WINDFALL FOR PLAYERS AS BCCI HIKES FEES
MS DHONI, R ASHWIN NOT IN ELITE LIST
NEWDELHI: The India team skipper Virat Kohli and other top players got their long-standing demand of an increase in their central contract money as the Committee of Administrators (CoA)-led BCCI decided to give them a massive hike. The central contracts list, however, doesn’t include Mohammed Shami, whose wife has made allegations of infidelity against him.
The Board created a new grade – A+, with five players in it. These players will get R7 crore as their annual retainership. Then, there are seven player in Grade A who will get R5 crore.
While Grade A+ includes allformat players like skipper Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Shikhar Dhawan and Jasprit Bumrah, who played all formats in South Africa, Grade A includes senior pro MS Dhoni, who plays ODIS and T20s along with Test players like R Ashwin, Ajinkya Rahane, Murali Vijay, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ravindra Jadeja and Wriddhiman Saha.
It should be noted that retainership amount for the top Grade – ‘A’ -- was R2 crore.
Speaking to Hindustan Times, CoA head Vinod Rai said, “In any corporate structure, the pyramid is sharp at the top with only a handful getting huge money. But what we wanted was that the pyramid should be flat at the top with as many players. So, now we have two top grades – A+ and A, with both including 12 players together. I was impressed by India captain Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni, Rohit Sharma and Ravi Shastri with whom I met twice in Delhi. They wanted an increment mainly for mid-level players as they don’t have sponsorship etc.”
The deliberations between players and the CoA have been going on since last year with former coach Anil Kumble too meeting Rai. Rai added that the state associations used to corner 70% of the revenues and it was time the top players, the real stakeholders, got a bigger share.
The money required to pay out these top stars, however, will be taken out from the IPL revenues. The Board is creating a Players Payment Fund, a R122-crore corpus from out of IPL revenues. This decision is likely to be contested by Board officials, who feel it is ill-timed and more of public relations exercise. They say that the media rights auction is just 20 days away and the Board would have known soon what revenue it’ll get for the next four years.
“If they would have waited for 20 days and known what kind of money BCCI will get through media rights, the true picture of revenues would have emerged and then they could have proceeded accordingly,” said an official who is not authorised to speak on behalf of BCCI. “We have no issues in giving extra money to players who have no IPL contracts like Cheteshwar Pujara.”
Meanwhile, Board officials have confirmed that they wanted to keep Shami out as it would have sent out a wrong message on a day serious allegations were made against him.