Kabaddi auctions keep buying the wrong half of the mat

Raiders take the money because raiders take the highlights, and the corner defender who quietly wins matches goes cheap.

Look at any franchise squad sheet and the spending is lopsided in the same direction. The top raider costs a multiple of the top defender. Sometimes several multiples. The justification is that raiders score, and scoring is what you pay for.

Except that a kabaddi scoreboard has two taps feeding it, and one of them is far more reliable. A raider's output swings wildly by night. He faces different defensive shapes, different substitution patterns, different amounts of mat space, and a bad half from a star raider is a normal occurrence rather than an alarm. A corner defender's output is steadier, because his job is a repeatable physical action performed from a fixed starting position against an opponent who has to come to him.

Steadier output is worth more than equivalent average output. That is not a kabaddi insight, it is a basic point about variance, and every sport that has been through an analytics phase has eventually rediscovered it. Franchises still pay for peaks.

The all out compounds it. Defence does not just score its own points, it removes bodies from the opposition mat, and removing bodies is what drags a team towards the two point swing. A tackle is worth one point on the board and an unmeasured amount of pressure on the next three raids. Nobody prices the second part because nobody has a column for it.

Here is the position I will defend. A league where the fifth most expensive player in a squad is a left corner would be a better run league than the one we have. Not because raiders do not matter. Because the market for raiders is crowded and competitive and therefore roughly efficient, while the market for defenders is thin, and thin markets are where the bargains sit.

There is a fair objection. Sponsors and broadcasters want stars, stars are raiders, and a franchise that spends on defence wins matches while losing shirt sales. That is a real business problem, not a rounding error.

Still. Every side that has strung together a title run has done it with a settled corner pair, and none of them paid what those two players were worth.