Auction or draft?  It seems to be the million-dollar question in the cricketing circle of Bangladesh ahead of players transfer for the upcoming edition of Bangladesh Premier League’s, country’s lone franchise-based T20 tournament.

Both cricketers and franchise owners are at dark as they prepare for 17 November, scheduled for forming the squad for the upcoming edition of the tournament slated from 16 December to 19 January.

A BCB official confirmed to Daily Sun on Friday that both set of papers and handed it over to BPL governing council so that they can choose from it and settle for the player transfer process they want to proceed.

Player auction is a significant aspect of modern sports leagues, prominently observed in cricket where teams bid to acquire players for a specific tournament or season for money.Players have their respective starting price as the entry point with each team stipulated to have a maximum of number of players comprised with local and foreign recruits while when in the main round, players will be called one by one and franchises will raise their bats to bid and the highest bidder will get the players from the auction.

Players draft process that was followed in the last edition of BPL cricketers were categorized according to their respective grades.

The minimum franchise squad size was 12 players (local: 10 and overseas: 2) while any team could register an unlimited number of overseas players while maximum local player registration was limited to 14.

Each franchise had a fixed remuneration cap of Tk four crore for recruiting local players and all teams had to ensure that their expenditure on local player recruitment remains within this designated remuneration cap while the expenses for retention and direct signing players will not be counted towards the fixed remuneration cap for local players.

In the draft, a franchise can choose their players when he was placed in the auction table on first-come-first basis that was determined by lottery and there was no scope for other franchise to bid for him by putting more money behind him.

As of now each team can have two direct signing from local cricketer’s category.

“I think we will take a decision whether it will be auction or players draft sooner than later but possibility of players picked through bidding is higher than the ones we are following in BPL,” a BCB official said when his attention was drawn regarding the matter.

Meanwhile, there is a high scale debate among the BCB directors regarding whether they will allow cricketers allegedly involved in wrong doing during the last edition of BPL.

It was learnt at the least official of two teams are on the suspect list while several cricketers name were included in the 900 pages investigation report as suspect.

BCB earlier insisted that they will not allow cricketers to take part in the BPL with problematic background while inform the franchises about it while now certain section feels that they cannot do that just on the basis of suspect.

A top BCB official raised his voice in one of their WhatsApp groups claiming that if they cannot bar the suspected cricketers against the cricketers’ and officials’ charges can be formed in that case what is the point of shouting loud about integrity in front of public.

It is understood BCB will soon take a decision in this regard and circulate it to the franchises and it remains to be seen whether they are allowed to pick players with shoddy background or not.