r/Cricket

A Statistical Analysis of IPL 2023

The discussion on Most Valuable Players in this sub recently inspired me to dig up some stats about IPL 2023. I've used the ESPN CricInfo MVP data for this analysis as that seems to be most reliable. I've only considered league games and evaluated total impact, as I aimed for a fair statistical comparison

1. The most valuable players:

Unsurprisingly, most of these players are capped, and have continued to experience reasonable success in IPL 2024, with some captaining franchises now. Most high performing players featured in the starting XII's early on in the season, and maintained their position. However, Glenn Maxwell and Piyush Chawla have not continued their IPL 2023 form.

|Player|Team|Total Impact|Matches|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|1 Faf du Plessis|RCB|831.3|14|
|2 Yashasvi Jaiswal|RR|731.9|14|
|3 Shubman Gill|GT|720.6|14|
|4 Mohammed Siraj|RCB|696.1|14|
|5 Axar Patel|DC|676|14|
|6 Rashid Khan|GT|671.7|14|
|7 Piyush Chawla|MI|637.1|14|
|8 Mohammed Shami|GT|628.4|14|
|9 Glenn Maxwell|RCB|593.2|14|
|10 Heinrich Klaasen|SRH|576.1|12|

2. The best teams:

I calculated the total impact for all players for each team, and compared this with their ranking during the league stage, and found only a weak correlation. Some interesting findings include RCB had the highest total impact (finally a win for RCB lol), but actually ranked quite poorly. Perhaps this is evidence that RCB recruits the biggest names in auctions instead of having a cohesive team. Also, Faf really carried RCB last season with nearly 1/5th of the total impact

On the other hand, PBKS had a similarly high total impact, but an even worse ranking. This could be because they lacked any standout performers (their highest player, Prabhsimran Singh, was only 26th on the MVP list), or the team was unsettled, with frequent order and tactic shuffles.

DC and SRH appear to have misfiring teams, resulting in both poor total impacts and actual rankings

|Team|Total Impact|Best Performer|Actual Ranking|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|1 RCB|4558.7|Faf du Plessis (18%)|6|
|2 GT|4444.7|Shubman Gill (16.2%)|1|
|3 PBKS|4411.7|Prabhsimran Singh (10.2%)|8|
|4 MI|4394.5|Piyush Chawla (14.5%)|4|
|5 CSK|4290.7|Ravindra Jadeja (12%)|2|
|6 LSG|4158.4|Marcus Stoinis (11.5%)|3|
|7 KKR|4111.5|Varun Chakravarthy (12.9%)|7|
|8 RR|4099.8|Yashasvi Jaiswal (17.8%)|5|
|9 DC|3961.1|Axar Patel (17.1%)|9|
|10 SRH|3566.5|Heinrich Klaasen (16.2%)|10|

3. Impact by country:

Especially with the impact player rule, there have been many calls for the overseas player quota to be increased. So I analysed the data to see the average impact per player per country, as well as the average (mean) auction price of players from each country (only considering players who played at least 1 match).

Based on the data, there is limited evidence to support that overseas players perform significantly better than Indian players in the IPL, with the average Indian performing about as well as the average English player. This could be due to familiarity with home condition. It is also evident that franchises are heavily overspending on some overseas players (eg Ben Stokes), where a better investment could be made in Indian players.

I was impressed by how the players from lower ranked nations eg IRE, AFG, ZIM were performing, however this could be down to small sample size. IRE, ZIM, and NAM only had a single player feature in matches.



|Country|Average Impact of Player From Country|Average Auction Price (Lakhs)|
|:-|:-|:-|
|1 Australia|339.88|593|
|2 Afghanistan|283.72|336|
|3 SA|225.44|348|
|4 Ireland|206.20|440|
|5 WI|201.63|547|
|6 IND|195.71|358|
|7 ZIM|195.40|50|
|8 ENG|176.19|711|
|9 NZ|159.98|336|
|10 LK|156.70|253|
|11 NAM|22.70|100|
|12 BAN|8.40|125|

4. Overperformers

I also analysed auction price vs total impact on a player-by-player basis. Using a regression model, I predicted the impact for a player given their auction price, and found out the players with the biggest "return on investment". An ROI of 100 indicates a player is worth their auction price, whereas an ROI of 500 indicates the