Indian Cricketers Salary 2020: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Team India

Indian Cricketers Salary 2021 – Cricketers draw attention like nobody others. Whenever they are in town, people pay almost everything to watch them play. As a result, they are at core of every income that BCCI make. But what do BCCI pay them in return? How do salary structures of star Indian cricketers look like? We will go through India cricket player salary, who is the highest paid cricketer and how much do cricketers earn per match here in detail.

India National Cricket Team Players Salary

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) hands employment to cricketers on annual basis just like any other companies. They announce the list of contracted players every year depending upon some basic criteria. This includes minimum number of matches played in the past year, selection potential of the players in the upcoming year, etc.

Based on that, this contracted cricketer salary list is divided into 4 categories: A+, A, B & C Grades. Players in these categories are paid INR 7 Cr, 5 Cr, 3 Cr & 1 Cr respectively as their annual salaries. Now, let’s take a tour of current salary of Indian Cricketers list (contracted players) by BCCI for this year. The same was announced back in January.

Grade A+ Category

This A+ category generally include marquee players of Indian cricket. Players, who lead their respective departments and provide immense value to the national setup, would be given first preference. These are the all-format players of team India and are having the workload of highest order.

Captain Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah are part of this category currently.

If you go by the numbers, these three players must have been playing maximum number of matches for team India with all of them guaranteed starters in all three formats. According to the current setup, they receive INR 7 Cr annually as their contract fees individually.

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Grade A Category

This list of players include major chunk of Indian cricket. If you are Integral part of Indian team in any form of the game, that should be enough for you to earn a national contract in this category. BCCI decide this category based on likeliness of the candidates to play a certain number of matches in any form of the game. These are the ones who have pretty less chances of being dropped during the course of the year.

Current list of players in this category are having a tally of 11, which is the highest for any category. Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, KL Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Mohammed Shami, Ishant Sharma, Kuldeep Yadav and Rishabh Pant are the decorated names in the list currently.

They all are eligible to receive INR 5 Cr annually as their contract fees. Ravichandran Ashwin, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane and Ishant Sharma have only played test cricket in recent years while others have been in the mix for all three formats of the game lately.

Grade B Category

This category of players are mostly those who are not part of all three formats. Either they are playing test matches or playing shorter forms.

This category includes Wriddhiman Saha, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Hardik Pandya and Mayank Agarwal for the year 2019-20.

Wriddhiman Saha and Umesh Yadav have only been considered in test matches recently while Mayank Agarwal has come into the limited overs formats only with upcoming Australia tour. Yuzvendra Chahal only plays white-ball cricket while Hardik Pandya has been a surprise omission from the earlier category. The reason behind his downgrading may be his recent injury history which has affected his international appearances badly after the 2019 world cup. This set of players receives INR 3 Cr as their annual salaries.

Grade C Category

This category includes those players who have been in and out of the squads but have been on selection radars in any of the formats.

Kedar Jadhav, Navdeep Saini, Deepak Chahar, Manish Pandey, Shreyas Iyer, Hanuma Vihari, Shardul Thakur and Washington Sundar have been awarded contracts in this category this year.

Only Kedar Jadhav is surprising inclusion here given that he has not been regular in any of the squads and also running out of time with his age in regards to his international prospects. Hanuma Vihari has been a regular in test match XI since England tour in 2018 while Manish Pandey, Shreyas Iyer and Deepak Chahar have been pretty good with their limited overs performances.

Match Fees

Apart from these contracted salaries, Indian cricketers are eligible to receive match fees for each International and domestic fixture they play throughout the year. These fees will be same for all the players irrespective of their contract grades.

Test match fee: INR 15 Lacs/match
ODIs match fee: 6 Lacs/match
T20Is match fee: 3 Lacs/match

Also note that we are not adding any individual and team rewards which they would get for each International series. So, annual contracts and match fees will constitute total salaries for these star Indian cricketers.

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Possible COVID Impacts

As we all know, this year has remained a challenge for almost all the industries. And with International cricket slowly coming terms with its original schedule, all the cricket boards would be breathing sigh of relief. But last six months have been difficult; there are no two ways about it. The effects of this slowdown were there to see during IPL 2020 as well where winners’ prize money was significantly lower than the last year. We may see major cuts in next year’s annual contracts for Indian cricketers as well. Other boards have already started announcing their revised remunerations for the next season and same can be expected from BCCI very soon.