prior seasons, was regression.

There were structural reasons the number inflated. Mega auctions concentrate demand: every franchise rebuilds simultaneously, the pool of Indian batters who have performed at the top of an order is small, and the rules require a minimum number of Indian players. An Indian left-handed top-order batter who can bowl a bit and who had just won a title is exactly the profile that gets bid into orbit when eight teams need the same thing on the same afternoon. Kolkata had also released him and then bought him back, which meant they were bidding against the market rather than exercising a retention.

None of that makes the price defensible. It makes it explicable, which is a different and more useful thing, because it identifies a repeatable failure mode rather than a one-off error of judgement.

The India career that did not develop

Iyer's international window was open for roughly three months and then shut. He made his Twenty20 international debut against New Zealand in November 2021, on the back of that first Kolkata half-season, and his one-day debut against South Africa in January 2022. His last one-day appearance came two days after his first, and his last Twenty20 international was in February 2022 against Sri Lanka. That is the whole of it: a call-up earned by ten innings of good franchise form, and a handful of matches in which he did not do enough to keep the place.

The India selection panel of that period was cycling through candidates for a specific slot — the batting all-rounder who could cover for Hardik Pandya while he was managing a back injury — and Iyer was one of several tried and discarded. It was a real opportunity and a narrow one, and the reason it closed is the same reason the auction price later looked wrong: a player whose form arrives in bursts is very hard to select, because the selector has to guess which version is turning up.

What he did have was a substantial domestic record for Madhya Pradesh, and one season in particular deserves a mention because it shows the ability is real. In the 2021-22 Vijay Hazare Trophy he made 379 runs at better than 63 with a strike rate over 133, including a 151 — becoming the first batter in the competition's history to make 150 or more from number six or lower — and took nine wickets in six matches. That is a genuine all-round contribution, and it is the version of Iyer that franchises kept paying for.

The reason is the same as the reason the IPL price was wrong. A player whose good seasons are genuinely good and whose bad seasons are genuinely bad is a difficult selection at international level, where the sample of matches available to prove yourself is small and the cost of a poor run is a place. Selectors and franchises both need consistency more than they need a high ceiling, and consistency is the one thing Iyer's record has never shown.

Where the criticism should stop

It is worth being clear about what Iyer is, because the size of the number has distorted his reputation in a way that is not fair to the cricketer.

He is a competent professional Twenty20 batter with over 1,600 IPL runs, two seasons above 370, one century, a role in a losing finalist and a title-winning side, and a first-class record for Madhya Pradesh that is respectable. That is a real career, and the great majority of players who enter the IPL never assemble one like it. He did not set his own price. He was, in the most literal sense, the object of somebody else's decision.

The comparison worth drawing is with Prabhsimran Singh, retained by Punjab Kings at a fraction of Iyer's fee at the same auction and productive across the two seasons that followed. Both were bets on Indian top-order batters with incomplete records. One was a modest bet on a rising player, and one was a very large bet on a player whose best season had just happened. The first kind of bet is how franchises build sides; the second is how they lose flexibility for three years.

What the case leaves behind

The IPL auction is often described as a market that prices talent efficiently, and over long periods it broadly does. What it prices badly, repeatedly and predictably, is recency. A player coming off his best season in a title-winning team is systematically overvalued, and a player coming off a poor season with a good career behind him is systematically undervalued, because the room is bidding on what it watched most recently rather than on the whole record.

Iyer's 23.75 crore is the cleanest available example, and its clarity is useful. His record contained everything needed to price him correctly — five seasons, an obvious pattern of alternation, a bowling contribution close to zero, no international foothold — and the market read one line of it.

He is now at Bengaluru, at a price closer to his true value, with a chance to do what he has never done and produce two good years consecutively. If he manages it, the 2026 season onwards will look like a franchise buying low on a player the market had over-corrected against, which would be the same mistake running in the opposite direction.