IPL stars

Now that we know who owns the IPL teams, it is time to find out just who will grab the big name players and how much of a hole will the big names burn in the pockets of their franchise owners.

The tournament runs for a month and a half and CNN-IBN has learnt that the teams will have to fork out quite a handy sum to get these big name players.

Iconic players like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahuld Dravid, Yuvraj Singh and Sourav Ganguly will cost at least 400,000 US dollars each, that's about 1.6 crore rupees for each year. MS Dhoni will cost about the same.

Anil Kumble may not play the shorter version of the game for India anymore but whoever snaps him up will have to pay a neat 250,000 dollars. Harbhajan Singh will cost the same. Irfan Pathan will be cheaper but only by 75,000 dollars.

Surprisingly, Kumble may be more expensive for a team to acquire than the stars of India's Twenty20 world cup winning team.

Robin Uthappa, Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag will cost at least 200,000 dollars each, that's about 80 lakh rupees.

But that still leaves one question unanswered. While some players like Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and Yuvraj have to play for their home franchises, who wants the others?

M S Dhoni, sources say, is being wooed by both Shah Rukh Khan for his Kolkata team and Mukesh Ambani for his Mumbai team. Robin Uthappa is on the radar of Vijay Mallaya's Bangalore team and Deccan Chronicle's Hyderabad team. And Preity Zinta is keen on getting Sreesanth to play for Mohali. Not surprisingly, the franchise owners aren't revealing their plans.

Vijay Rekhi, MD, United Spirits says: "We have already made a tentative list which has been about broadly. But that's a wish list, you know. Ultimately we have to decide after the availability of the players is known to us. "

Teams will have about 3.3 million dollars each to buy these players. The auction will take place sometime in the third week of February.

Courtesy : Yahoo news