Can Shreyas Pip Sai Sudharsan To MVP?

Srinivas Bhogle and Purnendu Maji check out who could be the Most Valuable Player of IPL 2025 before the final.

B Sai Sudharsan will likely be the MVP of IPL 2025.

There is an outside chance that Shreyas Iyer could unseat him. For that to happen, Shreyas must again produce the runs he scored when PBKS defeated MI, and at the same strike rate, in the final.

If MI had entered the final, Suryakumar Yadav would almost certainly have been MVP.

So how do we calculate the MVPI, Most Valuable Player Index? A batter must score a lot of runs at a good strike rate, a bowler must take a lot of wickets at a low economy rate, and a fielder must take a lot of catches, and participate in the most run outs, with direct hits being especially valuable.

Using this data, we collapse the batting, bowling and fielding performance of a player into a 'run equivalent'.

The Most Valuable Player Index (MVPI) can therefore be viewed as the total number of 'runs' that every player contributes via his batting, bowling and fielding. It's not necessarily runs scored off the bat, but it is a valid equivalent.

This has been a batter-friendly IPL, with 2 batters (Sudharsan, SKY) scoring over 700 runs, 6 batters (Shubman Gill, Mitchell Marsh, Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer) scoring over 600 runs, and 11 batters (Yashavi Jaiswal, K L Rahul, Jos Buttler, Nicholas Pooran, Prabhsimran Singh) scoring over 500 runs. It could be 12 if Priyansh Arya gets a fifty in the final.

The bowlers haven't done too badly with 4 bowlers (Prasidh Krishna, Noor Ahmad, Trent Boult, Josh Hazlewood) taking over 20 wickets, and Arshdeep Singh having a fair chance of being the fifth.

Check also the last column about a player's Paisa Vasool Index (PVI). This number is the quantity of US dollars that a player receives from the franchise for every run equivalent contributed.

A 3-digit PVI constitutes exceptional value (look at Mitch Marsh, Prabhsimran Singh, Priyansh Arya, Aiden Markram, Ryan Rickelton, Ajinkya Rahane, R Sai Kishore, Vipraj Nigam, Vaibhav Suryavanshi and Mitchell Santner). They were the biggest steals.

It is almost impossible for a player receiving more than Rs 5 crores to have a 3-digit PVI value. So, any player with a PVI between 1000 and 1500 is an exceptional buy.

Generally, a PVI below 2000 would be a very good buy. Incidentally, we've defined the PVI in terms of US dollars because with a PVI in INR almost every player would have 5-digit values, and that makes comparisons more messy.

Best Performing Players Before Final

• IPL 2025