I haven’t participated in fantasy sports in nearly a decade now. I was kicked out of a fantasy football league that I was in with some people from college once they found out I’d be forced to auto-draft again because I would be in the desert in Namibia without internet access. They tried to get me to rejoin that league a couple of years later, which I declined, and that league no longer exists. After stopping fantasy football, I found my overall enjoyment increased. I could just cheer for my team and let that be that. This year, I hardly watched football at all. That is what happens when the team you support is terrible.

One of the methods of doing a fantasy football draft is to have a player auction. Each owner has the same total amount of money they can spend compiling their roster. Each player is drawn at random (within the relevant position group), and then the bidding starts. Allocating players this way creates many more dynamics for you as the fantasy owner. Do you spend big on a certain player? Do you bid in order to get others to use up more of their money on a player they particularly like? Do you just accept that you are going to be weak in one area of the team? I’ve always thought it would be more fun than the more traditional snake draft, though I’ve never been a part of such a fantasy league.

But what if I told you that the auction dynamic is actually used by a major professional sports league? It’s a league most Americans haven’t heard of, but it is watched by tens of millions of people every night for something like two months—the Indian Premier League. It is a T20 cricket league, which isn’t important for this post. What this post is about is that the league had its annual auction earlier this week. While it doesn’t rise to the circus that is the NFL draft, they hosted the auction in Dubai this year and with some fanfare. This year’s was a so-called mini-auction as there were fewer players up for bid. Every few years, though, there is a mega-auction before which teams are only able to retain a small number of players. It can lead to some wild resets of the competitive balance.

The players come in sets based on what positions they play and their status of whether they have played for their national teams. Each player sets a minimum price for themselves, and when their name is drawn the bidding starts. There are more complications than that, but even the order in which people are drawn within their set can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars given the way the auction dynamics unfold. There were also players this year who received no bids the first time their names came up and then saw a bidding war unfold when their name came up again during the accelerated portion of the auction later. I find it all fascinating to review.

If you want to listen to an in-depth story of the league’s history (and have around four hours in which to do so), you can find an episode of the Acquired podcast from earlier this year. Since it involves big business and Bollywood, there are some twists in the tale.