The 2018 IPL cricket auction will be the most ludicrous event in the history of professional sports

The stars will align this week in India for one of the most ludicrous events in the history of professional sports. All 1,122 players in cricket’s Indian Premier League (IPL) are free agents at the same time, and starting on Saturday they will all be sold to teams, without any choice of where they end up. It’s a two-day event known as the IPL Auction, and you really won’t believe all this if you haven’t heard of it.

We’ve talked about the IPL Auction before, and why it’s the cruelest free agency in sports. Players have no say in the proceedings, there’s “reverse bidding,” where teams bid down and players watch while their salaries dwindle away as teams decide their worth, and it’s so surreal that it’s incredible to watch.

But one thing sets the 2018 auction apart from the usual madness — the 10-year rule.

In its infancy it was unclear if the IPL was actually going to work. Twenty20 cricket, a faster form of the game that is played in just a few hours, was picking up steam but it was unclear whether fans would embrace the format and its deviation from the norm. Conceptually, the idea was to attract new cricket fans and put the sport in a place to compete with the NBA and English Premier League for mind share — and that required shorter games.

The fledgling league was very much a risk and the first owners inside the IPL wanted to account for the possibility of one team streaking ahead and dominating the competition. Players would only be allowed to be signed to one-year contracts, with subsequent rights of teams to sign one- or two-year extensions, but no more. The maximum amount of time any team could hold a player was three years, and then they’d be up for auction again.

The 10-year rule was an even more extreme form of forced parity than player acquisition. It dictated that every 10 years the league would essentially start from scratch again, with every player released back into the free agency pool and put up for auction. This would ensure that the longest any team could dominate would be a decade, and that everyone had a fair shot, assuming they ponied up the cash.

The IPL began on Jan. 24, 2008. That’s right — 10 years ago.

Not only will every player be available, but also two teams are returning to the league after a two-year ban. The Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals were banned in 2015 for match fixing, and are only now being allowed to compete again. Their fans are desperate to see the teams again, meaning they could splash big in the auction and disrupt the market.

EVERYONE! Seriously though, imagine what would happen if every single NBA player was suddenly available to the highest bidder starting tomorrow. It would be madness. That’s what’s happening here. But even with all of cricket’s biggest names being available, there are a few who will stand out and command staggering sums at auction.

The standouts though are Ben Stokes, Ravichandran Ashwin, Rashid Khan and Keiron Pollard — just to name a few.

The amount of growth the IPL has had in the decade since it began is unprecedented. The 2017 season saw viewership swell by 25 percent, with a total of 1.25 billion viewers tuning in throughout the season. This means that, on average, each IPL game attracted 22.32 million viewers. To compare, the NFL averaged 16.5 million viewers per game in 2016.

With those fans comes money, and the amount flowing into the IPL is growing exponentially as well. League-wide sponsorship began in 2008 costing just $6.3 million for a four-year deal, which has swelled in a decade to $68.8 million.

Jan. 27 and 28, starting at 10 p.m. ET.

Sadly, it’s going to be very difficult in the USA. There’s no network or streaming rights currently in the country, so you might need to comb social media and catch up on what’s happening.

Rest assured though, it will be worth it — because we’re about to witness what happens when fantasy sports and real sports collide in the weirdest possible way.