From the ODI World Cup to the WPL auction, Deepti Sharma is on a roll. Within a month of winning the Player of the Tournament trophy in India’s victorious ODI World Cup campaign, the spunky allrounder produced fireworks off the field, emerging as the most expensive player at this year’s WPL auction.
At a price tag of Rs 3.2 crore, the Agra-born player became the second-most expensive player in the history of the league—next only to her national colleague Smriti Mandhana, who was lapped up by Royal Challengers Bengaluru for Rs 3.4 crore in 2023. Sharma now shares the No. 2 spot with Australian all-rounder Ash Gardner and English captain Nat Sciver-Brunt.
Sharma’s maiden bid, at her base price of Rs 50 lakh, came from Delhi Capitals (DC)—it stayed uncontested for a few heartstopping minutes before UP Warriorz (UPW), her team for the first three seasons, played the RTM (Right To Match) card to bring her back. (An RTM card allows a player’s former franchise to match the highest bid and reclaim her.)
Power-packed performances are nothing new for Sharma. The 28-year-old is the first Indian woman to cross both 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in T20Is, and was named the Most Valuable Player (MVP) in WPL 2024. Yet she has always remained at the fringes of public conversation. The recent World Cup—where Sharma became the first ever cricketer to score 200 runs and take 20 wickets in a single edition—has changed that.
One of the biggest takeaways from India’s victory in the World Cup is the way it has broadened the narrative beyond established stars like Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, Jemimah Rodrigues and Shafali Verma (all of whom were retained by their respective franchises and weren’t part of the auction pool), and brought players like Sharma firmly into the spotlight, giving them better bargaining power at the auction table. “Deepti’s story will tell you how the World Cup win has impacted the auction,” says Kshemal Waingankar, the COO of Capri Sports that owns UPW. “Aside from Deepti, look at someone like Pratika Rawal, who was picked by us despite her injury. That’s because the World Cup showed the potential she possesses.”
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Rawal, who was signed on for Rs 50 lakh in an accelerated auction (an express round for targeted unsold players), was a standout batter in the World Cup, ending up fourth on the runs tally despite sitting out of both the semifinal and the final due to an injury.
“This WPL auction marks the definitive commercial graduation of women’s cricket. We are witnessing the ‘victory dividend’,” says Hemant Dua, CEO of the Seattle Orcas in the US’s Major League Cricket and the former CEO of Delhi Capitals. “The World Cup win has rewired franchise logic, creating a new economy where high demand for a limited number of Indian players dictates the price and value of international stars.” Sharma’s heroics, for example, have put her ahead of Kiwi Amelia Kerr (Rs 3 crore), the Player of the Tournament in the 2024 T20 World Cup, Sophie Devine (Rs 2 crore), who led New Zealand to the 2024 T20 World Cup, and Aussie Meg Lanning (Rs 1.9 crore), a seven-time World Cup winner. “This auction has shown that a proven Indian core is now more precious than international celebrity,” adds Dua.
The changing dynamics also explain why N Shree Charani, who made her international debut in April and finished the World Cup with 14 wickets from nine matches, raked in a whopping Rs 1.3 crore despite playing only two matches in her debut season in WPL 2025. DC, her previous franchise, forked out more than double of the Rs 55 lakh they had in the last auction. “I expect a fair bit of bidding for someone like Charani, who's done exceptionally well during the World Cup. And we know how successful left arm finger spinners are in the shortest format,” Lisa Sthalekar, former Australia captain and a mentor with UPW, had told Forbes India before the auction. With her hefty payday, the 21-year-old spinner from Andhra Pradesh outshone her more established compatriots like West Indian Chinelle Henry (Rs 1.3 crore) and Australian Phoebe Litchfield (Rs 1.2 crore).
Aside from the headline acts of Sharma and Charani, members of the World Cup-winning squad like Harleen Deol (Rs 50 lakh), Radha Yadav (Rs 65 lakh), Sneh Rana (Rs 50 lakh), Kranti Gaud (Rs 50 lakh) and Arundhati Reddy (Rs 75 lakh), too, were picked up from an auction that saw the likes of six-time World Cup-winning Australia skipper Alyssa Healy going unsold.
Renuka Singh Thakur, though, might be disappointed with her value of Rs 60 lakh despite her impressively tight spells throughout the tournament and an economy rate of 3.50 in the final against South Africa. The number is less than half of the Rs 1.5 crore-deal she landed from the Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) for the first three seasons. “The World Cup effect is seen in the fact that all the squad members were picked up,” says Bhairav Shanth, co-founder, ITW Universe, a sports marketing and consulting agency. “Alongside, one key trend that has emerged is that the teams are focusing on acquiring all-rounders among Indian players, which shows how T20 strategy is evolving. That’s where Renuka might have lost out, being an out-and-out bowler.”
Adds Waingankar, who sat in on the auction with the UPW franchise: “The way the auction works is that teams look at different slots they have to fill, and perhaps they didn’t need a pace bowler early on. Second, Renuka came up for bidding in the very first lot as part of the marquee set of eight players. It’s possible that, at that time, the teams were looking to save money for later sets, where, as you would have seen, many players have fetched a premium.”
How timing and strategy plays a key role is evident from the way the purses were generously thrown open for all-rounder Shikha Pandey in the first round of the accelerated auction. Pandey, who hasn’t played for the national team since 2023, was the showstopper of this round going for Rs 2.4 crore, a price that’s 4x of what DC had bought her for in the inaugural auction. With this, the bowling allrounder leapfrogged the pool as the third most expensive player this year, at a time World Cup winners like Gaud and Singh Thakur pocketed a cheque of Rs 50 lakh and Rs 60 lakh, respectively. “The biggest surprise for me was Shikha. She had a good WPL last season, but, more importantly, I feel she was a strategic fit,” says Shanth of ITW. “She gave UPW a frontline pacer, which was missing from their arsenal.” Add to that the fact that Pandey was the most recognised domestic pacer left in the pool at that point in the auction would also explain why she commanded the price.
“The second part of why someone gets chosen is that teams also look for players with experience, players who’ve been there,” says Waingankar of UPW. “So someone like a Meg Lanning, a Shikha Pandey or an Asha Sobhana get picked up at a premium for what they have done in the past.” Sobhana, who went for Rs 1.10 crore in the auction from a base price of Rs 30 lakh despite missing the last season with an injury, was the second-highest wicket-taker of the tournament in 2024 and was the first Indian player to take a five-wicket haul in WPL.
Alongside, the World Cup victory has also had a knock-on effect on the entire WPL ecosystem as the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has onboarded three new commercial partners—ChatGPT, Kingfisher and Bisleri—at a combined value of Rs 48 crore. The trio has signed up for the next two seasons.
That the WPL will kickstart the commercial engine for women’s cricket in India was evident from its inaugural season, when it bagged Rs 951 crore and Rs 4,670 crore for the media rights and franchise sales, respectively. The momentum only grew with record TV viewership: The first 15 matches of the second season in 2024 clocked a viewership of 103 million, up from 67.8 million for the first 14 matches of the previous season.
The ODI World Cup has pushed the ceiling even higher, with the reach of the tournament growing 5x compared to the previous edition. With 185 million logging in, the India versus South Africa final became the most-watched women’s cricket match ever, and equalled the viewership numbers for the men’s T20 World Cup final in 2024.
As the WPL’s fourth season kicks off in January, women’s cricket in India seems poised to keep rewriting records, both on and off the field.
First Published: Nov 28, 2025, 14:28
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