In 2008, the benefits of team formation by auction first became apparent in the field of professional cricket. The Indian Premier League organized sequential single-item auctions to allocate 77 cricketers to eight teams that participated in a Twenty20 cricket tournament. We argue in this article that the auction format used resulted in distortion of player valuations. We recommend a combinatorial auction scheme MRPF which enables bidders to exploit the complementary nature of the resources. A laboratory experiment undertaken to test the feasibility of MRPF indicated that it would result in a more efficient auction system.